Margaret Carlisle Duncan, "The Promise of Artemis"
(page 4 of 4)

The radical response

Many scholars in the field of pedagogy believe that the girls themselves should set the agenda for physical education. That is, a PE class should address adolescent girls' most pressing concerns, which center on their own bodies and their lived experience of physical activity.[71] Here the aim is to teach girls "to resist devaluation," to borrow Dr. Stimpson's phrase. British and American pedagogists argue that girls should be taught critical thinking and media literacy skills (what they call "critical literacy"[72]) and to resist the blandishments of advertisers and the female body ideal.[73] But I would emphasize that it is not only girls at whom this instruction should be targeted. Boys also need to hear these messages in order to understand the effects of the objectification of the female body. Since both girls and boys are complicit in producing and reproducing the behaviors that support the current gender order, both need to acquire critical literacy skills.

In this context, Oliver and Lalik provide a curriculum strand for girls' physical education centering on the body, while Garrett outlines a rationale for such a strand.[74] Although a detailed accounting of their ideas is beyond the scope of this paper, I draw on their work by mentioning a few strategies for helping girls in analyzing discourses that shape female body practices. Parents, educators, and coaches can all contribute to changing the nature of the PE curriculum so that it is built to enable rather than disable the growth of female strength and self-sufficiency. The overarching purpose is to challenge the patriarchal discourses that currently obtain in physical education and to consider discourses more culturally relevant for girls, ones that affect their embodied subjectivity. In particular, girls need guidance and instruction - again the province of Artemis - about the female body: how girls who are physically active feel about their bodies, how girls who play sports are depicted in our culture, whether girls' physical competence can positively affect their sense of self-esteem and self-worth. Girls (and boys) also need to understand how the beauty, fashion, and diet industries exploit women's bodies for commercial purposes.

An article by Oliver and Lalik describes a girl-centered curriculum based on their research with teenage girls. When the authors allowed the girls' interests to drive the course, girls picked topics relating to "fashion, fitness, shoes, cute boys, hairstyles, food, beauty, body products, articles [girls] read and people [they] admired."[75] Oliver discovered that images were powerful ways of helping girls understand media messages, often more powerful than written texts.[76] Girls enjoyed looking at teen magazines and talking about the pictures they saw. They chose to express their ideas about these images using artistic portrayals and journal entries. They also talked about the images in small groups, composed photo essays, and examined school events such as a "beauty walk," a type of beauty contest. Often their discussion spun into other areas such as teen pregnancy, sex, STDs, race issues, and more generally, things that made girls feel bad about themselves.[77]

A truly radical approach would call for the revision of the entire educational endeavor. Like most of our social institutions, the institution of public education favors boys over girls.[78] All teachers - not just physical educators - would challenge inequitable practices that empower boys and men but disadvantage girls and women. Whether on a limited scale or a grand scale, this plan would require time for critical reflection about why certain activities may be empowering for one gender and disempowering for another. Although the task of teaching kids to think critically about the gender order seems daunting, even small steps in this direction would help.

Conclusion: The promise of Artemis

The promise of Artemis is the empowerment of girls. A major source of empowerment is the familiarity with one's body, understanding its pleasures, its potential, and its limits. One of the major benefits of physical competence is self-knowledge. Boys learn this early on, girls, often not at all. I invoke Artemis, therefore, to support the development of girls' self-knowledge as it enables self-sufficiency, strength, and independence.

Another source of empowerment is role models and mentors who can enact the values and behaviors that lead to success. Boys customarily have coaches, brothers, and fathers who perform this role. In addition, the media routinely publicize the achievements of men, especially male athletes. Girls have far fewer role models to choose from, since socialization into "female-appropriate" roles requires women to give up athletic pleasures or suffer homophobic assaults. Women for whom abandoning sport is unthinkable may be treated with contempt or ignored completely. Sports media silence the voices of female athletes by providing relatively little and poor-quality coverage of girls' and women's sports.[79] I invoke Artemis, therefore, to serve as both mentor and role model for girls, nurturing the expression of female physicality.

Yet another source of empowerment is social structures created to enable rather than disable the growth of self-worth. Boys learn their value through the social institutions that privilege them as a group, although they are also taught to believe in a meritocracy and not to recognize their unearned advantages.[80] In sports, in school, in the workplace, church, synagogue, or mosque, men and boys dominate. Women and girls, on the other hand, learn that their worth is based on something they cannot really control: their looks, their bodies, their youth. Social institutions like the educational system (with its "hidden curriculum") and the media (with its insistence on a dangerously unhealthy body ideal) are more likely to disable than enable girls. I invoke Artemis, therefore, to create and provide alternatives to our current social arrangements.

Sport is the field on which gender battles are fought. The stakes at the material level may seem trivial, but the stakes at the symbolic level are not. These symbolic stakes include the empowerment of women and girls, the cessation of assaults on female subjectivity, and the end of the assumption of female inferiority and male superiority. Such symbolic stakes render the outcomes all the more consequential. Thank you, Dr. Stimpson, for providing the mythic context for an important present-day intervention.

Endnotes

1. J. Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). [Return to text]

2. C. A. Hasbrook, "Young Children's Social Constructions of Physicality and Gender," in Inside Sports, ed. J. Coakley and P. Donnelly (London: Routledge, 1999), 7-16; M. A. Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); B. Thorne, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). [Return to text]

3. Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender; Messner, Taking the Field. [Return to text]

4. Hasbrook, "Young Children's Social Constructions"; Thorne, Gender Play. [Return to text]

5. Messner, Taking the Field. [Return to text]

6. J. Coakley, Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004); Messner, Taking the Field; Thorne, Gender Play. [Return to text]

7. D. S. Eitzen and G. H. Sage, Sociology of North American Sport, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003). [Return to text]

8. M. J. Kane, "Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sport as a Continuum," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 19 (1995): 191-218; Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender. [Return to text]

9. Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender; I. M. Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). [Return to text]

10. Eitzen and Sage, Sociology of North American Sport; Hasbrook, "Young Children's Social Constructions." [Return to text]

11. Eitzen and Sage, Sociology of North American Sport. [Return to text]

12. Young, Throwing Like a Girl. [Return to text]

13. Ibid. [Return to text]

14. Hasbrook, "Young Children's Social Constructions." [Return to text]

15. Eitzen and Sage, Sociology of North American Sport. [Return to text]

16. Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender. [Return to text]

17. Ibid. [Return to text]

18. L. R. Davis and L. C. Delano, "Fixing the Boundaries of Physical Gender: Side Effects of Anti-Drug Campaigns in Athletics," Sociology of Sport Journal 9 (1992): 1-19; Kane, "Resistance/Transformation." [Return to text]

19. M. C. Duncan, "Gender Warriors in Sport: Women and the Media," in Handbook of Sports and Media, ed. A. A. Raney and Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, forthcoming). [Return to text]

20. M. C. Duncan, "Title IX: Past, Present, and Future," in Changing the Game: Exploring Sport in Society, ed. S. S. Prettyman and B. Lampman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming). [Return to text]

21. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); Hasbrook, "Young Children's Social Constructions"; Messner, Taking the Field; Young, Throwing Like a Girl. [Return to text]

22. Connell, Gender and Power; T. Gorely, R. Holroyd, and D. Kirk, "Muscularity, the Habitus and the Social Construction of Gender: Toward a Gender-Relevant Physical Education," British Journal of Sociology of Education 24 (2003): 429-448.[Return to text]

23. M. A. Messner, "Sports and Male Domination: The Female Athlete as Contested Ideological Terrain," Sociology of Sport Journal 5 (1988): 197-211. [Return to text]

24. P. Adler and P. Adler, Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). [Return to text]

25. S. Shakib, "Female Basketball Participation: Negotiating the Conflation of Peer Status and Gender Status from Childhood through Puberty," American Behavioral Scientist 46 (2003): 1405-1422. [Return to text]

26. Hasbrook, "Young Children's Social Constructions." [Return to text]

27. Messner, "Sports and Male Domination." [Return to text]

28. N. Theberge, Higher Goals: Women's Ice Hockey and the Politics of Gender (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). [Return to text]

29. Connell, Gender and Power. [Return to text]

30. Adler and Adler, Peer Power. [Return to text]

31. Shakib, "Female Basketball Participation." [Return to text]

32. Ibid. [Return to text]

33. S. K. Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (NY: The Free Press, 1994); P. Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1998); Hasbrook, "Young Children's Social Constructions." [Return to text]

34. Shakib, "Female Basketball Participation." [Return to text]

35. M. C. Duncan, "Sociological Dimensions," in The President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports Report: Physical Activity and Sport in the Lives of Girls: Physical and Health Directions from an Interdisciplinary Approach, project directors M. J. Kane and D. S. Larkin (Minneapolis: The Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport, University of Minnesota, 1997), 37-47). [Return to text]

36. J. Curtis, W. McTeer, and P. White, "Exploring Effects of School Sport Experiences on Sport Participation in Later Life," Sociology of Sport Journal 16 (1999): 348-365. [Return to text]

37. R. Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity: Girls, Bodies and Physical Education," Sport, Education and Society 9 (2004): 223-237; Gorely et al., "Muscularity"; J. Wright, D. MacDonald, and L. Groom, "Physical Activity and Young People: Beyond Participation," Sport, Education and Society 8 (2003): 17-33. [Return to text]

38. Gorely et al, "Muscularity"; A. Laker, J. C. Laker, and S. Lea, "School Experience and the Issue of Gender," Sport, Education and Society 8 (2003): 73-89; K. L. Oliver, "Images of the Body from Popular Culture: Engaging Adolescent Girls in Critical Inquiry," Sport, Education and Society 6 (2001): 143-164; B. Santina et al., "Patriachal Consciousness, Middle School Students' and Teachers' Perspectives of Motivational Practices," Sport, Education and Society 3 (1998): 181-201; Shakib, "Female Basketball Participation"; Wright et al., "Physical Activity and Young People." [Return to text]

39. C. D. Ennis, "Creating a Culturally Relevant Curriculum for Disengaged Girls," Sport, Education and Society 4 (1999): 31-49. [Return to text]

40. Ibid. [Return to text]

41. Ibid.; Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity"; P. A. Vertinsky, "Gender and the Physical Education Curriculum: The Dynamics of Difference, in Gender in/forms curriculum, ed. J. Gaskell and J. Willinsky (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995), 230-245. [Return to text]

42. Ennis, "Creating a Culturally Relevant Curriculum"; Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity." [Return to text]

43. Ennis, "Creating a Culturally Relevant Curriculum"; Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity." [Return to text]

44. Gorely et al., "Muscularity"; Laker, Laker, and Lea, "School Experience and the Issue of Gender"; Messner, "Sports and Male Domination"; Oliver, "Images of the Body"; Santina et al., "Patriachal Consciousness"; Shakib, "Female Basketball Participation"; Wright et al., "Physical Activity and Young People." [Return to text]

45. Theberge, Higher Goals. [Return to text]

46. Ennis, "Creating a Culturally Relevant Curriculum," 33. [Return to text]

47. Taylor et al., "Physical Activity among African American and Latino Middle School Girls: Consistent Beliefs, Expectations and Experiences across Two Sites," Women and Health 30 (1999): 74. [Return to text]

48. Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity," 230. [Return to text]

49. Santina et al., "Patriachal Consciousness," 181. [Return to text]

50. M. C. Duncan, "The Politics of Women's Body Images and Practices: Foucault, the Panopticon, and Shape Magazine," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 18 (1994): 48-65. [Return to text]

51. P. Bunyan, E. Kelly and C. Letts, "An Investigation into the Perceptions of Body Image in Adolescent Girls and its Impact on Physical Education," European Journal of Physical Education 3 (1998): 105; B. Guinn and T. Semper, "Body Image Perceptions in Mexican American Adolescents," Journal of School Health 67 (1997): 112-120; Oliver, "Images of the Body"; K. L. Oliver and R. Lalik, "Critical Inquiry on the Body in Girls' Physical Education Classes: A Critical Poststructural Perspective," Journal of Teaching in Physical Education 23 (2004): 162-195. [Return to text]

52. M. C. Duncan and T. T. Robinson, "Obesity and Body Ideals in the Media: Health and Fitness Practices of Young African American Women," Quest 56 (2004): 77-104. [Return to text]

53. Duncan, "The Politics of Women's Body Images"; T. Eskes, M. C. Duncan, and E. Miller, "The Discourse of Empowerment: Foucault, Marcuse, and Women's Fitness Texts," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 22 (1998): 317-344; P. Markula, "Firm but Shapely, Fit but Sexy, Strong but Thin: The Postmodern Aerobicizing Female Bodies," Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (1995): 424-453; T. Poulton, No Fat Chicks: How Big Business Profits by Making Women Hate Their BodiesÑand How to Fight Back (Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press, 1997). [Return to text]

54. Duncan, "The Politics of Women's Body Images"; Eskes, Duncan, and Miller, "The Discourse of Empowerment"; Markula, "Firm but Shapely"; C. Spitzack, Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990). [Return to text]

55. Duncan, "The Politics of Women's Body Images"; Markula, "Firm but Shapely"; C. Spitzack, Confessing Excess. [Return to text]

56. Duncan, "The Politics of Women's Body Images." [Return to text]

57. D. A. Abood and M. A. Mason, "Exploring Racial Differences in Body Disatisfaction and Eating Attitudes and Behaviors," American Journal of Health Studies 13 (1997): 119-28; S. Grogan, Body Image: Understanding Body Dissatisfaction in Men, Women, and Children (London: Routledge, 1999). [Return to text]

58. S. Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Milkie, M.A., "Social Comparisons, Reflected Appraisals, and Mass Media: The Impact of Pervasive Beauty Images on African American and White Girls' Self-Concepts," Social Psychology Quarterly 62 (1999): 190-210; Perkins, K.R., "The Influence of Television Images on African American Females' Self-Perceptions of Physical Attractiveness," Journal of African American Psychology 22 (1996): 453-69. [Return to text]

59. Taylor et al., "Physical Activity." [Return to text]

60. Duncan, "The Politics of Women's Body Images." [Return to text]

61. Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity"; Gorely et al., "Muscularity"; K. James, "You Can Feel Them Looking at You: The Experiences of Adolescent Girls at Swimming Pools," Journal of Leisure Research 32 (2000): 262-275; Oliver and Lalik, "Critical Inquiry"; L. Webb, N. McCaughtry, and D. MacDonald, "Surveillance as a Technique of Power in Physical Education," Sport, Education and Society 9 (2004): 207-222. [Return to text]

62. Webb et al., "Surveillance as a Technique of Power." [Return to text]

63. James, "You Can Feel Them Looking at You." [Return to text]

64. P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000). [Return to text]

65. Duncan, "Title IX." [Return to text]

66. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and President's Council of Physical Fitness and Sports, "Physical Activity and Fitness," in Healthy People 2010 Information Access Project, http://www.healthypeople.gov/document/
html/volume2/22physical.htm. [Return to text]

67. Women's Sports Foundation, "How the Foundation 'works': Advocating for Gender Equality in Sport: The Experience of the Women's Sports Foundations in the United States," http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/
cgi-bin/iowa/issues/history/article.html?record=908. [Return to text]

68. Ennis, "Creating a Culturally Relevant Curriculum." [Return to text]

69. D. Siedentop, Sport Education (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1994). [Return to text]

70. Ennis, "Creating a Culturally Relevant Curriculum." [Return to text]

71. K. M. Armour, "The Case for a Body-Focus in Education and Physical Education," Sport, Education and Society 4 (1999): 5-15; Bunyan et al., "An Investigation into the Perceptions of Body Image"; Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity"; Gorely et al., "Muscularity"; A. M. Lee, K. Fredenburg, D. Belcher, and N. Cleveland, "Gender Differences in Children's Conceptions of Competence and Motivation in Physical Education," Sport, Education and Society 4 (1999): 161-174; Oliver, "Images of the Body." [Return to text]

72. Wright, cited in Oliver and Lalik, "Critical Inquiry," 163. [Return to text]

73. Bunyan et al., "An Investigation into the Perceptions of Body Image"; Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity"; Gorely et al., "Muscularity"; Lee et al, "Gender Differences." [Return to text]

74. Oliver, "Images of the Body"; Oliver and Lalik, "Critical Inquiry"; Garrett, "Negotiating a Physical Identity." [Return to text]

75. Oliver and Lalik, "Critical Inquiry," 173. [Return to text]

76. Oliver, "Images of the Body." [Return to text]

77. Oliver and Lalik, "Critical Inquiry." [Return to text]

78. American Association of University Women, How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1995); P. Orenstein, Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap (Boston: Anchor, 1995); M. Sadker and D. Sadker, Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls (New York: Scribner, 1995). [Return to text]

79. M. C. Duncan, M. A. Messner, and N. Willms, Gender in Televised Sports: News and Highlight Shows, 1989-2004, Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, 2005, http://www.aafla.org/9arr/ResearchReports/tv2004.pdf. [Return to text]

80. P. McIntosh, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies," Working Paper 189 (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Centers for Women, 1988). [Return to text]