A Critique of Critiques: Radical and Feminist Writings on Sport

Abstract

This paper reviews and evaluates two critiques of sport. The radical critique argues that sport is authoritarian, excessively competitive and exclusionary. The feminist critique holds that sport is male-dominated and in orientation. The critiques overlap in their emphases on social inequalities and instrumentality in sport and their advocacy of change. The analysis presented here argues that the radical critique is polemical and poorly formulated. The radicals' criticisms are reanalyzed in a discussion of the secularization and rationalization of sport. Thefeminist critique is insufficiently developed. Feminists who call for equality in sport and a diminution of the orientation fail to explicate, respectively, the meaning of equality and the institutional features of'a revised model of sport. In recent years North American sport has increasingly come under attack. Indeed it seems that with the first major thrust of work in the sociology of sport in the mid to late 1960s, there also emerged an increasing volume of criticism of the place of sport in our society and of its structure and processes. This criticism has not abated, rather it has increased and the number of ills that have been decried have multiplied. For example, in 1968 Harry Edwards explored the problem of racism in The Revolt of the Black Athlete. Continuing into the seventies, in Rip Off the Big Game Paul Hoch provided an analysis of sport as a racist, militaristic, sexist and overly competitive support for a corrupt system of monopoly capitalism. The first textbook in the field, Edwards' Sociology of Sport, provided a more tempered but similarly critical view of sport. Orlick (a) and Orlick and Botterill have examined the competitive and aggressive world of children's sports and sport generally (Orlick, b). Now into the eighties, the assault on sport continues. A recent volume edited by Sabo and Runfola decries the ills of sport as a masculine institution.