As the contributions gathered here show, the images produced each week for Sports Illustrated have an impact on how we understand gender well beyond the confines of the playing field. And, because our contributors are thoughtful and creative feminists, they show how making change in the area of sport, from which women have been so long and so thoroughly excluded and which seems so difficult to conquer, can make possible other types of social change. In other words, if we abandon the arena of sport because we worry that to enter it is to be caught up in the very snares of gender determination that we would hope to avoid, we shy away from one of the very places where we might transform those relations. As Jo Ann M. Buysse notes in her contribution, “we must continue our efforts toward interdisciplinary work between sport scholars and feminist scholars from all disciplines. Sport is an important site where dominant ideas of gender are shared and nurtured. Feminist scholars of every discipline must attend to the culture created and fostered on playgrounds and playing fields.”
Because Professor Stimpson has taken up these issues in such a useful way, the roundtable conversation provoked by her essay brings out precisely the ways in which sport, if taken up in feminist terms (whether implicit or explicit) can be a site for social transformation that has wide-reaching implications. Leslie Heywood’s article on female athletes in the context of neoliberalism (the currently dominant system of economic globalization) argues that sport can change the way in which the female body is experienced. Such a shift in the feeling of embodiment is important not just for the individual athlete; changes in embodiment have social repercussions as well. Any system of social organization depends upon certain perceptions by individuals, and the current system of economic globalization depends on what Heywood terms “tech time,” a speeded-up race toward transcending the very boundaries of the physical world. But, this effort at transcendence always depends on “others,” most often women and men of color, who do the worldly work that enables some individuals to overcome their limits. The athlete can either strive to embody the transcendence idealized by neoliberalism or she can experience her body differently. Even in an “individual” sport like cross-country, in which Heywood participated as a college athlete, she can experience the immanence of her embodiment and the ways in which her accomplishments are related to those of her team.
Such a shift in the experience of sport depends on a reconceptualization of the entire athletic endeavor from one of competitive achievement to one of inter-connected accomplishment. And, as Margaret Duncan argues, just such a change is being undertaken in some physical education curricula. Duncan points to a Sports for Peace curriculum, created by Catherine D. Ennis, in which, among other things, “students are taught that they are accountable for maintaining a supportive climate for all team members. To that end, they learn conflict resolution and negotiating strategies.” As with Heywood’s sense that the potential for experiencing the body differently has wide ranging implications, so also these alternative curricula for physical education have the potential to teach students a different set of life skills and social relations. The importance of the communal experience of sport is played out in number of essays including Tina Sloan Green’s description of mentoring for women athletes and the effects of the process on mentor as well as athlete. For Green the word “feminist” has often seemed to imply a realm of privileged white women who “although they championed the cause of equality for women, neither understood, nor wanted to understand the struggles of black or poor working women.” Yet, as she reflects upon her career she also realizes that many of the women who mentored her and helped her to excel in a sport like lacrosse that is often coded as “white,” were themselves feminists, and that feminist values, including those of mentoring other young women, were crucial to all of her work. Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward work out how multiple feminisms, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, can contribute to girls’ experiences of both self- and communal empowerment through organized athletics.
As Schulman and Bowen point out in The Game of Life, the claim that sports teaches life skills is reiterated so often as to make it a cliché. But, they are also concerned that there is a major discrepancy between the skills of the playing field and those of life beyond the arena, most particularly, between the character demanded by athletic competition and the values of education. What the essays collected in this issue of S&F Online suggest is that this disparity need not be so acute. When undertaken with a different set of cultural values, especially feminist values, sport can contribute to different kinds of lives.
In the current cultural and political climate, however, we are faced not just with the question of the implications of women’s participation in sport or with issues of gender and race as they play out on and off the field, but with the question of whether women and girls will be able to continue to participate in sports at all. There is no disputing the fact that the enactment of Title IX in 1972 ushered in a sea change for women in college athletics, one that has led to women’s increased participation in sport at all levels. There is also no question that recent attacks on Title IX and on its enforcement are directed at reversing these changes. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Gordon Gee puts it succinctly when he says, “any time a federal policy arises that would change the way things have always been done, some people will resist in fear or misunderstanding.” We include a position paper from the Women’s Sports Foundation, drafted by Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Donna Lopiano that lays out the problems with the Department of Education’s new guidelines for compliance with Title IX. As Hogshead-Makar and Lopiano show there is good reason to see these guidelines as a major shift in direction that will significantly undercut the enforcement of the legislation, and thus threaten opportunities for women’s participation in collegiate athletic programs.
