Ann Travers Queering in Sport Flashcards
Why are sports leagues problematic in this context?
- enforce a strict gender binary
- sites of tension in regards to trans individuals
- potentially enforce male dominance
- while male achievements in sport supports their straight sexuality, it equates female success in sports with lesbianism!!
What does queer feminist theory do?
-deconstructs gender binary and explains how sport normalizes/maintains the 2 sex system
What was Travers study on and why are they important?
- Lesbian softball leagues are important spaces to consider the challenges towards the gender binary
- Purpose of this study is to explore how policies of a representative sample of North American lesbian softball leagues
- Envisioning areas of organized sport that don’t rely on a rigidly defined gender binary is challenging → wholesale sex segregation
What are the rules with trans and sports?
-IOC (olympic committee) says that surgically changed trans are welcome after 2 years
What are the 2 different types of trans people
-there are gender conformers who believe they are in the wrong body and need surgical change to achieve true being
-gender transformers who call into question the fundamental binary sex categories and that body alterations are unnecessary for body identity
NOTE: this approach makes it hard to support ‘women’ since they are not clearly defined
What do lesbian sport committee’s do, but how is it problematic?
provide a women-only space where gender diversity can be celebrated outside of the common conforming feminine norm
However, these spaces put limits on women who challenge the binary
Since non-‘women’ may jeopardize the safety of the space
Women-only space has been shown to eliminate the pressure for women to conform to an expectation of subversion– “willingness to obey others”
Ex. education
In these leagues, what is inclusion based on?
Inclusion on the basis of self identification as a women has the potential to include male to female transgender and transsexual players, as well, to a lesser extent, female to male trans players
okay no clue what this means but it sounds smart
The protection of traditional women-only space and the softening of the gender binary to be more trans inclusive need to work together
Policies to enable gender conforming and gender transforming individuals to participate is important for queering process
Allows for retention of cultural/practical identity as women’s space while acknowledging the arbitrariness of boundary sufficiently to include participants who subvert it
how are sports a discourse for men?
it assumes their dominance over women; “we are better than you and you will never be as good”
- “Sport teaches and reinforces a key social lesson: it is not only better to be a boy than a girl, but may also be a matter of social survival for boys to prove that they are not anything like girls and therefore not gay.”
why is this important?
boys look to sports as a last resort if they were already not masculine enough for society (others began to question their sexuality)
- being active and successful at sports is a social test on male sexuality
