Introduction

Author(s):  
Lindsay Parks Pieper

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to book explores the history of sex testing from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) used different tests to both guarantee the authenticity of female athletes and identify male masqueraders in Olympic sport. Although the IOC Medical Commission never discovered a single male imposter—and the various iterations of the exam actually illustrated the impossibility of neatly delineating sex—the IOC nevertheless continued to implement the control. Olympic officials thus authorized a policy of sex/gender conformity, as sex testing/gender verification required that female athletes demonstrate conventional notions of white Western heterofemininity. Through these regulations, the IOC continuously reaffirmed a binary notion of sex, privileged white gender norms, and hampered female athleticism. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Author(s):  
Сергій Лазоренко ◽  
◽  
Дмитро Балашов ◽  
Микола Чхайло

Relevance of the Research Topic. The forthcoming Olympic Games in July 2021 in Tokyo – the capital of the rising Sun country – in the view of most heads of international sports federations, which absolutely support the aspects of the current Olympic concept, and the athletes preparing to demonstrate the best sides of modern Olympic sports during the Tokyo Olympic Games, can become most scandalous in the context of determining the winners of the Games, the fairness of Olympic records, especially in women’s competitions and Athletes-Transgenders’ participation in the Games. In the history of the modern Olympic movement, these will be the first Olympics Games in which, alongside biological women, will compete representatives of the male half of humanity, who have artificially changed gender. The last four years, following the Games in Rio de Janeiro, have been marked by a total struggle against doping in sports. The purpose of the research is to study the issues of transgender ontology in modern Olympic sport and solutions to this problem. Being used research methods are analysis, comparison and generalization of historical information and its systematization according to the dialectic of the problem’s development. Results of the study. The International Olympic Committee has decided to purge modern Olympic sports from this shameful phenomenon, because peaceful Olympic rivalry is a demonstration of the individual qualities of the athlete, not a rivalry of the modern achievements in medicine and pharmacology. This struggle demonstrated the fundamental position of the IOC towards athletes, teams and national teams, who, for the sake of high sport achievements, used prohibited pharmacological drugs, manipulated of doping tests, etc. in the preparation for official competitions. The result of this struggle is the removal of specified subjects from participation in 2021 Games. Conclusions. The authors of the article tried to explore the dialectic of the transgender phenomenon in modern Olympic sports and to identify aspects of the IOC policy regarding the admission of transgender athletes to the 2021 Summer Olympics.


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (13) ◽  
pp. 1613-1630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Swanson

This article mines the history of rape jurisprudence to illuminate how the legal treatment of wartime rape informs long-standing gendered tropes that dominate its understanding on the ground as well as its representation in literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes by reading Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog as a model for a dialogic literary imagination capable of revealing the fatal consequences of toxic masculinity as it informs not only the perpetration of rape in wartime, but also the possibility for either perpetrator or victim to achieve subjectivity free from the burdens of brutally constraining gender norms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 101269022110215
Author(s):  
Cathy Devine

The fair inclusion of female athletes at elite and Olympic levels is secured in most sports by way of female categories because of the extensively documented biological and performance-related differences between the sexes. International policy for transgender inclusion is framed by the definitive International Olympic Committee transgender guidelines in which the International Olympic Committee confirms the ‘overriding sporting objective is and remains the guarantee of fair competition’ and transwomen can be excluded from female categories if, in the interests of fairness, this is necessary and proportionate. Feminist theorists argue justice requires that women have equal moral standing in the sociocultural–political structures of society including sport. As such their voices should carry equal democratic weight. However, female elite and Olympic athletes are rarely heard in the sociocultural–political discourses of academic literature or policy formulation for transgender inclusion in female categories by the International Olympic Committee and governing bodies of sport. This empirical study investigated the views and presents the ‘voices’ of 19 female Olympians. The main findings include (1) these athletes thought both female and transgender athletes should be fairly included in elite sport, (2) unanimous agreement there is not enough scientific evidence to show no competitive advantage for transwomen, (3) unanimous agreement that the International Olympic Committee should revisit the rules and scientific evidence for transgender inclusion in female categories, and (4) the majority of athletes felt that they could not ask questions or discuss this issue without being accused of transphobia.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shohei Sato

AbstractThis article re-examines our understanding of modern sport. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds the diffusionist model. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Japanese educationalist amalgamated different martial arts and established judo not as a sport but as ‘a way of life’. Today it is practised globally as an Olympic sport. Focusing on the changes in its rules during this period, this article demonstrates that the globalization of judo was accompanied by a constant evolution of its character. The overall ‘sportification’ of judo took place not as a diffusion but as a convergence – a point that is pertinent to the understanding of the global sportification of physical cultures, and also the standardization of cultures in modern times.


2018 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 213-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan D. Rogol ◽  
Lindsay Parks Pieper

This report illustrates the links between history, sport, endocrinology, and genetics to show the ways in which historical context is key to understanding the current conversations and controversies about who may compete in the female category in elite sport. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) introduced hyperandrogenemia regulations for women’s competitions in 2011, followed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the 2012 Olympics. The policies concern female athletes who naturally produce higher-than-average levels of testosterone and want to compete in the women’s category. Hyperandrogenemia guidelines are the current effort in a long series of attempts to determine women’s eligibility scientifically. Scientific endeavors to control who may participate as a woman illustrate the impossibility of neatly classifying competitors by sex and discriminate against women with differences of sex development (also called intersex by some).


Author(s):  
John B. Nann ◽  
Morris L. Cohen

This introductory chapter provides an overview of legal history research. An attorney might conduct legal history research if the law at question in a legal dispute is very old: the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are well over two hundred years old. Historical research also comes into play when the question at issue is what the law was at a certain time in the past. Ultimately, law plays an important part in the political and social history of the United States. As such, researchers interested in almost every aspect of American life will have occasion to use legal materials. The chapter then describes the U.S. legal system and legal authority, and offers six points to consider in approaching a historical legal research project.


Author(s):  
Grégoire Chamayou ◽  
Steven Rendall

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on manhunts—the concrete historical phenomena in which human beings were tracked down, captured, or killed in accord with the forms of the hunt. These were regular and sometimes large-scale practices whose forms were first theorized in ancient Greece, long before their enormous expansion in the modern period in conjunction with the development of transatlantic capitalism. The main problem has to do with the fact that the hunter and the hunted do not belong to different species. Since the distinction between the predator and his prey is not inscribed in nature, the hunting relationship is always susceptible to a reversal of positions. Prey sometimes band together to become hunters in their turn. The history of a power is also the history of the struggles to overthrow it.


Author(s):  
Pierre Rosanvallon

This introductory chapter considers the definitions of legitimacy in the context of democratic politics. Expressions such as the “great majority” or “vast majority” established the law of numbers, in contrast to the minority rule characteristic of despotic and aristocratic regimes. At first, it was the difference in the origins of power and the foundation of political obligation that was crucial. Later, the majority principle came to be recognized in a more narrowly procedural sense. The chapter traces this evolution within the history of democratic elections, positing a decentering of democracy as newer forms of political investment emerge, making democratic politics into something more than merely electing representatives.


Author(s):  
Sheilagh Ogilvie

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of guilds and an overview of the debate surrounding them. The effects of guilds on economy and society have always attracted controversy. Contemporaries held strong views about them, with guild members and their political allies extolling their virtues, while customers, employees, and competitors lamented their misdeeds. Modern scholars are also deeply divided on guilds. Some claim that guilds were so widespread and long-lived that they must have generated economic benefits. Other scholars take a darker view. Guilds, they hold, were in a position to extract benefits for their own members by acting as cartels, exploiting consumers; rationing access to human capital investment; stifling innovation; bribing governments for favours; harming outsiders such as women, Jews, and the poor; and redistributing resources to their members at the expense of the wider economy.


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