Anxiety about female athletes and femininity, evident everywhere in newspaper and magazine articles, network and cable broadcasts, and sometimes even advertising, is an anxiety that the “someones” who have traditionally had to “live in biological time” will renounce that position. As Mellor points out, when privileged white women take to the public sphere, someone else – usually non-white women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds – has to step in to fill the breach. But there is, furthermore, often an attempt within global media to contain the ways female athletes signify transcendence and to re-link them visually with immanence:
As scholars have often noted, female athletes often seem all too willing to participate in this visual linkage between their athletic bodies and their bodies as unquestionably feminine – immanent. 1 As a normalizing social discourse, this one seems to have remarkable structuring power.
This was a powerful discourse that every athlete on my team internalized. As exemplars of Stimpson’s “Atalantas,” “honorary men” who were granted the possibility to “transcend” and occupy the public sphere in a visible way, becoming part of tech time and free market “opportunity,” on the women’s cross country team we came as close to transcendence as perhaps any women can get. As athletes trained in the model of sport as zero-sum competition, a model which clearly mirrors neoliberalism’s relentless focus on the bottom line (“winning is the only thing”), we used our sport as a means to accede to power “defined and ‘realized,” as Mellor writes, “by the ability of certain privileged individuals and groups to (temporarily) free themselves from embodiedness and embeddedness, from ecological time and biological time.” 2 Perhaps the clearest way I can express this is through the images and grounded description from a poem, included in The Proving Grounds, in which transcendence is a main theme:
For the Women’s Cross-Country Team, 1983
Puma shoes that season
In perfect shades of blue and gray:
Deep blue, like angry skies before monsoons
Gray stripes like thick layers
Of silver, our Adidas briefs
So light they hung on our hips
Like feminine hands, remember
Our fantasies of hips, our long bones
Stretched by the squat-jumps
We thrusted before training
Each 10-miler, timed,
Our hips thick and tight
As grapefruits, oranges, lemons, limes,
The smallest and tightest the closest
To bones the best, the lightest to fly
Over dust-soaked fairways,
5-minute miles
Each mile and not feeling it,
Drifting, rising, our arms spiders
Our wrists without flesh
All of us tight in a pack
And breathing one stroke
Taking the switchbacks
Like pumas, like male big-horn sheep:Anthea, Tracy, Stacy,
Kathy, Liza, Kim,
Do you remember how the Arizona Daily Star
Applauded us, pretty girls, death’s heads
Seven perfect wind-up toys
Running toward some reference point
That vanishes where the horizons end –
Do you remember, my teammates,
We got as close to perfection as this. 3
When “perfection” is defined as “transcendence” – and Mellor’s article makes clear that it is defined this way within the presuppositions of sped-up, dematerialized, post-industrial, global capital – people, perhaps especially women who are devalued within the “Atalanta Syndrome,” will attempt to embody that definition of perfection. We certainly did. “Our hips thick and tight/As grapefruits, oranges, lemons, limes,/The smallest and tightest the closest/ To bones the best, the lightest to fly/Over dust-soaked fairways,” shows the elements of tech time, of the desire to transcend the body or at least diminish it to its most elemental form. “The smallest and tightest the closest/To bones the best,” makes hips, traditionally the signifiers of flesh and reproductive femininity, become “thick and tight,” an image of shrinkage in which they are first “grapefruits,” then “oranges, lemons, limes.” This kind of self-willed diminishment of the body and desire to rise out of it, to become bones, marks the internalization not just of media images of skinny models whose images we strove to replicate – as athletes none of us particularly identified with models – but of something much deeper: the whole Western philosophy of transcendence and improvement of the vulnerable biological condition through technology.
“Drifting, rising, our wrists without flesh,” focused on nothing but our training, striving each day to run the fastest in that particular practice, eating almost nothing, we were applauded as the dominant culture’s definition of beauty and achievement. We endlessly repeated the motions we thought would enable us to enact these definitions and once and for all transcend the stigma that was our gender: “seven perfect wind-up toys/running toward some reference point/that vanishes where the horizons end.” We never got there of course, each of us developing some form of long-term injury or illness from overtraining, each of us learning the hard way that transcendence is an illusion. “Someone has to live in biological time,” and although the advanced consumer economy under globalization promises transcendence to those who can afford it, at some point biology, human vulnerability, and materiality make themselves felt, both on the microcosmic level of the individual and on the macrocosmic level of the environment, which is exploited to produce the goods that allow for temporary transcendence in the “developed” world.
As so many ecologists, sociologists, and even economists have argued, current patterns of consumption are unsustainable, and we can no longer afford to ignore the biological and ecological dimensions, as these are linked to current environmental crises such as diminishing oil and water supplies, global warming, the destruction of ecosystems, and the extinction of species. As I will argue, sport defined differently from the competitive model serves as a mediatory experience between humans and nature that can increase our ecological awareness and investment in that ecology – an investment that, in a globalized culture characterized by the ethic of self-fulfillment, is not easy to foster. As Phil Macnagten argues, however, “in an individualized society environmental concerns are likely to be felt most acutely when they impinge on the body, typically in relation to questions of food and health.” 4 Sport is one means of fostering, in environmental historian Peter Hay’s words, a “pre-rational impulse” that for most people “establishes identification with the green movement . . . [giving rise to] a deep consternation at the scale of destruction wrought, in the second half of the twentieth century, in the name of transcendent human progression.” 5 This is a role for sport, and for female athletes, that has been little discussed, and its logic can be most clearly seen in those dimensions of sport that are defined not solely as competition, but also as an “immersive practice.”
- See, for instance, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, “Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference: Images of Women and Men in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games,” Sociology of Sport Journal 7, no. 1 (1990): 22-43.[↑]
- Mellor, “Ecofeminism,” 214.[↑]
- Leslie Heywood, “For the Women’s Cross Country Team, 1983,” in The Proving Grounds: Poems (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press), 39.[↑]
- Phil Macnaghten, “Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life Practices,” The Sociological Review 51, no.1 (2003): 68.[↑]
- Peter R. Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 2-3.[↑]
