Immanence, Transcendence, and Immersive Practices: Female Athletes in U.S. Neoliberalism

I have been asked to write an article for the Scholar and the Feminist Online, a special issue occasioned by Catherine R. Stimpson’s keynote address at Barnard College in 2004, “The Atalanta Syndrome: Women, Sports, and Cultural Values.” In this talk, she argues that “the Atalanta Syndrome names a cultural illness in which women are vulnerable and devalued,” and speculates that even though female athletes may overcome that “illness” through their athletic performance and the heightened status it gives them, they, like the Atalanta in Greek mythology, may end up trapped by this syndrome despite their best efforts. I am delighted to respond to Stimpson’s talk and contribute to a special issue focused on women and sports for a number of reasons. Her talk raises significant questions I believe feminists should be thinking about more than they previously have been.

In some ways, devoting an issue to women in sport is an unprecedented focus for a feminist journal, for while scholars working in sport studies often take a specifically feminist approach in their work, it cannot be said that feminist journals have likewise entertained sport as a relevant focus. As Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward write in this issue, “despite women’s dramatic surge in participation and achievements among women athletes during the last three decades, feminists generally have not seen sport as a major theater for gender politics and cultural transformation.” There are many possible reasons for this lack of feminist attention, and as Sabo and Ward discuss the major factors, I will not similarly speculate about the reasons here. What I will offer instead is an account of the female athlete’s contradictory place in the contemporary “sporting empirical,” of the ways that place is framed by the athlete’s relation to current versions of feminism, and of the ways both feminism and female athletes are framed by the dominant discourse of neoliberalism.¹ As such, I will try to answer the following questions: (1) How does Atalanta (the contemporary female athlete) function in an era of late global capitalism? How does her sporting practice help her to locate and identify herself within this context? How does gender as a marker structure her participation? (2) How does sport formulated as an “immersive practice” provide the resources through which she can negotiate identity markers that might otherwise be determinative?² (3) How does Atalanta support and contest the neoliberal agenda characteristic of the current era of globalization through her sporting practice, a practice defined broadly to include both competitive and immersive experiences, which often happen simultaneously?

In taking on this particular task, I am positioning myself as a “contextual sport studies researcher” who is also a participant.³ I have been a competitive athlete since I was 13, a post Title-IXer who attended a Division I university on a full athletic scholarship in track and cross-country. I compete in a different sport (powerlifting) today, and participate in ashtanga yoga and running. I have also been a scholar who writes about the body, female athletes, and feminism since my PhD dissertation, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture, which became a book published by the University of California Press in 1996. I can literally say that the focus of this journal’s special issue – the cultural value of sport – has been the focus of my life, and I have been framed and shaped in the most fundamental ways by its contradictions. In fact, though I was not specifically named, I am the Third Wave feminist Stimpson references in her talk when she speaks of how, when reading the literature on women’s sports, she finds the voice of

a champion runner, fierce, single-minded in pursuit of victory, a model of rugged individualism, sacrifice for a higher end, and American performance. Estimating that she has spent 25% of her life since adolescence working out, she finds this “my sanity, my identity, my life.” Seeking a major high school championship, she was proud to be accepted as one of the guys, at least the JV guys. Yet, after being known for her championship, she feels dislocated. Later, in college, she is both depressed and frequently physically ill. Her difficulties have political resonance. Her quest for fitness, once autonomous, has become incorporated into a life-style movement, co-opted, domesticated, marketed. When she turns to feminism for a sense of collective action, she finds mouthy power feminism, which yammers on that the world is competitive and to get with the program if you want to succeed. She is reminded, she sighs, of her old male coaches.⁴

I would note two things of interest in Stimpson’s account of my life story as represented by the particular essay she was reading here. First, Stimpson references what was in my original text a quotation from a newspaper article, an article that strategically misrepresented what happened on a daily basis – I was able to train with and regularly perform better than not just the JV male runners, but also many of the varsity. This public misrepresentation of actual comparative achievements helps to reinforce the idea that even the best female athletes cannot compete with men at the same level, which, especially in endurance sports more suited to female physiology, like long-distance running or swimming, simply is not true. As Stimpson notes elsewhere in the talk, such representations work to deemphasize what sport studies theorist Mary Jo Kane has articulated as the continuum of athletic achievement. Kane observes that all women do not fall on the less accomplished and all men on the more accomplished end of the continuum; rather, some women perform better than some men in particular sports, and some men perform better than some women in others.⁵

Second, the language of “a champion runner, fierce, single-minded in pursuit of victory, a model of rugged individualism, sacrifice for a higher end, and American performance” points directly to my internalization of the emergent neoliberal discourses of this period, the turn in the early 1980s toward economic globalization and its attendant practices of deregulation and outsourcing. In the words of globalization theorists David Held and Andrew McGrew, the structural realities of this turn “embod[ied] the creation of a single global market, which, through the operation of free trade, capital mobility, and global competition [was seen by its supporters as] the harbinger of modernization and development.”⁶ It is precisely the ideologies associated with “free trade, capital mobility, and global competition” defined as “development” – equal opportunity within the self-regulating free market, each man (or woman) for him or herself in a spirited competition for the economic success that provides the only direction forward – that informed my experience as an athlete during this period (and I would argue that these assumptions are even more normative today). “Fierce single-mindedness, rugged individualism” were inculcated and encouraged by coaches to the exclusion of any emphasis on cooperation or teamwork, and competition between team members was a regular part of practice. To cite one particularly memorable example, my coach used to make my roommate do a 600-meter interval while I did an 800-meter interval starting at the same time, causing me to compete all the more fiercely to stay ahead while being handicapped by having to run an additional 200 meters each time. Since this practice first, foregrounded the differences in our abilities, and second, made it look to all who watched like my roommate, who was a member of the second string, was keeping up with me, neither one of us was at all happy with this arrangement, though we never questioned it. Some might say that this exaggerated emphasis on one-on-one competition and daily worth-proving and status-seeking had to do with the fact that I was competing in an individual rather than a team sport, and that this made individualism more normative than it would be in a sport such as basketball, which is true. However, it is still the case that the model of sporting practice that took hold in the 1980s emphasized individualism in a historically unprecedented way, promoting an individual star system and setting up competition between players for the best endorsement contracts and media attention. As the work of prominent sport studies theorist David Andrews and many others has shown, the convergence of corporate interests and the global media worked during this period to produce a star system based on individual achievement, a system that replaced older models based on ideas such as self-sacrifice to the larger whole and teamwork.⁷

1. David Andrews, Daniel S. Mason, and Michael L. Silk, “Encountering the Field: Sport Studies and Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Methods in Sport Studies (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 9. [↩]
2. Nigel Thrift, “Still Life in the Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature,” in Bodies of Nature, ed. Phil Macnaghten and John Urry (London: Sage, 2001). [↩]
3. David Andrews et al., Qualitative Methods, 12. [↩]
4. Stimpson takes this quote from the essay I co-authored with Jennifer Drake called “We Learn America Like a Script: Activism in the Third Wave; or, Enough Phantoms of Nothing,” in Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, ed. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 46. Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Atalanta Syndrome: Women, Sports, and Cultural Values.” [↩]
5. See Mary Jo Kane, “Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sport as a Continuum,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 19: 191-218. [↩]
6. David Held and Anthony McGrew, “The Great Globalization Debate,” in The Global Transformations Reader, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), 28-9. [↩]
7. See David Andrews, ed., Michael Jordan, Inc: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). [↩]