Discourses on the Gender/Sport Relationship

Abstract

In any developing field such as the one that began as "women in sport," key developments can be traced through the evolution of the language we use and the concepts we develop to express our new understandings. Thus the discourse has moved from considerations of sex differences and sex roles, to gender differences and gender roles, to the sex/gender system, and finally to patriarchy and gender relations, and we have progressed from seeing gender as a variable or as a distributive category to conceiving of it as a set of relations created through human agency and sustained or reproduced through cultural practices including, but not limited to, sport. At the same time, our understanding of sport has grown from seeing it as a static social institution, defined in terms of its separation from the real world, to the comprehension of sport as a social practice produced through human agency and reproduced through ideological work. Finally, our view of gender relations has moved from a focus on sex differences, conceived as relatively innate, to an outraged response to sexism, to a deeper understanding of just how complex and culturally situated are the relations of domination and subordination that characterize gender relations in partriachal cultures. As our consciousness has grown, our questions have changed from "why aren't more women involved in sport?" to "why are women excluded from sport?" to "what specific social practices accomplish the physical and ideological exclusion of women from sport?", "how and why have women managed to resist the practices that seek to incorporate them?", and "how do women work to transform sport to an activity that reflects their own needs as women?" The study of gender relations and sport has come a long way in a short time. In less than 20 years, the field has transformed itself from often angry, always well-intentioned, but generally atheoretical investigations of the patterns of women's involvement and the psychological factors that kept women from full participation, to a theoretically informed, critical analysis of the cultural forces that work to produce the ideological practices that influence the relations of sport and gender. Clearly, the direction for the future lies in the development and application of more critical analyses capable of capturing the complexity of the gender/sport relation.