scholarly journals What Does it Mean to be a Woman in Sports? An Analysis of the Jurisprudence of the Court of Arbitration for Sport

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-411
Author(s):  
Lena Holzer

ABSTRACT This article explores the definition of ‘sportswoman’ as put forward in the Caster Semenya case (2019) and the Dutee Chand case (2015) before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). It analyses the structural and discursive factors that made it possible for the CAS to endorse a definition that reduces sex and gender to a matter concerning testosterone. By relying on the concept of intersectionality and analytical sensibilities from Critical Legal Studies, the article shows that framing the cases as a matter of scientific dispute, instead of as concerning human rights, significantly influenced the CAS decisions. Moreover, structural elements of international sports law, such as the lack of knowledge of human rights among CAS arbitrators and a history of institutionalising gendered and racialised body norms through sporting regulations, further aided the affirmation of the ‘testosterone rules’.

Author(s):  
Nimisha Barton

In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. This book argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight — the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. This compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately toward a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, the book shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women — mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Immigrants often embraced these policies because they, too, stood to gain from pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefits, and French nationality. By striking this bargain, they were also guaranteed safety and stability on a tumultuous continent. The book concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing — in short, through families and family-making — which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.


2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Whittle ◽  
Lewis Turner

Gender transformations are normatively understood as somatic, based on surgical reassignment, where the sexed body is aligned with the gender identity of the individual through genital surgery – hence the common lexicon ‘sex change surgery’. We suggest that the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 challenges what constitutes a ‘sex change’ through the Act's definitions and also the conditions within which legal ‘recognition’ is permitted. The sex/gender distinction, (where sex normatively refers to the sexed body, and gender, to social identity) is demobilised both literally and legally. This paper discusses the history of medico-socio-legal definitions of sex have been developed through decision making processes when courts have been faced with people with gender variance and, in particular, the implications of the Gender Recognition Act for our contemporary legal understanding of sex. We ask, and attempt to answer, has ‘sex’ changed?


Author(s):  
Annalisa Enrile ◽  
Dorotea Mendoza

The term human rights defenders was coined after the ratification of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1998. The term encompasses those who identify and act as advocates, activists, professionals, and workers; those who monitor and take reports; and others who work in the human rights arena. The point of unity that all human rights defenders share is that they seek to promote and protect basic civil rights. They may do this in multiple capacities, including providing legal aid, mental health services, casework, and general protection such as providing shelter or security. The work of human rights defenders is difficult and dangerous. In 2017, more than 300 human rights defenders were killed. The Philippines has a history of violations in the spheres of labor, politics, and gender rights. In 2017, there were human rights violations in the form of more than 350,000 displaced persons, more than 4,000 extrajudicial killings, overpopulated prisons, and the trafficking of thousands of women and children. The most effective way to address these violations is through transnational organizing and movement building, cultivating international alliances of women who fight abuses against human rights defenders. These organizations and coalitions operate beyond borders and create change through engagement.


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
H Lorraine Radtke

Theory is an important preoccupation of articles published in Feminism & Psychology. This Virtual Special Issue includes 10 of those published since the journal’s inception that have a primary focus on theoretical issues related to two related topics – differences and the biological. The concern with differences includes the socially constructed categories sex and gender, as well as sexuality and social class. Those articles addressing the biological represent critical scholarship that is working to negotiate a place for the biology within feminist psychology and entails moving away from the view that the biological is natural and innate. This introductory article addresses how theory fits within feminist psychology and offers a brief history of debates concerning differences and the biological before offering summaries and observations related to each selected article. The featured articles can be located on the Feminism & Psychology website and are listed in Appendix 1 at the end of this article.


Author(s):  
Rosemary L. Hopcroft

This chapter provides an overview of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society. Chapters in the first part of this book address the history of the use of method and theory from biology in the social sciences; the second part includes chapters on evolutionary approaches to social psychology; the third part includes chapters describing research on the interaction of genes (and other biochemicals such as hormones) and environmental contexts on a variety of outcomes of sociological interest; and the fourth part includes chapters that apply evolutionary theory to areas of traditional concern to sociologists—including the family, fertility, sex and gender, religion, crime, and race and ethnic relations. The last part of the book presents two chapters on cultural evolution.


Author(s):  
Mark Blasius

This chapter focuses on an event in the history of sexuality, more specifically in the history of sexuality as a political issue. In recent years, vastly diverse movements around the politics of sexuality have embraced the notion of “sexual rights.” This concept developed rapidly especially since the UN Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) and in the wake of the global AIDS pandemic. More recently, rights specific to sexual orientation and gender identity have gained prominence, for instance with a 2011 Human Rights Council resolution on sexual orientation and gender identity, and a report to the UN General Assembly that analyzed in a preliminary way the universal human rights of LGBT persons. Issuance of this report and the resolution that commissioned it together signify a historical event in the politics of sexuality.


Author(s):  
Hasia R. Diner ◽  
Jonathan Safran Foer

This book explores how the making of Judaism and the making of Jewish meals have been intertwined throughout history and in contemporary Jewish practices. It is an invitation not only to delve into the topic but to join in the growing number of conversations and events that consider the intersections between Judaism and food. Seventeen original chapters advance the state of both Jewish studies and religious studies scholarship on food in accessible prose. Insights from recent work in growing subfields such as food studies, sex and gender studies, and animal studies permeate the volume. Encompassing historical, ethnographic, critical theoretical, and history of religions methodologies, the volume introduces readers to historic and ongoing Jewish food practices and helps them engage the charged ethical debates about how our food choices reflect competing Jewish values. The book’s three sections respectively include chronologically arranged historical overviews (first section), essays built around particular foods and theoretical questions (second section), and essays addressing ethical issues (third and final section). The first section provides the historical and textual overview that is necessary to ground any discussion of food and Jewish traditions. The second section provides studies of food and culture from a range of time periods, and each chapter addresses not only a particular food but also a theoretical issue of broader interest in the study of religion. The final section focuses on moral and ethical questions generated by and answered through Jewish engagements with food.


2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.


Author(s):  
Nazan Maksudyan

Abstract In 1975, the world-famous novelist Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) undertook a series of journalistic interviews with street children in Istanbul. The series, entitled “Children Are Human” (Çocuklar İnsandır), reflects the author's rebellious attitude as well as the revolutionary spirit of hope in the 1970s in Turkey. Kemal's ethnographic fieldwork with street children criticized the demotion of children to a less-than-human status when present among adults. He approached children's rights from a human rights angle, stressing the humanity of children and that children's rights are human rights. The methodological contribution of this research to the history of children and youth is its engagement with ethnography as historical source. His research provided children the opportunity to express their political subjectivities and their understanding of the major political questions of the time, specifically those of social justice, (in)equality, poverty, and ethnic violence encountered in their everyday interactions with politics in the country. Yaşar Kemal's fieldwork notes and transcribed interviews also bring to light immense injustices within an intersectional framework of age, class, ethnicity, and gender. The author emphasizes that children's political agency and their political protest is deeply rooted in their subordination and misery, but also in their dreams and hopes. Situating Yaşar Kemal's “Children Are Human” in the context of the 1970s in Turkey, I hope to contribute to childhood studies with regard to the political agency of children as well as to the history of public intellectuals and newspapers in Turkey and to progressive representations of urban marginalization.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 107-137
Author(s):  
Nina Gładziuk

Otto Weininger’s work entitled Sex and Character is an important text in the intellectual history of Viennese modernism of the f‌in de siècle period. The author makes a pessimistic diagnosis of modern culture, which, according to him, is infected by anti-cultural feminine values. With desperate passion, he looks for a way to heal this state of affairs and finds it in the project of male reorientation in culture. To make this plan a reality, he thoroughly redef‌ines sex and gender. The aim of the article is to investigate various paradoxes and contradictions contained in this famous work.


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