The governance of sport, gender and (dis)ability

Abstract

Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and with a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this study was to describe and analyse how wheelchair basketball (WCB) players governed themselves in relation to the dominant discourses of sport, gender and disability. This study was based on semi-structured interviews with 12 men and 6 women with and without classified impairment. The findings illustrated how governing operates in the micro-context of WCB and how the athletes were constituted at the intersection between technologies of power and technologies of the self. On the one hand, they were categorized according to a classification system by which the athletes were organized into competitive classes based upon sport-specific tests. On the other, they were taking up and rehearsing narratives about themselves in terms of normality. Finally, the results have shown how male and female WCB athletes take up and resist predominant sport, gender and disability discourses and how they govern themselves in relation to such discourses. The results of the study also illustrate how the workings of power were differentiated within the WCB context and how the sport and gender discourses provided instructions on how to become the desired ideal.