Hetero-sexing the athlete: public and popular discourses on sexuality and women’s sport in South Africa

Mari Haugaa Engh,Cheryl Potgieter

doi:10.18820/24150479/aa50i2.2

Abstract

Hetero-sexing the athlete: public and popular discourses on sexuality and women’s sport in South Africa

Highlights

Since the 1990s sport has occupied a central role in imaginaries of social cohesion and social transformation in South Africa; sport is celebrated as a vehicle for building, and a symbol of the existence of, a unified and diverse South Africa
Sport is presumed to do the ‘work’ of social transformation both materially and symbolically; according to sport policy, equal participation in and access to sport will translate into changes in divisive and exclusionary attitudes, and foster unity and cohesion among South Africans
Using examples of popular debates regarding three South African women athletes – Eudy Simelane, Caster Semenya and Portia Modise – we argue that the ways in which gender and sexual diversity is discussed publicly reinforces the heteronormative and racialised gender binaries that sustain homophobic and sexist attitudes

Summary

Introduction

Since the 1990s sport has occupied a central role in imaginaries of social cohesion and social transformation in South Africa; sport is celebrated as a vehicle for building, and a symbol of the existence of, a unified and diverse South Africa. While Fraser uses this proposition to develop a broad two-dimensional approach to gender justice, we wish in this article to pause on the initial argument: that any struggle for gender justice in/through sport requires a focus on both material relations and resources, as well as on the status and visibility afforded to women athletes and women’s sports We do this to illustrate that while South African policies on transformation in/through sport make a contribution to redistributive justice, along both gendered and racial lines, this does not necessarily translate into justice in terms of visibility and recognition. We suggest that the three representational regimes presented below offer a conceptual map (not a detailed survey) of how sexuality is imagined and articulated when it comes to women and sport in South Africa

Annihilation: sportswomen should be ‘real women’ who love men

Expulsion: silencing queer women athletes

Concluding remarks