The cultural value of sport. How is it to be measured? Is organized athletic activity a social good? A social problem? Both? Neither? And what of women and girls, so long excluded from the realm of sporting activity, striving to make gains since the passage of Title IX and once again threatened with exclusion? Is bringing more and more women into organized sport, from the childhood world of soccer leagues to the highest realms of professional achievement, of unalloyed value? Something to be sought without concern?
These questions, which Catharine Stimpson took on with wit and erudition in the inaugural Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 lecture, serve as our point of departure in this issue of Scholar & Feminist Online. In inaugurating the McIntyre lectureship, Stimpson turned her immense energy and intelligence to a topic that deserves but rarely receives our attention. Because athletics at the collegiate level are extracurricular activities, they have not always been subject to the type of scholarly attention that professional sport receives in the major media. Sports are somehow extraneous, perhaps even frivolous. They are, after all, just games: exercise and entertainment and certainly separate from the “real” business of society and education. Yet, sport is also big business, and not just at the professional level, where billion dollar team franchises have the power to command public funds for new stadiums and tax concessions. Sport is also big business for the major media, where talk radio stations and multiple cable networks are dedicated to nothing but commentary on sport, and where more time of the local news is dedicated than to issues of political or social concern. And sport is big business for colleges and universities. As James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen have documented in The Game of Life, athletic programs comprise a major portion of collegiate budgets, and these high-level programs can bring in vast revenue and media attention. But, even in the less rarified realms of Divisions II and III schools, athletic programs have a greater impact on admissions than do affirmative action programs, and they require a kind of specialization and dedication that make it hard to realize, except in rare cases, the ideal of the “student-athlete.”
In making the cultural value of sport the topic of her lecture, Professor Stimpson also raises a set of specifically feminist issues, ones which feminist scholars who study sport (some of whom are assembled here) have long followed, but which have not received the attention that they deserve outside the confines of sport studies. A number of contributors track this apparent disjunction between the feminist study of sport and feminist studies more generally. As Leslie Heywood notes, “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.” Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward follow these disjunctions and their effects in detail. They explain that the issue is not simply that most feminists have not paid enough attention to sport, but also that women’s sports advocates have tended to shy away from the “f-word,” because to be labeled feminist could be a death knell in the hyper-masculine world of sport. The consequences of this divide are all too often those of lost opportunities for solidarity and social change. Various forms of feminism (or feminisms) are relevant to the struggles of women athletes, and perhaps even more importantly, sport presents a site of possibility for feminist transformation, a site whose positive potential for both individual and communal change is all too often overlooked. Ultimately, then, the sense that feminist studies doesn’t attend to sport in ways that might acknowledge its socially transformative possibilities is due to fundamental ambivalences for feminists with regard to sport, and likewise for sports advocates with regard to feminism.
As both a critic and a fan, Professor Stimpson takes up this discussion in a way that allows us to see the full range of the issues that are at stake. She wittily summarizes these issues through the classic story of Atalanta, a renowned athlete whose father initially rejects her and then desires that she marries. Atalanta counters a proposal of marriage by challenging her suitor to a foot race: if she wins, he dies; if he wins, she marries. Favored by Aphrodite, who gives him three golden apples, he places the apples along Atalanta’s path and when she stops to pick them up, she loses the race and submits to marriage. Atalanta’s ambivalence – her desire to win and her claim to autonomy juxtaposed with her willingness to be distracted in a way that undercuts her desires – says a great deal about women’s place in relation to contemporary sport. Stimpson diagnoses this position as one that inculcates the “Atalanta syndrome,” “a cultural illness in which women are vulnerable and devalued . . .. Yet, if nurtured, women can become self-protective and resist devaluation. They can – for example – become famous athletes.” But, the story doesn’t end there. The classical Atalanta can provide the name for a contemporary syndrome precisely because even those young women who succeed against the odds face continuing pressures to conform to social norms, particularly those of femininity. “When these women enter the most important race of their lives, they can be distracted . . . they cannot stay the course.” And the effect of veering off course is to be returned once again to the constraints over which they have previously been victorious. Because women may themselves conspire in their own distraction, undoing the Atlanta syndrome is no simple business.
These complexities set up the very ambivalences that our commentators show have led to a disjunction between feminism and women’s sports advocacy. If sport is a field where gender differences that require women’s submission can be inscribed, then why should feminists direct their efforts toward this field? Yet, surely, it is a mistake to feel that women and girls, so long excluded from the pleasures and benefits of the physical activity in the form of organized sports should be asked once again, like Atalanta of old, not to play to win, or maybe not to play at all, for the sake of social (rather than their own) good. And just as surely there is reason to be cautious about a full-fledged and uncritical rush into a realm of activity that is as much business as it is pleasure, and that plays such an immense role in defining the very gender differences that make women’s participation problematic.
In fact, as E. Grace Glenny argues in her essay on the visual culture of sport as exemplified by the covers of Sports Illustrated magazine, the fact that sport is big business has a crucial impact on gender and race relations. If SI is first and foremost in the business not of reporting on sporting events, but of selling magazines, then the pictures that we see in the magazine will tend to coincide with those views of gender and race that seem most marketable. And as Glenny shows, it is impossible to disentangle whether SI is merely following cultural trends that perceive women as sexual rather than competent and that replay deeply held prejudices about race, or whether the magazine is setting these trends. Yet it is these very trends that make it extremely unlikely that athletics will be an arena in which we might see either gender or racial justice.
