The Theatricality of the Locker Room, or Staging the Naked Jock

Abstract

As liminal spaces, locker rooms obscure many assumed oppositions: clean and dirty, home and away, homosocial and homoerotic, hidden and visible. Nevertheless, popular discourse affirms that these same spaces reinforce certain gender norms. Linguistic features are not the only elements of the locker room that produce discriminatory effects, for locker rooms operate primarily as zones of physicality. Bodies prepare to expend energy or recover from its outlay. People become as conscious of breathing, of muscular tension, of smells as they are of language. Although sports constitute the central subject of these two plays, they also all feature men in various states of undress for a good portion of each production. The intersections of masculinity, nudity, sports, and nationalism have long been documented. As Sue-Ellen Case has explained referring to United States theatre emergent in the countercultural movements of the 1960s, “Staging the naked body both provoked and was inscribed by revolutionary attitudes toward the gender and sexual systems it signified.”.