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

Given its history, surfing is perhaps the clearest example of the kind of immersive practice I am attempting to highlight here. Surfing has its origins in ancient Polynesian culture, where, although conditions were stratified according to one’s social status as nobility or commoner (with nobility given access to the best waves and best wood for surfboards), everyone, men and women alike, surfed.¹ Their technique, however, was very different from the “wave shredding” that characterizes contemporary styles. As the model for the “soul surfing” that emerged in California in the mid-to-late 1970s – defined by surfing historian Matt Warshaw as “the catchall opposition philosophy to professional surfing”² – early Polynesian surfers are thought to have ridden deliberately “with waves, flowing in smooth rhythm with their natural direction.”³ The other style, recognizably more Western and originating in Australia as well as regions of California, takes the opposite approach to waves, “‘conquering,’ ‘attacking’ and reducing them to stages on which to perform.”⁴ This basic difference in one’s philosophical approach to surfing might also serve as a model for an approach to sport more generally. In my experiences with the women’s cross country team, I experienced both models, the competitive, “conquering nature and others” model and the immersive, “going with nature and others” model. In my yoga practice today I experience the former, while in powerlifting competitions I experience both.⁵ But because it is much less normative than the competitive model, it is the former, “immersive” model that is the better resource for understanding and configuring sport experience differently so that it might partake of the best aspects of each model.

As was perhaps indicated by the terms of my analysis above, in my most recent work, I am moving from an exploration of the status of the female athlete as such to an analysis of the empirical potentialities of sport – in particular the sport of surfing – as an immersive practice that may have effective links to activist practice, particularly in the area of environmentalism. Recent theoretical debates about the impact of globalization on contemporary social and cultural transformations have suggested that the self-fulfillment ethic associated with neoliberalism necessitates a different approach to environmental activism (and activism in general) than has been practiced in the past. An empirical examination of participant experience in surfing may serve as a starting point for this new approach. Because surfing, from the time of its Polynesian origins, has been a sport allied with the philosophy of intrinsic value in nature and at odds with the mechanistic worldview characteristic of the Western (Californian and Australian) models that appropriated it, it may currently be described as an embodied lifestyle practice at once normative and transformative. Surfing, formulated as an immersive bodily practice, can be a form of engagement with nature that makes possible “the cultivation of an empowered politics of the environment,”⁶ and it is this kind of practice, I suggest, that will most help us to expand the definition of sport to include practices other than those that are competitive and institutionalized. This expansion that will undoubtedly lead women who already train on a daily basis, but in the more immersive model that up to this point has not necessarily been considered “sport” to consider themselves athletes.

III. Feminism and Athletes

I have argued that sport can serve as a means of fostering immersive practices that can reconnect us to a sense of biological time and our immersion in the natural world – definitely a feminist question. But to return to the more immediate question of feminism’s current relation to sport: on the positive side of feminist ambivalence is the idea that sport can function as an empowering site for women that will help to, in Stimpson’s words, “weaken gender as one of life’s organizing principles.” Since women’s supposed physical and emotional weakness have long been constructed as an essential difference between men and women that is located in the biological body, the challenge female athletes by definition pose to that construction has been instrumental in calling that presupposition into question. However, despite this undoubtedly “feminist” challenge to gender assumptions, female athletes and advocates for women’s sports have not always identified as feminist. As Sabo and Ward have noted in this volume, “implicit feminisms occur when advocates are guided to one extent or another by what could be described as feminist values or aims, but they do not publicly identify as ‘feminist’ . . . It is fair to say that implicit feminisms now reign in progressive circles and organizations partly because it has become politically impractical or functionally irrelevant to overtly espouse ‘feminist’ agendas.”⁷ What Sabo and Ward call “implicit feminism” is similar to what, in a number of places, I have termed “stealth feminism,” making the argument that sport is a site where feminism makes it in through the back door: “Through their work on women’s sports issues, feminists are advancing their ideologies and causes in a kind of stealth feminism that draws attention to key feminist issues and goals without provoking the knee-jerk social stigmas attached to the word ‘feminist,’ which has been so maligned and discredited in the popular imagination.”⁷ This is one of the positive reciprocalities between feminism and women’s sports, one particularly important today at a time when feminism often signifies negatively. Another is the way that sport, understood as an immersive practice, is much more in alignment with other feminist goals – those beyond the equal-opportunity goals of classic liberal feminism, which leave the larger structure intact. Sport understood as immersive practice may provide a way for everyday individuals to more fully understand their grounding in biological time, the reality of their own connection to the ecological world, and the necessity to think about the environment as part of us rather than something that is “out there.” Such immediate, experientially based understanding can function to displace the relentless focus on consumerism and make those privileged enough to live within tech time to think about the ways technology is both dependent on and disruptive of the ecological world.

1. See Drew Campion, Stoked: A History of Surf Culture (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 32-36. [↩]
2. Matt Warshaw, Encyclopedia of Surfing (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 552. [↩]
3. Douglas Booth, “Ambiguities in Pleasure and Discipline: The Development of Competitive Surfing,” Journal of Sport History 22, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 194. [↩]
4. Ibid. [↩]
5. On the sport of powerlifting as providing a different model of competitive experience, see Leslie Heywood, “Bench Press, or Becoming a Girl Again,” in Whatever It Takes: Women on Women’s Sport, ed. Jolie Sandoz and Joby Winans (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999), 298-305. [↩]
6. Macnaghten, “Embodying the Environment,” 82. [↩]
7. Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward, “Wherefore Art Thou Feminisms? Feminist Activism, Academic Feminisms, and Women’s Sports Advocacy,” Scholar and Feminist Online 4, no. 3 (Summer 2006). [↩] [↩]