Privileging Difference: Negotiating Gender Essentialism in U.S. Women’s Professional Soccer

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Rachel Allison
Keyword(s):  
Women Athletes ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Professional Soccer ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Material Reward ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Moral Superiority

Although women athletes in professional sport are uniquely positioned to expose the limits of gender essentialist ideology and challenge its relationship with inequality, little empirical research has considered how professional women athletes understand and negotiate gender ideologies. Drawing on 19 in-depth interviews and one e-mail exchange with U.S. women’s professional soccer players, this article finds that sportswomen strategically endorse constructions of gender difference while simultaneously universalizing White, middle-class women’s experiences. “Privileging difference” is a narrative whereby players recognize belief in women’s physical inferiority to men and argue for women’s moral superiority to men as a source of value and reward for women’s sport. Sportswomen’s moral authority is defined from a position of racialized class privilege, as players construct an idealized woman player who sacrifices material reward for emotional satisfaction and who emphasizes future change over present conditions.

Newspaper Representation of Women Athletes in 1984 and 1994

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Mathesen ◽  
Kay Flatten
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
General Population ◽  
Women Athletes ◽  
Sport Participation ◽  
Women's Sports ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Women’S Sports

This research was to assess changes in Great Britain (GB) in the percent coverage of women’s sports in six national and Sunday newspapers (Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, Express, Mail and Mirror) between 1984 and 1994. Measurements were taken of all sports articles on the front pages, editorial pages and sports pages for the period 1st-14th July in both years. Data were categorized into male only, female only and mixed articles per day, square centimetres per day and photos per day. There was a decrease in percentage coverage of women’s sport coverage (articles per day down 5.2%; cm2 per day down 5.2%; photos per day down 7.1%) while the overall coverage of sport increased. During the time period the portion of GB Olympians who were women increased by 7% and there was a 3% increase in proportion of sports participants in the general population who were women. An adjustment index is presented which uses population figures and sport participation figures to calculate the proportion of sport participants who are female. This index was used to assess fairness in reporting sport.

Defining ‘woman': A governmentality analysis of how protective policies are created in elite women's sport

2022 ◽  
pp. 101269022110727
Author(s):  
Anna Posbergh
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Women Athletes ◽  
Relative Energy ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Energy Deficiency ◽  
Fair Competition ◽  
Safety And Health ◽  
Standards And Regulations ◽  
Do So

Women's sport remains a contested realm that frequently features standards and regulations premised on women's inferiority and physiological distinctions from men. In response to these purported sex-based differences, a range of protective policies have been implemented to ostensibly ensure women's safety and health, defend “fair competition” in women's sport, and/or prevent the violation of social and medical boundaries that define who is a “woman.” Yet, protective policies encompass a multitude of rationales and strategies, demonstrating the malleability of “protection” in terms of who is protected and why. In this article, I draw from Michel Foucault's theory of “governmentality” to investigate the nuances of protective policies, especially their placed importance on sex differences. To do so, I examine three case studies: World Athletics’ (WA) 2019 female eligibility policy, WA's 2019 transgender eligibility policy, and the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) consensus statement on relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S). Using document texts and semi-structured interviews with eight scientists involved with developing the case studies, I find that protective policies are developed through messy and often contentious processes that selectively draw from varying knowledges and discourses. This then culminates in contrasting methods of defining, protecting, and governing women athletes and their bodies.

“We suffered in our bones just like them”: Comparing Migrations at the Margins of Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 880-907 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar
Keyword(s):  
Central Place ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Population Mobility ◽  
Return Migrants ◽  
Moral Culpability ◽  
History Of ◽  
Competing Ideas ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
Historical Trajectory

AbstractIn this article, I trace how return migrants (former labor emigrants) from Andalusia, Spain draw on their regional history of emigration as a resource for claiming the moral authority to assess immigrants from the global south. By comparing their own migratory experiences and those of new migrants, Andalusians renegotiate competing ideas about their region's membership in Europe, a question with renewed political saliency during the ongoing economic crisis. Specifically, they use comparisons to claim a more central place in Europe for Andalusia, while at the same time eschewing moral culpability for Europe's mistreatment of labor emigration. To do so, Andalusian return migrants mobilize discourses of migrant suffering at various geopolitical scales of belonging, often mapping Andalusians’ experiences of emigration and return onto the region's historical trajectory of Europeanization. The scaling up and down of discourses of migrant suffering in the context of historical narratives of migration enables Andalusians to claim moral superiority based on their non-European, migrant past while also claiming European belonging in the present. Memorializing and assessing migrant suffering thus become forms of discursive work that help construct the political and moral limits of Europeanness. Through analysis of this process, I call for a more central focus on return migration and the intersection of multiple kinds of population mobility in migration research and in the study of European unification.

Reading ‘Race’ in Bourdieu? Examining Black Cultural Capital Among Black Caribbean Youth in South London

Sociology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 907-923 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derron Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Depth Interviews

This article extends Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital in relation to ‘race’ and ethnicity by exploring the significance of black cultural capital among middle class black Caribbean young people in a large state school in south London. Black cultural capital is here defined as the appropriation of middle class values by black ethnics. Based on a 14-month-long ethnography, with specific attention to three focus group and 13 in-depth interviews with middle class black Caribbean young people, this piece outlines the benefits of and backlash to black cultural capital that students encounter from white middle class teachers for deploying black middle class tastes and styles in the classroom. The findings suggest that while black middle class pupils draw on black cultural capital to access advantages in formal school settings, they are also invested in challenging the terms of class privilege that marginalise the black working classes.

scholarly journals If “Ifs” and “Buts” Were Candy and Nuts

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Ivy
Keyword(s):  
Women Athletes ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Basis ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Contemporary Issue ◽  
Established Fact ◽  
Representative Selection ◽  
Selection Of

It’s relatively easy to say that the debates about whether trans and intersex women athletes deserve full and equal inclusion in women’s sport is a contentious contemporary issue. I’ve already argued for the legal, ethical, and scientific basis for full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport. In this paper, I want to analyze what I take to be a representative selection of recent arguments against full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport. In short, these arguments tend to be based on mere assumption, unsupported “common sense,” straw arguments, fallacious question begging, and a number of hypotheticals and unsupported counterfactuals rather than established fact. Essentially, they’re based on a lot of “ifs.”

Strike a Pose! The Femininity Effect in Collegiate Women’s Sport

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Musto ◽  
P.J. McGann
Keyword(s):  
Women Athletes ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Team Sport ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
School Type ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Contextual Variation ◽  
Cultural Ideals ◽  
Quantitative Content ◽  
Hegemonic Femininity

The apologetic strategies women employ to manage the cultural tension between athleticism and hegemonic femininity are well documented. Existing research, however, tends to be small-scale. The cumulative symbolic implications of female athlete appearance on cultural ideals remain under-theorized as a result. Our quantitative content analysis of a stratified, random sample of 4,799 collegiate women athletes’ roster photos examined whether sport, school type, and geographical location are related to gendered appearance. Despite important contextual variation, we found overwhelming homogeneity across settings. Our results suggest that the normalization of women’s athleticism is limited and depends on subordinated femininities. Thus, despite some positive changes, team sport still helps stabilize and naturalize the gender order.

Hostility Toward Men and the Perceived Stability of Male Dominance

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Glick ◽  
Jessica Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Ambivalent Sexism ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
The Stability

Two studies examined how ambivalent gender ideologies, measured by the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) and Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory (AMI), relate to the perceived legitimacy and stability of gender hierarchy. Study 1 showed simple correlations of each ASI and AMI subscale with the perceived legitimacy of gender hierarchy, but only Hostility Toward Men (HM: A traditional, but unflattering view of men as domineering) predicted the perceived stability of gender hierarchy. In Study 2, experimentally priming HM (but not other gender ideologies) increased perceptions of the stability of gender hierarchy. Although HM derides men for acting in a domineering manner, it characterizes men as designed for dominance. By reinforcing the perceived stability of gender hierarchy, HM may undermine women’s motivation to seek change.

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