Table Of Contentnew femininities in digital,
physical and sporting cultures
NEW
SPORTING
FEMININITIES
Embodied Politics in
Postfeminist Times
edited by
:
kim toffoletti holly thorpe
-
jessica francombe webb
New Femininities in Digital, Physical and
Sporting Cultures
Series Editors
Kim Toffoletti
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Deakin University
VIC, Australia
Jessica Francombe-Webb
Department for Health
University of Bath
Bath, UK
Holly Thorpe
Faculty of Health, Sport and Human Performance
University of Waikato
Waikato, New Zealand
Palgrave’s New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures
series is dedicated to exploring emerging forms and expressions of femi-
ninity, feminist activism and politics in an increasingly global, consumer
and digital world. Books in this series focus on the latest conceptual,
methodological and theoretical developments in feminist thinking about
bodies, movement, physicality, leisure and technology to understand and
problematize new framings of feminine embodiment. Globally inclusive,
and featuring established and emerging scholars from multi-disciplinary
fields, the series is characterized by an interest in advancing research and
scholarship concerning women’s experiences of physical culture in a vari-
ety of cultural contexts.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15874
Praise for New Sporting Femininities
“A timely and valuable addition to the work on sport feminism, this important
collection highlights how postfeminism operates through diverse sport media
platforms and as an effect permeates sport women’s lived experiences. Bringing
together a group of bright international scholars, it critically outlines how femi-
nism has been appropriated within contemporary neoliberal consumerism in
various sporting contexts. It is essential reading for any scholar interested in
popular physical culture, gender, and the media.”
—Professor Pirkko Markula, University of Alberta, Canada
“This engaging, inspiring, and wide-ranging collection makes an invaluable con-
tribution to scholarly analyses of femininities, postfeminism, and neoliberalism
by exploring questions of gender, embodiment, and subjectivity in the fields of
sport and physical culture. Geographically, the book engages with a range of
spatial contexts; conceptually, several chapters set out to explore the complex
interplay of gender with other axes of difference; and thematically, the collection
engages with a range of phenomena in the physical and virtual worlds of sport
and movement culture.”
—Dr Christina Scharff, Kings College London, UK
Kim Toffoletti • Holly Thorpe
Jessica Francombe-Webb
Editors
New Sporting
Femininities
Embodied Politics in Postfeminist
Times
Editors
Kim Toffoletti Holly Thorpe
School of Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty of Health, Sport and Human
Deakin University Performance
VIC, Australia University of Waikato
Waikato, New Zealand
Jessica Francombe-Webb
Department for Health
University of Bath
Bath, UK
ISSN 2522-0330 ISSN 2522-0349 (electronic)
New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures
ISBN 978-3-319-72480-5 ISBN 978-3-319-72481-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72481-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938350
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018, corrected publication July 2018
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To our daughters and the next generation of sporting girls and women
Foreword
We are living in challenging times where the neoconservative cultural and
political milieu has fuelled a multitude of feminist desires, tactics and
alliances aimed at transforming the gender-power relations shaping
women’s lives and public discourse. Academic debates have an important
role to play in contributing new feminist analyses that can deepen under-
standing and challenge the contradictory imperatives that shape sporting
femininities. Responding to such challenges, this book offers a number of
paths through which to navigate the shifting gendered politics of sport
and physical culture across a range of local and global contexts. The alter-
native possibilities of feminist thought, affect and activism offer us a
range of hopeful yet critical visions for different sporting futures. Very
recently we have witnessed feminist seeds of change pushing through the
historical layers of sexism and silencing that characterise the sport media
industrial complex and patriarchal gender order. By tracing these femi-
nist cracks and fissures the editors, Kim Toffoletti, Holly Thorpe and
Jessica Francombe-Webb, and the diverse range of authors in this collec-
tion, explore the powerful mediating processes that shape what it means
to enact sporting femininities (for particular bodies and cultural loca-
tions). Adopting the word “femininities” in the title of this book is a
provocative move to bring to the fore the relevance of postfeminist
debates that explore contradictory norms about sporting bodies, capaci-
ties and identities within the cultural imaginary.
ix
x Foreword
In the sport mediascape of 2017 Serena Williams (who appears in this
book on numerous occasions along with other public sport identities
below) won the Australian Open while in the first trimester of her preg-
nancy and without losing a single set along the way. Her performance
rebuffed earlier sexist commentary that tried to limit recognition of her
athletic achievement in tennis by invoking a gender binary (best female
player), rather than value her contribution to sport beyond a masculine
defined norm. As one of the greatest players in the world and as a Black
American woman, Serena has smashed an ace down the line of essentialist
thinking to shatter assumptions about what women’s sporting bodies can
do. Speaking out about racism and sexism she has made issues such as the
gender pay gap for Black women visible through the celebrity culture of
sporting “success.” Other elite Black athletes, such as South Africa’s Caster
Semenya, have endured intense surveillance concerning the “truth” of
their gendered embodiment defined by sport practices in heteronorma-
tive, biologically reductionist ways. Winning gold in the women’s 800m
at the 2016 Olympic Games generated great public scrutiny about her
levels of testosterone, appearance and “feminine” status. Since when have
men been questioned about the effects of different testosterone levels on
their performances? Binary notions of femininity and cis-womanhood
are highly problematic in the way they reiterate a “naturalised” gender
order within sport that excludes a more fluid understanding of gendered
subjectivities (trans, non-binary, etc.) (Irni, 2016; Larsson, 2015).
The gendered politics of sport have flowed rhizomatically through
public discourse, becoming entangled with broader debates about
unequal pay, sexual harassment and violence, institutionalised racism and
sexualisation to name but a few issues. The Norwegian national football
team and Australian cricket team brokered record pay deals in 2017 to set
a new equality benchmark for professional sport. A new Women’s
Australian Rules Football League began with great public support and
the national football team enjoyed record crowds for international
matches at home. In the USA, women basketball players were actively
protesting against the Trump administration’s anti-abortion funding
threat to women’s organisations and advocating that Black Lives Matter,
while high profile US footballers pursued LGBTQ rights. As the first US
citizen to compete at the Olympics in a hijab in 2016, fencer Ibtihaj
Forewor d xi
Muhammad also sought to make visible the Islamophobia informing
new “American ideals.” Living in the UK I was fortunate to join the sell
out crowd at Lord’s where England narrowly beat India to take
the Women’s Cricket World Cup (almost a postcolonial triumph). The
last bastion of sporting patriarchy was temporarily overrun with women
(and some supportive men) in the stands, bars, grounds, locker rooms
and on the hallowed turf where few of the English players had ever played
before. A petition circulated through the member’s stand to pressure the
MCC to address the lack of women on their board, but the pavilion itself
was half empty (cricket is one of the worst offenders in English sport).
The game produced a collective wave of excitement around the pitch that
travelled globally through a television audience of 100 million and an
avalanche of social media posts (and voices from the Global South).
Rather than simply being celebratory moments, such “wins” also prompt
us to consider how the sport media industrial complex opens up women’s
sport in new ways and also profits from the successful emergence of new
market relations (female fans, players, coaches, officials etc.).
So what are we to make of the shifting relations through which women
and girls move into new configurations of sport and feminism? Alongside
the resurgence of interest in popular feminism, academic feminists across
the fields of education, sociology, critical psychology, sport and leisure are
critically engaging with the various tensions surrounding postfeminist
claims that are also bound up with conceptualisations of third and fourth
waves (Evans & Riley, 2014; Genz & Brabon, 2012; Gill & Scharff,
2011; Harris & Dobson, 2015; Fullagar, Pavlidis, & Francombe-Webb,
2018; Retallack, Ringrose, & Lawrence, 2016; Rivers, 2017; Thorpe,
Toffoletti, & Bruce, 2017; Toffoletti, 2017). Rivers (2017, p. 4) identifies
how the feminist framing of change continues to be a key focus of debate
when she states, “Questions of whether the emergence of a ‘new’ wave of
feminism has rendered postfeminism(s) as now defunct, either as a criti-
cal term or phenomena, have begun to be asked.” In speaking to these
complexities, New Sporting Femininities explores postfeminist ideas as
they are produced and performed, rather than assumed and reified as self-
evident constructions of meaning. Organised around three central prob-
lematics—the sport media industrial complex—everyday athleticism and
postfeminist negotiations—digital sport and fitness spaces—the chapters
