The Sport Nexus and Gender Injustice

Abstract

Abstract:Male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport 1 in North America constitutes a "sport nexus" (Burstyn, 1999;Heywood & Dworkin, 2003) (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (Burstyn, 1999). Feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. In this article I consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels.Fraser (2007, 2000, 1997, 1993, 1987) has a long history of writing within the tradition of feminist political science/feminist theorizing on democracy and the public sphere (see also

Barriers to women’s access to decision-making positions in sport organizations: the case of establishing a girls’ volleyball academy in Israel

“…In keeping with the critical tradition of sociological investigation of sport, Travers (2009) highlighted the role that the sport nexus plays in promoting and perpetuating gender binaries by culturally and economically marginalizing women and non-normatively gendered people. This is in line with Western culture, which has traditionally viewed gender as a binary concept.…”

The Rules of Engagement: Negotiating Painful and “Intimate” Touch in Mixed-Sex Martial Arts

“…With some recent exceptions (Guérandel & Mennesson, 2007;Lökman, 2010;McNaughton, 2012;Spencer, 2011), there has been relatively little attention to sex-integrated training, much less direct focus on its transformative potential. Yet in other physical cultural settings, feminist scholars have explored mixed-sex participation, suggesting that personal empowerment, along with broader challenges to hierarchal gender discourse, can be strengthened immensely when men and women jointly experience the potentials of differently sexed bodies (Anderson, 2009;McDonagh & Pappano, 2008;Travers, 2008;Wachs, 2005). This indicates that investigating mixed-sex training might yield richer analyses of the transformative value of women's involvement in martial arts; a task we turn to in this paper.…”

The lived experience of sex-integrated sport and the construction of athlete identity within the Olympic and Paralympic equestrian disciplines

“…Despite the fact that to date there are no longer any explicit, formal barriers to participation for females at any level of equestrian sport (within the context of culturally specific gendered sporting access), Travers (2008) notes that this does not simply translate to equality of opportunity. One of the hidden barriers Dashper (2012b) refers to include the combination of gender and class as the following quote from a female young rider suggests:…”