Abstract
Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport, by Kathryn Henne, is a book about the ways that sport regulation and governance operate to define citizenship and deviant bodies, and to sustain ideologies surrounding sport in society. To explore these ideas, Henne examines the emergence of drug testing and gender-verification in sport, contending that contemporary regulation functions not simply to catch “cheaters” but to reinforce and reify a set of longstanding myths about sport, race, class, and gender. This is an ambitious, sophisticated, and detailed scholarly analysis of sport governance ideally suited for graduate level students and scholars of gender, governance and regulation, science and technology, law, citizenship, and of course sport in society. Critically, the arguments presented advance scholarship well beyond the confines of sport.
Henne’s premise, that “sport, as a social field, articulates messages not simply about ethics, but broader beliefs about embodiment, physical ability, and human difference” (p. 2), firmly situates the book in anthropological and sociological literatures involving embodiment, risk, citizenship, biomedicine, law and society, and regulation and governance. The major concerns of the text, in particular how anti-doping informs ideas about the body, gender, and governance have been addressed at length in previous scholarship. However, addressing these topics collectively allows the reader to understand sport regulation as an all-encompassing form of contemporary social control with powerful consequences not only for the athletes subject to it but to our collective understanding of the role of sport in contemporary life. Making manifest these connections is, for me, the greatest strength of this text.
The work is based on extensive participant observation and interviews with a range of athletes and sport officials in Australia, Europe, New Zealand, and North America. Henne also employed archival research of historical accounts and records of the International Olympic Committee, in particular the Medical Commission, detailing the establishment and evolution of global anti-doping and gender-verification regulation. Located in the cultural anthropological tradition, Henne’s methodology explicitly recognizes that her identity as a former athlete deeply informs her research position. An appendix offers additional methodological and epistemological details, which taken collectively give the reader a clear and convincing justification for her approach.
Henne begins to tackle the ideological raw material for anti-doping justifications, practices, and policies in Chapter One. Rooted in naturalized assumptions regarding human bodies, race, and gender, the Olympic ideals rest on an amateur conception of sport characterized by notions of fair play, natural or pure bodies, and a preservation of the integrity of competition. These ideals legitimated through the partnership of law and medicine create a particular type of athlete citizen, one who not only complies with the rules, that is they are ‘clean’, but embraces anti-doping ideals, meaning they are ‘pure.’ Ultimately, Henne argues that the contemporary anti-doping regime of surveillance, testing, and disclosure furthers inequality as it intersects with other forms of social control to reinforce and, at times, exacerbate social stratification.
In Chapter Two Henne describes the moral crusades against doping spearheaded by international sport regulators, scientists, and medical doctors for whom scientific and technological innovation would combat new pharmacological enhancements. A product of Olympic ideals and racial, colonial, gender, and class assumptions of the time, this Cold-War arms race approach, as Henne defines it, shifted attention from protecting athletes’ health to detecting evidence of doping and punishment while inscribing athletes as suspect citizens.
The recruitment of law in the lobbying efforts of international anti-doping advocates is the subject of Chapter Three. Created in 1999, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was tasked with harmonizing international anti-doping efforts. Henne contends that WADA governance draws from the moral rhetoric of the Olympic ideals while taking on a globalized legalistic approach to anti-doping. Most notably, pushing for laws that not only criminalize doping but compel governments to hold athletes accountable. Here, Henne adroitly demonstrates how anti-doping capitalized on media coverage of PED use by high-profile athletes including Marion Jones, Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, and others to push for the criminalization of doping. Henne argues that WADA’s primary focus on drug testing largely ignores the corporate sport world that incentivizes PED use while post-colonial underpinnings of contemporary WADA practices and policies implicitly frame athletes from the global north as ‘clean’ and those from the global south as ‘dirty.’ The inconsistent treatment and punishments experienced by these and other athletes highlight the limited success in “harmonizing” global anti-doping regulation
In Chapter Four, Henne draws on the history and practice of gender-verification in sport to illuminate the ways that medical science has been employed to justify and support sport regulation. Pulling from a deep history of feminist scholarship involving female sporting bodies, Henne argues that medicine gives the illusion of objectivity and supports a belief in clear biological difference between men and women, even as science is unable to demonstrate clear binary distinctions. Despite this inability, medical science and law operate as “ideological gatekeepers” to preserve ‘fair play’ and ‘natural bodies’ as justifications for gender-testing. In practice however, this rationale creates ironic contradictions that are evident in the IOC’s Medical Commission’s 2011 guidelines for gender verification (only females are gender-tested) in which female athletes shown to have “too much” naturally occurring androgens or testosterone in some cases must take drugs to lower their testosterone level in order to compete. In these instances, “natural” bodies are not pure but must be fixed in the name of upholding ‘fair play.’
Examining the high-profile cases of Jamaican runner Caster Semenya and similar athletes, Henne illuminates how contemporary testing continues to impact the social construction of the female athlete. Female bodies failing to conform to the idealized female athlete aesthetic are rendered as suspicious subjects, held for additional scrutiny, stigmatized, and viewed as violations of ‘fair play.’ Stepping back from sport, Henne briefly explores how gender-verification acts to police not just female athlete bodies but masculine femininity in larger society.
In the most entertaining and illuminating section of the book, Chapter Five offers detailed accounts of how anti-doping policies are experienced on-the-ground by athletes most subject to scrutiny. Interviews with elite athletes, particularly rugby players in New Zealand, challenge mainstream representations of athletes as entitled millionaires by exposing the tenuousness of their athletic careers and the all-encompassing nature of the surveillance they are subject to. Reflecting on the increasing expansion of risk as a regulatory strategy in other social arenas, Henne shows how some athletes internalize their status as suspect subjects by adopting self-governance strategies, most notably monitoring everything that goes in their body, while often projecting suspicion outward upon competitors. The result of the testing regime, she argues, is the instillation of a risk-laden belief that renders athletes as inherently suspect subjects thus justifying increased scrutiny.
Henne also locates athletes’ personal experiences with anti-doping regulation within an analysis of colonial histories to illuminate divergent regulatory experiences of Pacific Islanders and Anglo-European athletes. She notes that many native athletes had tested positive for marijuana, a non-performance enhancing substance that some viewed as a cultural or normative practice. Athletes testing positive for marijuana were punished and denied athlete citizenship not for attempting to improve their performance but for failure to comply with rules, which nonetheless marks them as ‘impure.’ By disregarding cultural differences in anti-doping policy, Henne argues the anti-doping regime enables disproportional punishment without overt acts of discrimination.
Chapter Six consolidates the major thematic concepts of the book to address both practical and analytical concerns with the existing anti-doping regime. Unsurprisingly, consequences of anti-doping regulation parallel the effects of many “consensual crimes.” Outlawing particular performance enhancing substances fuels an underground economy for new and untested substances while incentivizing experimentation. Like many crime control policies, anti-doping regulation targets individuals, largely disregarding historical, social, and structural inequalities. In doing so, Henne argues, working-class bodies of color remain particularly suspect, “not because they actively seek to cheat but because their visibility renders them more at risk, especially when their actions do not actively embrace the culture of anti-doping and risk” (p. 159).
In closing this chapter, Henne is understandably reticent to offer many concrete alternatives to the existing anti-doping system. Any initial steps, she argues, must involve recognizing the deeply unequal environment of contemporary global, corporatized sport as well as the colonial, gendered, and racialized legacies that underpin existing regulation. At the ground level, new regulatory methods must prioritize health and well-being while instilling trust between athletes and regulators and fostering an environment where athletes don’t feel pressured to dope. While not the goal of this book, readers relatively new to the topic would likely find additional ideas for reform useful additions to the text.
Henne concludes the text with an appendix containing a thoughtful and critical reflection on her methodological experiences and practices. In sum, Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport offers a compelling, sophisticated, and much needed reevaluation of contemporary global sport.