Transformative Sporting Visions

Writing about social justice issues in any context can be a grind and those of us who toil in the field of critical sport studies are no exception. The racism, misogyny, heterosexism, and transphobia that collide with the celebration of European diasporic morality (Lemert, 2002) and the normalization of inequitable capital accumulation in much amateur and most professional sport reflect and reinforce antiegalitarianism cultures and practices in every sphere of life. It is hard to catch a break in terms of unraveling the privileging power of Whiteness, masculinity, heterosexism, and class, and it becomes challenging at times to remember what it is about sport that many of us are so attached to. I watched director Thomas Keith’s The Bro Code: How Contemporary Culture Creates Sexist Men recently and the sheer hatred directed at women, at men who fail the alpha test for masculinity or who are gay, and that renders trans folk beyond the pale, so effectively captured in the documentary burned like acid on my psyche for days. It interfered with my ability to “suspend disbelief” to the extent I must to watch Major League Baseball with any pleasure at all. There is no closet door shutting out the reality of much North American locker room culture, and it takes no leap of the imagination to understand the likelihood of many of the ballplayers I cheer on the field of play boozing it up together in the off-hours, watching “gonzo,” (rape) porn and practicing their “bros before hos” craft on willing and unwilling female bodies.

Mainstream sport as it is currently structured reflects and reinforces “various hegemonies of oppression and inequality such as sexism, racism, able-ism, and homophobia” (Kaufman & Wolff, 2010, pp. 154-155). The critical perspective I share with the contributors to this special issue is one that problematizes the mythical relationship of Western sport to ideals of fairness and/or a “level playing field,” health, social equality, and social mobility. And the concern I share with the contributors to this special issue is this: How can sport be transformed to cultivate more socially just relationships?

This special issue comes from that place in many of us where imagining an egalitarian sporting world as part of a more just socioeconomic transformation more broadly is necessary in order for us to continue with our intellectual and recreational engagement with sport. And these worlds of difference we carry in our heads bear airing out because much of the time, in our own individual and at times collective corners, we forget important things and need the input of our peers to see the things we have failed to adequately think through. In its entirety this special issue will necessarily fail, in the sense that “failure” is a queer event (Halberstam, 1998) that creates space for further critical reflection. At any rate, any and all shortcomings must be laid at my doorstep.

The style of several articles in this special issue is a little different. There are many hearts on sleeves, including my own. According to C Wright Mills, “the best scholars ‘do not split their work from their lives’” (Mills, 1959, p. 195, in Spencer, 2010, . 28) and a key criterion of good scholarship, therefore, involves personal engagement. Critical sport studies scholars are engaged alright and the authors in this special issue are fine exemplars.

In “Visions of Gender Justice: Untested Feasibility on the Football Fields of Brazil,” Jorge Knijnik brings the analytical concepts of social liberation developed by Paolo Freire to bear on the sporting life of Brazilian women’s football star, Juliana Cabral. By the end of the article, the reader can feel the wind of change blowing through Cabral’s hair as she heroically and collectively struggles to uplift women’s soccer from the stranglehold of Brazilian patriarchy. Knijnik succeeds in capturing a moment of resistance and inspiration.

In ‘“What Makes a Woman a Woman?” Versus “Our First Lady of Sport,” Cooky, Dycus, and Dworkin analyze media framings of womanhood, Blackness, and sex difference that erupted over the body of South African runner Caster Semenya after she won the 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships. It is no accident that Black women are seldom present in discussions about sex differences in athletic performance as the racialized discourses of Black athletic superiority collide with the cultural assumptions of “unfair advantage” held by men over women (Sykes, 2006). The traditional invisibility of Black women in discourses of sex difference harkens back to Sojourner Truth’s (1851) Ain’t I a Woman? The Semenya controversy is a fertile site for this exploration as her “muscularity” (“maleness” or “Blackness”) seemingly justifies her exile from “womanhood” (Nyong’o, 2009). The authors of this article draw on postcolonial feminism and critical feminist studies to envision a transformative sporting future untied to the damaging myth of a level-playing field and propose, in the short term, the application of gender verification testing (with normative limits) to male as well as female athletes.

In “Invisible Women in America’s National Pastime . . . Or, ‘She’s Good. It’s History, Man,’” Jennifer Ring chronicles the experience and perspective of Team USA as the women prepare for and then compete in the Women’s World Cup tournament of 2010 in Caracas, Venezuela. Like the Brazilian women’s football team in Knifjnick’s article, the USA national women’s baseball team experienced celebrity treatment abroad and complete invisibility at home. Analysis of such “cultural texts” (McDonald & Birrell, 1999) supports the contention advanced by Hargreaves (2001) and Pelak (2005) that the sports most closely tied to a nation’ s identity are by necessity masculinized and heavily gender policed. In her article, Ring attempts to bring women baseball players and women’s baseball out of the shadows. The transformation she envisions entails greater funding and opportunity for the development of women baseball players and a greater overall commitment from Baseball USA to support the women’s team.

It is no accident, given my own focus on the sport of baseball, that there are two articles in this special issue articulating a critique of the gender inequality structured into the sport of baseball in North America and imagining a better deal for girls and women. Ring calls for greater support for women’s baseball in general and Team USA in particular while the vision I advance in “Thinking the Unthinkable: Imagining an ‘Un-American’, Girl Backspace-Friendly, Women- and Trans-Inclusive Alternative for Baseball,” targets the occupational inequity inherent in the gendered bifurcation of baseball and softball and links the sexism and racism inherent in the ideology of the two sex system that underpins it. Ring is much harder on softball—the game that has been assigned to women—than I am—perhaps reflecting the lesbian softball environment that I have found so central to my athletic and social life for almost 20 years. The transformation I so ardently seek centers on the elimination of male-only baseball teams and programs at all levels, amateur and professional, as a mechanism for addressing gendered occupational inequities and for undermining baseball’s traditional role of celebrating and normalizing racist policies advanced by American nationalism.

Eric Anderson’s analysis of youth team sports in “I9 and the Transformation of Youth Sport” calls into question a commonly accepted North American truism: that participation in traditionally organized sport is good for children and youths—both to counteract obesity and promote good health and to strengthen and improve character/moral fiber! In a pragmatic turn, Anderson’s piece demonstrates the possibilities of a consumer movement for more inclusive sport within a neoliberal capitalist framework. Anderson also raises questions about the value of post-Title IX sport participation for girls and women by arguing that sports as they are currently organized and operated do more harm than good to participants.