Testing the Limits of Science
Madeleine Pape’s critical essay puts the issue of gender eligibility regulations in Olympic sports in historical perspective and examines the scientific debates around gender verification pointing to its formation and continued grounding in the racialized colonial gaze. A historical review of the field of athletics illuminates the deeply subjective nature of the production of scientific knowledge and its application in the verification of gender. Further, discriminatory role of sport governing bodies in perpetuating masculinist and racialized ideologies in insisting on scrutiny in the participation of women, inspection of their ‘unfeminine’ bodies, to invasive gender tests of ‘suspicious’ cases, continues unabated, especially of the global South.