Caster Semenya Research Articles

Hyperandrogenic athletes: performance differences in elite-standard 200m and 800m finals

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to examine whether the difference in elite-standard track and field performance between women athletes with and without hyperandrogenism reaches the 10–12% difference in performance between men and women, using only results from elite-standard track and field final competitions. Officially available data from two hyperandrogenic women (Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand) were compared with the characteristic performance of 200m and 800m elite-standard finals. The finishing times of Caster Semenya, before her ineligibility to compete in 2009 and after the suspension of the 2011 IAAF Hyperandrogenism Regulations were found to be respectively 1.24% and 1.49% faster than the predicted performance in 800m finals. When compared with the result of the second classified, the difference was respectively 0.65% and 2.08%. The analysis of the finishing times of Dutee Chand did not lead to any conclusions due to the lack of available data. The present study indicates that the percentage difference in performance between women with and women without hyperandrogenism does not reach the 3% difference requested by the Court of Arbitration for Sport for the reinstatement of the Hyperandrogenism Regulations, neither does it reach the 10% accepted range of difference in performance between men and women.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction Patti Duncan Welcome to our second issue of 2018—the thirtieth year of Feminist Formations! This year is a landmark year for us, as we celebrate and reflect on thirty years of publishing cutting edge feminist scholarship. Such reflection requires an engagement with the history, as well as the future, of feminist knowledge production, organizing, and resistance—a process we invite you to participate in as we move through the writings in this issue, and throughout the year. This has been a devastating year in many ways, considering the separation of migrant children from their parents at the US border, the anti-Muslim travel ban, and the continued onslaught of policies from the Trump administration that create and contribute to ongoing forms of gendered, racialized state violence. Considering the history of such events and policies reminds us that the deliberate fragmentation of families has been a cornerstone of US politics, particularly for Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ communities, people with disabilities, working-class and poor people, and other marginalized communities. Acknowledging this history allows us to also acknowledge the long history of resistance that has always existed alongside such forms of oppression. Many of the articles in this issue engage multiple ways of reading histories, through archival research, interviews, analyses of film and literature, and within popular and social media. In doing so, the authors detail the strategies of resistance, collective organizing, and coalitions that have emerged within specific communities at certain historical moments. Our cover features the beautiful art of Wura-Natasha Ogunji, "She moved the road" (2007), thread and acrylic on paper. Ogunji, a visual artist and performer whose works include drawings, videos, and public performances, explores the presence of women in public space. As Ogunji explains, her hand-stitched drawings, made on architectural trace paper, are inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, from the epic to the intimate. In "She moved the road," as the title implies, the woman moves the road, rather than (or in addition to) moving herself on the road. The image invites us to ask questions about space and place, especially our different experiences of movement within and through public spaces. References in the piece situate the figure in a specific geographical location, but also indicate an engagement with [End Page vii] movement, and with history. The figure represented in this piece could be seen as deliberately acting on the world around her, mobilizing change, imagining something different. Facing forward, arms crossed, eyes alert, she is prepared for struggle. See more of Wura-Natasha Ogunji's work at www.wuraogunji.com. As always, I am grateful to managing editor, Rebecca Lambert, and editorial assistants, Andrés López and LK Mae. We could not do the work we do at Feminist Formations without the excellent labor of copyeditor Hank Southgate and compositor Jamie McKee, as well as the staff of Johns Hopkins University Press. Thank you, also, to the members of our Editorial and Advisory Boards, and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University, for ongoing support. ________ We begin this issue with a timely article by Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, "The Powers of Testosterone: Race, Nation, and the Regulation of Women Athletes." Karkazis and Jordan-Young introduce their article by describing an image of two white women runners rejecting the outstretched arms of gold medalist Caster Semenya at the 2016 Olympic Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on media coverage, scientific publications, interviews, and sport regulation documents, and framing their analysis through intersectional feminist science studies and critical race studies, Karkazis and Jordan-Young investigate how the regulation of testosterone in women athletes disproportionately affects women of color from the Global South. To do so, they introduce the concept of "T talk," in order to "signal a web of direct claims and indirect associations that circulate around testosterone both as a material substance and as a multivalent cultural symbol." Through their reading of "T talk" in multiple discursive spaces, Karkazis and Jordan-Young powerfully demonstrate that racism and colonialism are central to the regulation of testosterone in women athletes. Kate Boyd, in "Stop Thinking...

Reassembling sex: reconsidering sex segregation policies in sport

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, cases such as Caster Semenya’s have drawn attention to the problematic nature of sex segregation policies in elite sporting competition. Several authors have emphasised that sex segregation policies are based on questionable evidence and do not facilitate fair competitions. This article uses the concept of the assemblage, as derived from Bruno Latour’s work in Actor-Network Theory, to highlight how, through considering the body as made up of multiple traits, it is possible to arrive at a classification system that is fairer than the current two-sex binary, and more logically based on the different physical traits required in various sports. Using the example of the change from a medical classification system to a functional system in disability sport, we outline and discuss a model for able-bodied sport as an alternative to the current sex segregation, which involves classifying bodies based on functional ability across multiple traits.

FRI-17 “WALK LIKE A MAN”: SEX TESTING AND FEMALE GENDER IDENTITY IN INTERNATIONAL ATHLETIC COMPETITION

You have accessJournal of UrologyHistory of Urology: History Forum1 Apr 2017FRI-17 “WALK LIKE A MAN”: SEX TESTING AND FEMALE GENDER IDENTITY IN INTERNATIONAL ATHLETIC COMPETITION Unwanaobong Nseyo Unwanaobong NseyoUnwanaobong Nseyo More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2017.02.2482AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES During the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games, Caster Semenya participated in the 800m finals and won gold. Her win, while a personal accomplishment, also had historical implications. Seven years prior, questions began to be raised about her gender ultimately leading to her temporary ban from athletic competition while she underwent “sex verification testing.” The sex-testing to which she was subjected had a historical precedent. This paper seeks to explore the historical narrative surrounding intersex disorders as the presented in the form of female athletic competition. METHODS A literature review was conducted in PubMed which identified primary and secondary sources regarding “sex testing” and “femininity certificates.” These sources were reviewed in order to evaluate the sociocultural context of sex testing among female athletes in international competition. RESULTS Sex testing began in earnest in the 1950s with the mandatory sex testing of female athletes during the European Championships, although rumblings of questioning the ender of female athletes pre-dated the creation of this mandatory law. In the 1930s, as women became increasingly involved in athletic competition, women's bodies were scrutinized if they appeared too “male-like” or exhibited athletic exceptionalism. Early sprinters such as Dora Ratjen of Germany and Stella Walsh of Poland were driven away from the sport due to claims that they were in fact men. Once testing became official, it consisted of invasive physical examinations, heavily focused on the genitalia as women were asked to “parade nude before a panel of doctors.” Often as a direct response to these athletic community's inquiries into their sexual identity, these female athletes, who were branded as male and termed “hermaphrodite” subsequently underwent surgical reassignment. While testing transitioned to include genetic and hormone testing, the results remained relatively inconclusive and significantly altered the lives of the women on whom they were conducted. CONCLUSIONS Historically, dominant performances by women on the international athletic stage called into question their gender identity. Invasive sex testing was performed and many of the individuals who were investigated would be identified as intersex today. Contemporary discussions of transgender identity add a new layer of complexity to examinations of the intersection of gender and athletic competition as transgender athletes made history in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games by competing without having undergone gender reassignment surgery. © 2017FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 197Issue 4SApril 2017Page: e1066 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2017MetricsAuthor Information Unwanaobong Nseyo More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Technology at the service of natural performance: cross analysis of the Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya cases

Drawing from the pragmatic sociology initiated by Boltanski and Thévenot, this study bears on the moments of tension between nature’s dispositions and technology’s possibilities in sporting events. It is based on the premise that the deep meaning of sport competitions and their staging are best perceived when strange or foreign forces (an overly ‘bouncing’ prosthesis, an overly masculine body) comes and undermines the reality tests which constitute the events. Through a cross-analysis [in the sense lent to this term by Passeron and Revel], of two athletes whose sporting achievements generated debates – Oscar Pistorius and Caster Semenya – we will underline the fundamental role of technology, which consists in instituting, in secret, reality that is always more significant from a sporting standpoint.

Black, Queer, and Precarious Visibilities: Simon Nkoli's Activist Image in South Africa's Exit Newspaper

Black, Queer, and Precarious VisibilitiesSimon Nkoli's Activist Image in South Africa's Exit Newspaper Z'étoile Imma (bio) We must be visible if we are going to be liberated. —Simon Nkoli In November 2015, Exit, South Africa's longest running monthly LGBT newspaper, published its 300th issue. As critic and activist Donna Smith asserts, in the context of pervasive uncertain and inconsistent publication of lesbian and gay print media in South Africa, founded in 1985, and still available in clubs and bookstores throughout the country, Exit has uniquely stood the test of time (189). Not surprisingly, Exit editors marked the milestone with a celebratory and confident tone. The issue's cover photo featuring a smiling, young, muscular, seemingly able-bodied white man, standing poolside with a dainty glass of beer raised outlines the aesthetic, embodied, and affective contours of Exit's brand of gay triumphalism. Along with the luxury, pleasure, and leisure harkened by the cover image, in an essay published in Exit's November print edition and subsequently posted on the newspaper's Facebook page, cultural critic, literary scholar, and contributing writer for the periodical, Tim Trengove-Jones, notes that for Exit "to survive in South Africa for 300 editions is close to miraculous" (8). In his guest column entitled "Long Life to Exit" Trengove-Jones goes on to offer a brief history contextualizing the great achievement of Exit's continued run in the face of apartheid-era Christian nationalism, the AIDS crisis, and Pride politics, upheavals, and fractures. As he charts the importance of Exit as "not a voice. THE voice" of the LGBT community in South Africa, Trengove-Jones highlights key moments in Exit's thirty-three-year trajectory. He asserts that Exit "was there" when "Pride really mattered," when debates regarding performance artist Steve Cohen's now infamous antics emerged, when (openly gay and HIV-positive) Justice Edwin Cameron defended Cohen's right to free speech, when the now defunct "Out in Africa" film festival was launched, when LGBT rights were constitutionalized, when "a group of disaffected lesbians lay down in Jan Smuts Avenue in protest against what they believed was the depoliticization of Pride," and when the queer community mourned the passing of well-known drag performer and Exit contributor Dainti Delischia (8). In the making of his tightly abbreviated queer timeline, Trengove-Jones pinpoints key moments of victory, visibility, and contestation in South Africa's LGBT recent history. While much and many must be left out of such a brief and largely informal construction, the glaring absence of how race, racism, and racialized queer subjects have shaped LGBT politics in South Africa ironically affirms long-standing critiques of Exit as white supremacist and white masculinist centric. [End Page 61] In choosing to construct a memory project in which three white South Africans—Steve Cohen, Justice Cameron, and Dainti Delischia (Charles Wiley)—uniquely serve as central figures in their country's LGBT history, Trengove-Jones misses an opportunity to center the names and flag the stories of important Black and of color queer activists and figures such as Bev Ditsie, Zackie Achmat, Phumi Mthethwa, Wendy Isaack, Caster Semenya, and Simon Nkoli. In Trengove-Jones's commentary, South Africa's Black queer notables are at best coded and minoritized as disaffected bodies or at worst relegated to the impermeable background of LGBT history. As a central force behind the first Pride march in South Africa, the politicizing of AIDS treatment for gay men, and the successful campaign to include legal protection against discrimination based on sexual orientation in South Africa's constitution, it remains that Simon Nkoli haunts the silences and blank spaces of Exit's most recent (re)fashioning of LGBT history and memory. Yet Nkoli was, and is, more than a specter to the white-centered representational practices systematized in Exit. Simon Nkoli was an early, consistent, yet dynamic figure in the newspaper, even after his death in 1998; he was memorialized three times in the pages of Exit that following year. As such, failure to make explicit mention of his contributions, if not his controversies, in celebrating the periodical's history, however passingly, is especially egregious. Indeed Nkoli was there in...

Misogynoir in Medical Media: On Caster Semenya and R. Kelly

Misogynoir describes the co-constitutive, anti-Black, and misogynistic racism directed at Black women, particularly in visual and digital culture (Bailey, 2010). The term is a combination of misogyny, the hatred of women, and noir, which means black but also carries film and media connotations. It is the particular amalgamation of anti-Black racism and misogyny in popular media and culture that targets Black trans and cis women. Representational images contribute to negative societal perceptions about Black women, which can precipitate racist gendered violence that harms health and can even result in death. As philosopher Linda Alcoff asserts, racism depends on perceptible difference to determine which bodies are expendable, and in this cultural moment of Black hypervisibility, Black women are particularly vulnerable (Philosophy). I use two culture examples to explore the real life impact of misogynoir in medical media. I explore the ways in which the biomedical knowledge produced by physicians reinforces certain bodies as normal and others as pathological. The case of Caster Semenya as well as the trial of R&B star R. Kelly, allow me to introduce Black feminist health science studies as a critical intervention into current medical curriculum reform conversations.

The unexpected body: From Sara Baartman to Caster Semenya

Abstract The article draws lines between the historical example of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and the ‘Caster Semenya case’ – the 18-year old South African athlete who won the women’s 800 metres in the World Championship in 2009, and had to undergo ‘gender testing’. It looks into how the South African press covered the case of Semenya in the light of identity and power processes. How did the Semenya case feed into broader political and cultural processes in South Africa? The discussion shows how the concept of identity politics is multifaceted – covering issues such as sex, gender, ethnicity, colour, status and class while reflecting colonial as well as postcolonial realities.

The illegal transgression: discourse analysis of the media perception of the transgressive aesthetic of performance and display in top-level sports

The debate over Caster Semenya’s female sex began shortly after the South African runner won gold in the women’s 800 m final at the 2009 Athletic World Championships in Berlin. Her victory was disputed by questioning her right to compete as a woman. Using the theoretical framework of gender and postcolonial theories and the methodology of discourse and dispositive analysis, the paper explores the contextualization of a perceived transgressive, aesthetic, performance and display in the field of top-level sports. The case study analyses the discourses surrounding a non-white, non-male South African runner in eight mainstream Swiss German language print media. The paper argues that the media response to Semenya exemplifies Butler’s claim that the discursive framework of gender constructs and naturalizes sex. A key question is, therefore, whether the assignation of deviant bodies to a ‘field of deformation’ works to pluralize and cross set gender boundaries, or rather, as Butler suggests, calls those bodies into question.

Running Like a Man, Sitting Like a Girl: Visual Enthymeme and the Case of Caster Semenya

Much attention has been given to the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, an 18-year-old South African athlete subjected to “sex testing” during the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, but far less attention has been given to Semenya's rhetorical response to the media's scrutiny of her body. This essay explores how Semenya's portrait on the cover of You, a prominent South African magazine, employs a visual rhetoric that functions as an enthymeme. I argue that while Semenya hailed audiences to view her as an authentic, feminine self, her visual enthymeme was constrained by medical conceptions of gender. By investigating the Semenya case, I analyze how female athletic bodies are displayed, disciplined, and reinscribed into sexist and racist discourses about gendered athleticism.

Sporting space invaders: Elite bodies in track and field, a South African context

ABSTRACTThis article builds on previous work that conceptualizes certain bodies – particularly women and racialized minorities – as ‘bodies out of place’ and ‘space invaders’ – to put forth the notion of the sporting space invader. I argue that certain sporting bodies become sporting space invaders by transgressing sporting boundaries, real and/or imagined. Specifically, this article makes case studies of two South African runners, Caster Semenya and Oscar Pistorius, to illustrate the ways in which certain bodies become viewed as existing ‘beyond’ particular sporting boundaries. The notion of sporting space invaders is specific to time, place and space as focuses the modalities of race, gender, sexuality, nationality and ability as the primary sporting boundaries that render certain sporting bodies as ‘out of place’. Both Semenya and Pistorius were/continue to be framed within the media as possessing characteristics that gave them an ‘unfair advantage’ in their respective events, thus rendering them sporting space invaders. This concept seeks to complicate existing discourse on sport and the body by seeing sporting space invaders as individuals who mark instances of the changing face of modern sport, and thus make room for broader conversations about social justice and sport.

She's a strong girl

Note from author: We have a long way to go, still, as our Caster Semenya wins gold in Berlin in the 800 metres by a long streak. Penned during the “she's a strong girl” observation by someone inter...

Sex, Drugs, and Kinesiology: A Useful Partnership for Sport’s Most Pressing Issues

From the gender controversy of South African runner Caster Semenya to the doping practices of disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong, recent sporting issues highlight kinesiology’s important role and responsibility to sport. Increasingly, sport organizations, such as the International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and international federations, have turned to academics to help navigate their sport science issues. Such complex, cross-disciplinary problems require researchers versed in kinesiology’s sub-disciplines and familiar with problem-based inquiry. Though such cross-disciplinary practices are familiar to kinesiologists, their familiarity only indicates kinesiology’s potential impact on the major issues sport is currently addressing. Kinesiology must be a field comprised of scholars equally comfortable with empirical and humanistic research while at the same time applying their cross-disciplinary knowledge to some of sport’s most pressing issues. Kinesiology ought to consider more collaborative venues for scholars from across its sub-disciplines to work together on complex, cross-disciplinary research.

“Just Look at her!”

Using the American sport media’s treatment of South African runner Caster Semenya, this article explores how in the course of defending Caster Semenya the American sport media presented a rigorous challenge to traditional conceptions of sex and gender. Yet these rhetorical efforts to deconstruct sex and gender binaries were undermined by the specific ways in which Semenya’s dual performances—athletic and gender—were visually depicted. A close reading and analysis of US sports media coverage of Caster Semenya provide an opportunity to explore the ways in which the norms of sport may foster progressive treatment of athletes whose genders do not fit comfortably within the existing, traditional expectations of what men and women should be like. At the same time, however, I wish to suggest that both discursive and visual rhetoric are limited in how much they can use such sports norms when ontological questions about the normal, the natural, and the body are at stake. By paying particular attention to the interplay between the linguistic, the visual, and the performative, I hope to show that even the most sincere efforts to complicate sex and gender within the framework of sport have significant limitations.

Sex Testing and the Maintenance of Western Femininity in International Sport

During the Cold War, women from Eastern Europe excelled in international sport. Rather than applauding the successes of these female athletes, many in the Cold-War-West responded with suspicion, contempt and derision. Armed with rumours and anecdotes, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) implemented sex testing in 1966, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) followed suit two years later. Despite the introduction of a compulsory sex/gender control, many continued to lament the muscular physiques of the Cold-War-Eastern victors. The known and suspected sex test ‘failures’ from North Korea, the Philippines, Poland, the Soviet Union and Spain served to exacerbate the fears of gender fraudulence. As global dynamics shifted, however, so, too, did the anxieties in sport. When women from the People's Republic of China dominated the international sports scene in the 1990s, many in the geographic-West again doubted the authenticity of the achievements and called for a return to gender verification. A decade later, the international plights of Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan and South African runner Caster Semenya convinced the IAAF and the IOC that such a reestablishment was necessary. Using the ‘colonial/modern gender system’ framework, this article explores the political and racialised sex/gender concerns medical professionals and sport authorities possessed, which led to the establishment, abandonment and reintroduction of sex testing/gender verification in elite sport. Through these three phases of sex testing/gender verification, the IAAF and the IOC reaffirmed a binary notion of sex and privileged white, Western gender norms.

Doping e controle de feminilidade no esporte

Neste artigo ocupamo-nos das relações entre doping e o corpo e a sexualidade de mulheres atletas. A partir da análise da Política de Verificação de Gênero no esporte, bem como de um episódio recente com a atleta Caster Semenya, refletimos sobre a relação que o doping tem com os discursos generificantes, mostrando que a preocupação com as mulheres atletas dopadas pressupõe uma inquietação com suas identidades sexuais e de gênero.

Spectacles and Scholarship: Caster Semenya, Intersex Studies, and the Problem of Race in Feminist Theory

In this essay I use the case of Caster Semenya, a South African sprinter forced to undergo gender verification testing in 2008, as a point of entry for looking at the role that race and nation have historically played in the production and reproduction of the concept of intersex. I examine feminist scholars’ previous work on Semenya in order to highlight how their inattention to issues of race and nation made them unable to see the ways in which intersex—as a classificatory schema, an object of knowledge, and a technology of subject formation—contains within it a racially exclusive impulse. The essay examines the production and reproduction of the idea of intersex in two locations—the United States and South Africa—during three different time periods in order to show how ideas about race were written into the subject from its earliest conception. A number of other scholars have argued that intersex has played a key role in the production of ontological gender. I take this work a step further by showing how the issues of race and nation have factored into both the historical production and reproduction of intersex and, through that, have come to exert a powerful but hidden effect on gender as an object of analysis and conceptual tool.

Caster Semenya, Gender Verification and the Politics of Fairness in an Online Track & Field Community

The sex testing of South African runner Caster Semenya in 2009 was widely discussed in media, but the most serious and significant sites of debate may have been within the cultures and institutions of track & field itself. In this article, we report findings from an analysis of an online track & field community—TrackNet Listserv—through which the Semenya case, and the politics and ethics of sex testing, were discussed. The results suggest that listserv members recognized the contestability of sex testing policies and identified with feminist struggles, but nevertheless largely argued for sex testing’s necessity in light of understandings of the biologically normative female body and the importance of maintaining fairness in and through sex-segregated sport. The implications for the sport of track & field and for sporting feminisms are discussed.

The “Science” of Fair Play in Sport: Gender and the Politics of Testing

This essay reflects on the history of gender verification regulations aimed at female athletes in international sport and the justification for this practice under the rationale that it protects fair play in women’s sport. Beginning with the most recent guidelines for women participants proposed in 2011 following the controversy around the 800-meter world champion runner Caster Semenya, this analysis looks at the politics—gendered, scientific, and international in nature—of policing sex in women’s events through the use of scientific testing. To do so, the article traces the ideological underpinnings of fair play in Olympic sport and the development of international guidelines, providing a historiographic reading of the International Olympic Committee Medical Commission’s early work in this field during the 1960s, subsequent changes to this regulation, and their implications. In advancing this argument, I contend that to date the science aimed at preserving a steadfast binary has only provided evidence to the contrary. Science has yet to prove that female sex is definitive, and its recommendations have in part come to reflect that recognition. The recent revisiting of gender verification protocols nonetheless suggests the technocratic desire for a formation of sex that reflects binary constructions of gender, attesting to the continued power of heteronormative orders in this field and beyond.

The new IOC and IAAF policies on female eligibility: old Emperor, new clothes?

The Caster Semenya debacle touched off by the 2009 Berlin World Athletics Championships resulted finally in IOC and IAAF abandonment of sex testing, which gave way to procedures that make female competition eligibility dependent upon the level of serum testosterone, which must be below the male range or instrumentally countered by androgen resistance. We argue that the new policy is unsustainable because (i) the testosterone-performance connection it posits is uncompelling; (ii) testosterone-induced female advantage is not ipso facto unfair advantage; (iii) the new policy reflects the gender policing impulses endemic to sport as well as the broader cultural impulses to monstrify women and to doctor women who have nothing wrong with them; (iv) female–male performance disparities are not the only reason for sex-segregated sport, but co-exist with respectable cultural and practical reasons, which (v) provide a powerful case for allowing athletes to compete in the sex category congruent with their gender identity.