Women's Artistic Gymnastics: Socio-Cultural Perspectives

Abstract

In recent years, media coverage of women's artistic gymnastics (WAG) has increased immensely. On the one hand, a reason for this is its rising popularity in many countries; tickets for international championships sell out quickly, and TV ratings also indicate that WAG enjoys a large, stable fan base. On the other hand, WAG has stirred enormous controversy. The conviction of Larry Nassar, the US gymnastics team doctor, for sexually abusing female gymnasts, and the suicide of the team's former coach, John Geddert, generated both increased public awareness of the sometimes problematic coach–athlete relationship in this sport and a new, stronger self-confidence among athletes to come forward and resist sexism and violence.Against that backdrop, scholarly research on the historical and sociocultural dimensions of WAG has also intensified. This anthology, edited by Rosly Kerr, Natalie Barker-Ruchti, Carly Stewart, and Gretchen Kerr, not only summarizes the results of this research but also adds significant new insights from a variety of perspectives. The book uses an interdisciplinary approach and draws on contributions from a variety of fields, among them sociology, history, and psychology. It seeks to embed developments in WAG into larger trends characteristic of other sports as well, such as globalization and scientification. Moreover, next to such macro-perspectives, many essays highlight the micro-interactions between the different actors involved in gymnastics and how agency and power relations were and are negotiated under changing circumstances.The collection is divided into four sections; combined, they “explore WAG's many complexities: the sport's unique history, the individual experiences of gymnasts, the complicated coach–athlete relationship and the wider actors that affect the practice of gymnastics” (1–2). A main premise for the volume, and hence the focus of Section 1, is how notions of gender in general and femininity in particular have been articulated over the course of WAG's history. Essays in this part outline the development of WAG since the 1952 Olympic Games and stress processes of acrobatization, perfectionization, and commercialization. Together, they underscore a paradoxical constellation, as WAG historically celebrated women and femininity in a sport based on the biomechanically optimized bodies of girls.Section 2 zeroes in on the gymnasts’ experiences. Essays here listen to the voices of individual athletes and how they struggled with the intense training demands of WAG, with controlling and often sexualizing gazes of spectators, coaches, or judges, or with their own body-self perceptions. A contribution authored by Ashley Stirling, Alexia Tam, Aalaya Milne, and Gretchen Kerr is of particular interest; it analyzes the media narratives of gymnasts’ abusive experiences and asks whether “the broader effects of the #MeToo movement will . . . help to ensure the athletes’ voices are heard this time” (95).The third section revolves around coach–athlete relationships. The often large age difference between male coaches and their very young athletes suggests a strong male dominance in a sport that seeks to highlight femininity and questions whether girls can grow up to become independent characters. As the essays in this part point out, the complexities of coach–athlete relationships in WAG even reach beyond this most obvious aspect. As Melanie Lang and Joanne McVeigh remind readers in their essay, regardless of whether the coach is male or female, touching athletes in order to assist them with learning new skills is a central element in training that reduces options for protecting athletes from possible abuse that would work in other sports. The final section of the book brings in parents, sports scientists, physicians, judges, and technology—the personal and infrastructural environment that shapes WAG. As becomes evident, this surrounding network of influences often has highly ambivalent consequences, ranging from substantial support of the athlete to increasing her disempowerment.Women's Artistic Gymnastics is a valuable contribution to the study of female sport in general and gymnastics in particular. Its fourteen original scholarly essays—plus an introduction and a conclusion—cover a broad spectrum of historical, sociological, psychological, medical, and media-related issues from several theoretical and methodological perspectives and, hence, enriches our understanding of a complex sport. What makes this collection even more interesting is its willingness to engage in experimentation: each of the four sections of the book opens with a brief piece of fictional writing authored by James Pope, narrating the story of an imaginary character named Jenny and her ambivalent experiences within the world of WAG. Certainly, some readers will find that somewhat odd for a scholarly publication, and some might also question whether hiring a male writer to fictionalize the inner thoughts of a female athlete is a good idea. But the experiment of using fiction as a tool to highlight subjectivity is stimulating; Pope's “Jenny's Story” often works well, especially with those essays that stress the importance of the gymnasts’ own point of view.