The Inaugural Helen Pond McIntyre Lecture
October 20, 2004

A note[1] of thanks.

I must begin with words of gratitude, for I have significant debts to acknowledge. One is to Eleanor T. Elliott, whose gift has made the Helen Pond McIntyre Lectureship possible. Any society without an Elly Elliott ought to importune her for the chance to import her. Her integrity, selflessness, energy, imagination, and generosity render all that she touches better. A second is to the Barnard Women's Center, of which Elly was a founder, and to its gracious invitation to serve as the inaugural Helen Pond McIntyre Lecturer. The Center has honored me. Still other debts are to Barnard itself. This college gave me a job when I was a graduate student at Columbia and provided the site on which I began my career and made friendships that I treasure. I am but one of the many women and men whose lives Barnard has transformed. A proud but unpretentious place, Barnard has been a pioneering author of the history of New York City, higher education, and women and gender.[2]

Given the dignity of this occasion, I was afraid that my choice of a subject - sports - would be unbecomingly frivolous. I have no public credentials as an expert on the subject. It hardly matters that, as a tomboy child in a small city in the Pacific Northwest, I filched my brother's copies of Sports Illustrated and that at night, instead of saying my prayers, I murmured the batting averages of the baseball players in the Pacific Coast League. Nor should my career as a player inspire trust: a high school senior elected president of the Pep Club because she was too incompetent to get on the drill team; a tennis player without reliable ground strokes; a college varsity basketball player with a career-wrenching knee injury; the only faculty member of the Barnard Women's Liberation basketball team in the mid-1970s who, in the one game the team played, and that against a band of male faculty determined not to lose to The Libbers, fouled out in the first quarter after scoring one point; and, finally, a selectee for the Hall of Fame of a women's sports magazine. My sport? The not wholly risible Hide and Seek.

Yet, my life has taught me that one must speak one's passions. I love sports, be they individual or team sports, although I dislike any that abuses animals or fetishes machines. Not for me the tracks of dog racing or of NASCAR events. Validating my love is a sense of the rightness of sports. Done sanely, they benefit our bodies, character, and minds. They can teach fairness, persistence, discipline, grace under pressure, and graciousness in victory and defeat. Team sports are an exercise in cohesion, camaraderie, and the meanings of a common struggle towards a worthwhile goal. Anyone who has sat in a stadium during a Big 10 football game gets their ability to bind a community together. Culturally, all sports are a rich source of metaphors. I want children to play a game that stretches body, character, imagination, and mind - without going crazy about it all. It is an indicator of the effectiveness of sports that in 2004 UNICEF is sending sports equipment to children, including girls, in zones of war and armed conflict. For sports can be their "informal school and a safe haven."[3]

In brief, I am a fan. Yet, for seventeen years, I was at Barnard College in offices that were variously on the 4th, 3rd, and 1st floors of Barnard Hall. Here I became a self-conscious feminist and an academic student of women and gender. My hope in this lecture is to align the circuitry of the values of the fan, the feminist, and the student of women and gender. As a child fan and nascent feminist, I did premature forays into women's studies. I rifled through history, literature, myth, and legend to discover whole, complete women athletes. I found instead complex, divided figures. Some narratives dramatized trajectories of achievement and loss. Amelia Earhart flew, but crashed in the Pacific and died mysteriously, her adventurous body never to be recovered. Other narratives told of achievement and its repudiation. Haunting me is a novel written for young girls. The title? Forgotten. The author? Forgotten. The story remains. An American female tennis player is good enough to get to the finals of Wimbledon. Despite the strenuous competition and hours of practice, she has fallen in love with a handsome American man. She decides to play on Center Court rather than to take the boat back home with him. Serving successfully, but distraught over his departure, she drops her racquet in mid-play and flees the court for the boat. She prefers the service of marriage to the service line; the grass of suburbia to the grass of Center Court.

One reason why the novel has stayed with me is because, in yet another demonstration of intertextuality, it builds on an older story that I had previously read, that of Atalanta. A figure in classical mythology, she is a formidable athlete. Taking part in the hunt of the Caledonian boar, she draws first blood, stopping only to kill some centaurs (the number varies from version to version) who attempt to rape her on the hunting field. She is a wrestler as well as huntress and self-defender. Having met the hero Peleus at the boar hunt, she defeats him in wrestling at the funeral games of Pelias, a favored subject of vase painters. Only later did I read of the probable sexual connotations of the grappling.[4] Perhaps the most-circulated story about Atalanta has to do with a foot race. When she was born, her father was murderously disappointed. He had wanted a son. To rid himself of the unwanted baby girl, he exposes her to the elements. However, a she-bear, a totemic form of Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt, rescues and feeds her. Supplanting the bad father is the divine surrogate mother. Having grown up, after becoming an Amazonian creature, she reclaims her biological parents. Her father accepts her, but wants her to marry. Now strong enough to set the conditions, she agrees to race any man whom her father thinks a suitable husband. If she wins, the man will be killed. If he wins, she will marry him. Like many classical Greek games, this is a competition with the highest possible stakes.

Then a suitor appears whom Aphrodite, the goddess of love, favors. His name varies in different versions of the myth. It can be Hippomenes, or Meilanion. Whatever the name, the goddess gives him three precious golden apples from the Hesperides, the end of the world. During the race, he throws the apples down at intervals, which some interpret as a marriage proposal. She stops to pick them up. Slowed down, she loses. He lives; she marries him; they have a son.

If we are responsible scholars, we can neither generalize about the historical experiences of Greek women nor universalize about mythic meanings. I have taken a liberty and invented the Atalanta Syndrome, derived from this myth. The Atalanta Syndrome names a cultural illness in which women are vulnerable and devalued. Atalanta's father banishes her simply because she is a daughter. Yet, if nurtured, women can become self-protective and resist devaluation. They can - for example - become famous athletes. Their culture and families nevertheless believe that reproductive sex is preferable to virginity, marriage to the independence of the wilds and of sport. Even a goddess may line up against them. When these women enter the most important race of their lives, they can be distracted, for Atalanta by golden apples weighty with symbolism. They cannot stay the course. The consequence of their defeat, in which they may conspire, is conformity to the prevailing rules of femininity, for Atalanta marriage and motherhood.[5] Crucially, the United States has no single Atalanta, but many Atalantas, their identities shaped by race, family, religion, economic circumstance, education, and the sports that they have chosen or that have chosen them. The Atalanta syndrome has multiple variants.

Being fanciful, one can imagine fans in the bleachers of the Greek Atalanta's race. Their cheers would signify their attitude about the Atalanta Syndrome. Some might be yelling for Hippomenes and then happily sending congratulatory wedding messages. Others might be shouting, "Go, Atalanta, go. No, Atalanta, no. Don't do it. Don't pick up that apple up." After the race, they would be drooping like a discarded wedding bouquet. No matter what their side, they would partake of the phenomenon of fandom. The word "fan" is an abbreviation of "fanatic." In turn, "fanatic" has religious roots, connotating the loss of self in a religious frenzy. The modern fan deeply identifies him or herself with a higher power and is willing to lose the self in the aura of that power - be it a movie star, or a sports star, or a sports team. Yet, the rules of every sport are universal, transparent, and accepted as legitimate.[6] They are meant to be stable and strict. Pity poor Alice in the Wonderland in which the rules of a game are whimsical. The paradox of fandom, like that of organized religion, is that one can obtain a sense of boundlessness within a structure.

Because of the competitive nature of sports, the fan hangs in suspense as to whether his/her player or team will prevail. This period is dramatic, full of unknowns and improvisations. Even fixed games pretend to be suspenseful. The suspense creates tension, anxiety, agonies. Fortunately, except for sports that demand silence during play, sports provide an outlet for emotion, a release from normal restraints, a chance to scream and cry out and howl, to clap and cheer and rattle noise-makers, to wear a team's colors and hats. Boosterism can be boisterous.[7] Eventually, every sport, even cricket, finds closure. The game has an end point. Victory will bring ecstasy and too frequently a bullying attitude of superiority; defeat will bring pain and too frequently a churlish and belligerent anger. Defeat also tests the character of the fan, for the true fan must remain loyal even during the bad times.

I am a feminist fan. The feminism I know combines a demand for a critical perspective on the present with a Utopian belief, which realism tempers, in feminism's promise for the future. When one looks at sports critically, as any sentient person of any age must do, one realizes that modern sports are much more than a plaything. In part because of the reach of the mass and new electronic media, in part because of the growth of leisure time that permits more people to be either players or fans, in part because of effective marketing, sports have grown enormously. They are global source of entertainment, be it for players or tailgaters or couch potatoes tuned in to ESPN 1 or ESPN 2 or the YES channel. The etymology of the word "sport" is the late Latin "deportare," meaning a diversion, a pastime, fun, applicable to sex (the sporting life) as well as surfing. Feeding the pervasive United States desire and demand for fun, sports are an industry. They have become as well a crucible of personal and national identity, and a matrix of values as powerful as many churches. They pass on to us our authority figures, especially "The Coach;" our celebrities, be they glamour boys and girls or bad boys and girls, who have their own aggressive glamour; our heroes and heroines, our Hercules and Atalanta before that last race; our epic narratives and legends; and some of our values. A resilient "good sport" is to be emulated; a whining "bad sport" shunned.

All this is well-reported and well-known. So are the difficulties of Big Sports. They can be corrupt and corrupting. The violent competitor on the field can be a violent abuser off the field. When sports are a religion, they can crowd out all other values except a god-like victory. The desire to win can lead literally to death for players and fans - to murder, to murderous crowd violence, to destructive "performance enhancing" medications. In the United States, some sports, but only some sports, offer the illusion, but a risky illusion, of possible success and riches to poor and/or minority kids. In our educational institutions, when we are not careful, the student-athlete sacrifices the student for the athlete.

Yet, even though sports are highly public, they are so pervasive and so big that even we may fail to measure them accurately. This unmeasured magnitude exists because sports, both individual and team, are in the middle of a broad spectrum of modern activities in the United States and elsewhere. Since the last part of the 20th century, video and computer games fit into every point on it. These games engross millions, but one of the wonders of sports is their stubborn corporeality, their base resistance to virtualization, their incessant reminder that the mind and body are as linked as veins to arteries. Sports, like parenting, quite literally ground us. With their accompanying video and computer games, this spectrum of activities is so encompassing that we now must deploy the metaphor of the game to picture human behavior. Homo sapiens is a bunch of gamers, gamesters, and game players. This metaphor is as leveling as that of all the world as a stage. Both game and stage picture us as agents within a structure that is partially, but only partially, within our control.

At one end of the spectrum are health, fitness, exercise, self-defense, all endorsed by a common belief in the organic connectivity between the healthy mind and the healthy body and by the feminist conviction that they are "physically and mentally empowering."[8] The New Woman in the 19th and early 20th centuries was proud of her bloomers and bicycle. The New New Woman, the Atalantas, of the 20th and early 21st centuries don their sweats and tote their yoga mats. Significantly, the feminist concern with fitness and exercise has been part of a larger national movement to make them accessible even to those who could not exemplify the norms of the athletic body. 1975 saw the first issues of both Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Sports 'n Spokes, a magazine for wheelchair athletes. In the past few years, the desirability of fitness has become even more prominent because of the diagnosis of an "obesity epidemic," spawned by a toxic combination of genetics, bad nutrition, and lack of exercise. Not coincidentally in a market economy, selling fitness can add to the bottom line. In 1989, fitness supplies and products brought in $100 million per year to businesses in Canada, $1 billion per year in the United States.[9] I have guiltily asked myself how many babies with AIDS or poor women in need of health care my gym membership dues could assist.

In the middle of the spectrum are organized sports. Overlapping with them are some schools of contemporary dance and the praise of some dancers as "athletic." I think, for example, of Liz Streb and her company, fusing dance with sports and such popular, physically demanding genres as the rodeo and the circus. Instead of being distinct genres, dance and sports train with each other as mutually beneficial kinetic fields.

Moving towards the other end of the spectrum are the games in which the mind may be more active than the body - card games, board games, games of chance. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, is a set of intellectual movements emerging in the mid-20th century. They both study games as systems and study other systems if they were games. Four benchmarks: In 1928, John von Neumann, the great mathematician, began his work on the theory of games, initiating "a mathematical discipline designed to treat rigorously the question of optimal behavior of participants in games of strategy and to determine the resulting equilibria."[10] These games can be noncooperative or cooperative. Game theory has profoundly influenced the social sciences, perhaps most radically economics, military strategy, business, and biology. No mathematician, I read of matrices, zero-sum games, saddle points, information sets, and decision points as if they comprised a foreign language, but one that I realize is the language of the powerful. A second benchmark: in the 1940s, Ludwig Wittengenstein finished Philosophical Investigations, first published in 1953, two years after his death. This now canonical work explores the concept of language-games and the "language-game" itself. Still another benchmark: in 1972, Clifford Geertz, scrutinizing a Balinese cockfight, argues that sports are social texts. A fourth benchmark: in the same year, 1972, Steps To An Ecology of Mind, a collection of essays and dialogues by the polymath Gregory Bateson, appears. Bateson's bristling, bustling pages argue that the current mathematical game theory of von Neumann will not work for human societies or international relations, suggest that we can apply game theory to understand schizophrenia, and reveal a fascination with playing and gaming. In a dialogue with his daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, she wonders what the two of them are doing. "Daddy," she asks, "do our talks have rules? The difference between a game and just playing is that a game has rules."[11]

Feminism teaches another blunt lesson: gender marks every point on this spectrum. More specifically, gender shapes if it does not control the theory and practice of sports, the spectrum's mid-point. The feminist analysis, like most modern studies of sport, has proved the existence of the Atalanta Syndrome even more irrevocably than reporters and fans have shown the presence of bias in the judging of figure skating. Let me remind us of the features of the syndrome that haunt most Atalantas, with gratitude to the commentators and scholars who have gone before me but with understandable weariness at the need for reiteration. For the Atalanta Syndrome is as persistent as the Energizer Bunny crossed with a marathoner.

Notwithstanding the presence of pairs in figure skating and couples in mixed doubles, men and women are assigned to different sports in different places. Today, in the United States, men are from football stadiums; women are not. Of course, in some religiously and politically traditional countries, women have been forbidden to occupy public space - be in the law courts or the tennis court. One of the most poignant sections of Leila Ahmed's autobiography tells of living with a comparatively liberal family in Cairo during the end and the aftermath of English colonialism. Sent to an English school, she was its veritable Atalanta, a champion at track and field events, the winner of cups and trophies. Then, her school entered her a citywide competition where she won the 100-meter dash, setting a new record for Cairo. A picture of her, in her shorts, was in the paper. Her mother, finding it inappropriate, "decreed that I could no longer compete in games - in any public venue, at any rate."[12]

If men have access to public space, they create and perform masculinity, whether they are players or fans. As a male fan has written, "Becoming a sports fan is a rite of passage for most men in our society. It gives us a common language, rituals and traditions."[13] Sports are also the theatre in which fathers tutor sons, transfusing the blood of the paternal body into the filial one. The initial resistance to women sportswriters in male locker rooms - anxious, often enraged - is but one sign of the strictness of the gender boundaries in sports.[14] In brief, sports help to establish and muscularly reinforce a binary opposition between the genders. They discourage us from imagining what Mary Jo Kane, a leading scholar of sports, has named a "continuum" of athletic activity in which men and women might compete together, grouped according to age or ability or a host of other factors.[15]

No matter how strong the gender differentiation is, both spheres are homophobic and use homophobia to enforce conformity. No good Atalanta should stoop to conquer the apples of a female fan. These homosocial spaces lock out homosexuality - so vigorously and viciously that they betray a repressed fear that heterosexuality will prove to be unbearably fragile and homosexuality inexorably attractive. The most pervasive and symptomatic fear about modern women athletes is that they will lose their "femininity" and become "Amazonian" or "mannish" and "deviant." In 1925, the National Association of Secondary Principals warned that "sooner or later, the spectacle of interscholastic contests among girls gives rise to undesirable and even morbid social influences."[16]

Despite their common homophobia, men's sports and women's are ranked hierarchically. Today, in the United States, despite slurs against "dumb jocks," male sports are more lucrative, get greater and better media coverage, and seem to provide more thrills and chills. The insecure man who loses to a woman is - if not fully castrated - a lesser man with some nicks on his masculinity. Of course, because of our gender hierarchies, most if not all of our most honorable, rewarding, and prestigious social spaces have been coded as masculine. Only men have access to them. As Susan Guettel Cole writes of such classical Greek sites as the stadium at Olympia, "Restrictions were especially strong in sacred spaces associated with recognition of male authority and the validation of male prestige."[17] Because of American racial hierarchies, the admission of men of color to these spaces has been carefully and often maliciously controlled.

Male authority and prestige are wrapped up in the cultural Gordian knot of athletics and war, which seem formed of barbed wire as well as rope. Today, our warriors are often captains of industry who are more apt to carry a golf club than a sword or spear. The association of male sports, however, with the warrior ethos remains. Not surprisingly, because this nexus can signify courage and piety, women athletes, our young Atalantas, find it attractive. Recently, a young woman in Virginia, ranked among the top ten of women saber fencers, talked about her love for her sport. She chose it, she says, "because of the legends surrounding . . . [it] . . . Kings, noblemen, heroes fenced out of a code of loyalty and honor." She "identifies with that tradition."[18]

Despite our idealistic fencer, many feminists have feared sports because of the deep, strong, and often destructive chain mail links among sports, war, and masculinity. This attitude helped to lead to a split in Second Wave feminist thinking about sports, but one of the many instances of the tensions between "sameness" and "difference" feminism. Going through the library stacks in search of Atalanta, I picked up again a copy of Catharine A. MacKinnon's Feminism Unmodified, and there, with all its force and sass and legal brilliance, was her 1982 speech on sports that maps this historic fissure, "Women, Self-Possession, and Sport."[19] As she spoke, two groups were struggling for control over women's intercollegiate sports, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women and the far more established, ultimately victorious, and, some might say, patriarchal National Collegiate Athletic Association.[20]

MacKinnon, by her account, had spent two hours a night, five nights a week, for five years learning martial arts, but because of sexism's thrall, had only begun to think of herself as an athlete. She now applies the distinction between liberal and radical feminism to sports. The former sees the differences between men and women as irrational, the consequence of arbitrary constraints. The task of feminism is to get rid of them. "Those things," liberal feminism argues, "that men have been, psychologically and physically, so also women should be allowed to become." (118) The latter, far preferable to her, finds the "ritualized violence (of sports) . . . alien and dangerous as well as faintly ridiculous." (123) It seeks to create a "new standard . . . a new vision of sport." (123) The radical woman athlete disrupts sexism simply by being an athlete and claiming her body. She re-invents sport by defining it not as combat but as ". . . pleasure in motion, cooperation . . . physical self-respect, self-possession, and fun." (121) If asked why climb Mt. Everest, the man responds, "Because it is there," the woman, "Because it is beautiful." (124)[21]

Divided responses to sports - which are visceral as well as theoretical, psychological as well as political - have continued into Third Wave feminism. Again searching for Atalantas, I found an autobiographical essay by two self-defined Gen X feminists. One of the two voices is that of a champion runner, fierce, single-minded in pursuit of victory, a model of rugged individualism, sacrifice for a higher end, and American performance. Estimating that she has spent 25% of her life since adolescence working out, she finds this "my sanity, my identity, my life." Seeking a major high school championship, she was proud to be accepted as one of the guys, at least the JV guys. Yet, after being known for her championship, she feels dislocated. Later, in college, she is both depressed and frequently physically ill. Her difficulties have political resonance. Her quest for fitness, once autonomous, has become incorporated into a life-style movement, co-opted, domesticated, marketed. When she turns to feminism for a sense of collective action, she finds mouthy power feminism, which yammers on that the world is competitive and to get with the program if you want to succeed. She is reminded, she sighs, of her old male coachs.[22]

As a fan, I am neither radical nor liberal but both. I want to avoid getting trapped on one side or the other of a binary opposition, to traverse each position, and then to honor bits and pieces of each. Some athletic women have negotiated far more difficult passages. I think of Hassiba Boulmerka, an Algerian Muslim and champion middle-distance runner.[23] Opposing the fundamentalist Islamic politics of her homeland, she entered the arenas of the highest level of international competition, learned to speak its language, and developed "a robust and healthy sense of self." (348) Yet, the experience deepened her patriotism and commitment to the values of a non-fundamentalist social co-operation.

So positioned, I can imagine using both liberalism and radicalism to re-imagine being competitive. Being competitive, under comparatively benign conditions, is psychologically strange. One wants to win. I certainly do. That means turning one's rival into the Other that must be vanquished. Yet, one's rival is also like one's self, a shadow self in the playing of the game. The game, then, both divides and merges the players. What would happen, feminist theory has asked, if we were to glory in competition but reject it as combat or as a zero/sum game? Could we then engage in competition as if it were a "cooperative challenge"? We would play against the opposition, the Other, the rival, but we also play with the opposition, our shadow self. We would co-operate in respecting the rules of the game and each other. The game would be a way not to death but to an enhanced sense of life.[24]

On balance, the Utopian feminist fan thrills to the radical vision and uses it as the horizon of possibility. I hope that the presence of women in sports will be a rebuke to corruption and a murderous desire to win; that it will provide a moral and psychological leavening; and that it will weaken gender as one of life's organizing principles. Interestingly, the currently major study of collegiate athletics found the women athletes less materialistic than the men.[25] At the same time, the liberal feminist fan believes in that old shibboleth of "being effective." I seek gender equity in sports. Women should have as many athletic opportunities as men, be able to play as hard and well as possible, be recognized and rewarded with an income and the currency of hard-earned celebrity for it.

Given the political culture of the United States, with its oscillations between gender conservatism and belief in equality of opportunity, the liberal vision of sports is implemented more often than the radical. The push and pull towards equity is notoriously incomplete, jagged, and uneven. As the century turned, women were 56% of United States undergraduates, but in the major schools, they had only 36% of the athletic operating budgets and 32% of the recruiting dollars.[26] Even the liberal vision wrenches the guts of the diehard sports traditionalist.

The liberal healing of the Atalanta Syndrome, with its potentially radical consequences, offers two compatible treatments, each with its own highly publicized and politicized national drama. The first is the taking of access for women into previously "masculine" arenas and individual sports - as players, administrators, writers, broadcasters, and knowledgeable fans. Having gained access, they may compete against men or each other. So I applaud the fact that in the 2004 Greek Olympics, Atalantas were on the march. About 44% of the participants were female, including two Afghan women, one in judo, one in track. I cheer on the pioneering women jockeys, boxers, wrestlers, ice hockey players, and saber fencers; the girls and their parents who integrated Little League; and Anneke Sorenstam, who played against the touring male PGA pros in the 2003 Colonial tournament. Her motives, she said, in the rhetoric of liberal individualism, were to test herself and her skills. Sorenstam's career, no matter how glorious as golf history, is another example of the non-glories of the Atalanta Syndrome. In 2002 she won more than 50% of her starts, 13 victories in 25 international tournaments. In contrast, Tiger Woods - whom I watch avidly and who famously embodies statements about sports and race - won 6 of his 22 starts. Are we surprised to learn that Sorenstam earned $2.5 million in endorsements while Woods earned $60 million, many more bushels of golden apples?

The most recent national dramatization of the push for access was less about playing the game than about playing the game in a "masculine" space: the Augusta National Golf Club. This site of the Master's Tournament most vividly represents a conjunction of elite, almost exclusively white male power, prestige, and sports. Apparently, the magnolias emanate a sacramental fragrance.[27] The march of the women on Augusta has been beaten back, if temporarily. The resistance of the club's leader and many of its members to the admission of women is explicable. Why should they give up their material and psychological comforts, the luxuries of power and privilege, and the ability to control women? Yet the hostility to women seems at once fearful, ludicrous, and a sinister reminder of the power of the Atalanta Syndrome.

The second treatment of the Atalanta Syndrome is the continuing growth and prowess of women's sports teams, of women playing with and against each other in women's soccer, rugby, volleyball, softball, basketball, track. For many years, these teams - like individual women's sports - tended to be the province of the affluent, but they have become both more democratic on the school level and more professional on the post-collegiate. The political struggle of this effort has been over Title IX, which has been responsible for greater democracy and has affected a broad cross-section of institutions. Passed in 1972, Title IX preceded by one year the spectacular tennis match of Billie Jean King against Bobby Riggs, where Billie Jean King, the feminist warrior, beat the mouthy patriarch. An amendment to an Education Act, Title IX is historic legislation. Yet, it reads simply, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."

After 1972, a series of federal regulations clarified the law for athletics. In 1979, they mandated a "three-prong" test to measure an institution's compliance with Title IX. Schools could show that their male-female athlete ratio was "substantially proportionate" to their male-female enrollment, or they could show a history of opening up sports opportunities for women, or they could show that the athletic interests and abilities of women were "fully and effectively" accommodated. About 2/3rds of schools chose the latter two prongs.

For women athletes, Title IX has been a boost. Between 1971 and 2002, the number of girls participating in high school sports increased from 294,000 to 2.8 million. Today, more and more fathers are bringing suits under Title IX to give their daughters better high school sports facilities and training. We have softball dads as well as soccer moms. The transmittal of the culture of sports from father to son has been broadened to include daughters. Why, I asked with mock naïveté, would such a wonderful evolution be challenged? For the most part, public opinion seems to support Title IX. Yet, its implementation has proved so contentious that Title IX has had its near-death experiences.

In the 1990s, about 400 men's college teams were eliminated, with wrestling and gymnastics taking a particular blow. Driving a wedge between female and male athletes, the advocates of male sports blamed Title IX for their demise and called for a resurrectionary change. An alternative - to alter sports funding so that both men and women's teams could prosper - was often ignored. The average college wrestling program costs $330,000 per year - not cheap, but far less expensive than football. In 2002, the Department of Education, under Secretary Rod Paige, appointed the presidential Commission on Opportunity in Athletics to ask if Title IX should go on. A force behind its establishment was a suit against the Department brought by the National Wrestling Coaches Association. After public wrangling and advocacy, the Commission did recommend that the Education Department should reaffirm its commitment to equal opportunity for both sexes. A University of South Carolina professor, Robert Stokes, in a letter to the Sports Editor of the New York Times, commented wryly:

It is ironic that the erosion of Title IX's socially salubrious requirements of gender equity in college sports was initiated by a lawsuit filed by the college wrestling coaches' association. Considering America's current fascination with female wrestling, as evidenced by the recent number of pop culture references to the sport, one would think that instead of ending male programs, colleges and universities would advance female wrestling as a revenue producer that would rival football and baseball.[28]

Unfortunately, the weakening of the Atalanta Syndrome is extracting a price: the sexualization of the strong woman athlete, the engineering of the "buff bunny" or the "heterosexy" competitor. Let our Atalantas be champions, but have them emanate sexual charisma as well. Let her be swifter and stronger, let her go higher, but let her have glamour, allure. A pioneering study of the media guide cover photographs of the Division I schools of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which the schools themselves distribute, found that during the 1990s, the covers changed to have a rough parity of men's and women's sports, but the images of women were more apt to be gender stereotyped and "sexually suggestive".[29] If a contemporary Atalanta were to be an ambitious beach volleyball player, playing a tough sport barefoot in a sand pit, she would strategically fuse strength and femininity before the voyeuristic TV cameras and perhaps mention the support of a boyfriend in her after-game interviews. Moreover, the sexualized woman athlete, like women in many fields, is more marketable than the decorous good girl or the frump. As a review of books about bodybuilding comments, female body-builders "adhere to - and are often photographed and featured for narrow, highly sexualized versions of femininity, which are immensely profitable."[30]

This process of sexualization - each shot of a female body-builder, each reproduction of the image of the champion soccer player removing her jersey, each female Olympian on the cover of a men's magazine - is part of the sexualization of all United States public life that affects men, women, and, lamentably, children. The sexualization of Atalanta is also part of even larger efforts to re-integrate her with and to perform some or any prevailing norm of femininity. A brilliant essay by Ann Chisholm shows how women gymnasts, those tough descendents of the military training of antiquity and the entertainers of the Middle Ages, promise female empowerment and resistance to the ideology of feminine passivity and athletic inferiority.[31] Yet, these "transgressive impulses" are eroded by deploying cuteness as a defense against accusations of abnormality. Indeed, the girl gymnasts can be so cute that those big, grizzly papa bears of coaches adopt, train, and nurture them.

Pressing our Atalantas into the molds of femininity has provoked arguments that carry forward the conflict between the liberal and radical theories of the reform of women's sports. Is the female athlete who is both "strong" and "sexy" a self-empowered, self-willed new definition of beauty? Or, in spite of all her hard work, has she been ultimately passive and exploited? Given the crosscurrents of history, I believe both positions are plausible. Changes in gender tend to combine change with its containment, which insures that evolution is neither easy nor revolutionary.

Since the 1960s, the study of women and gender has been inseparable from the development of feminist theories in all their variety. As a fan, I have seen our Atalantas at work and play. As a feminist, I have seen our Atalantas struggle for both equity and a new vision of sports. Yet, as a student of women and gender, I have been surprised at how marginal sports seem to be as a subject of our academic inquiry. To be sure, lots of good information is available through newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and books; the Internet; athletic and health organizations and networks; and the Women's Sports Foundation, which Billie Jean King helped to establish in 1974.

To be sure, too, since the 1960s, every academic field has shown some interest in the construction of the body, of human corporeality, and in play, games, and gender and sports - be the discipline medicine, law, education, human development, kinesiology, media studies, or the arts and sciences. I have read, for example, about the trope of the tomboy and the nostalgia for her: the tomboy, that wild girl, running free before adolescence or adulthood corsets her; the tomboy, that robust scamp whose parallel in fantasies of a happy youth is that girlie-boy Peter Pan. The academic work may be especially rich in sociology in the United States and in the social sciences in Europe, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Norbert Elias has encouraged scholars to see sport as a "key area in the civilizing process of European societies . . . a privileged field for the analysis of individual and social tensions." Pierre Bourdieu has influentially analyzed sports as an instrument of indoctrination - into nationalism, sexism, competition, and the cult of idols.[32] Disturbing to unreflective fans, the critical literature of sports and physical education casts them as systems of "norms and of coercion imposed on the body." These reproduce the social order that the subject may accept or, in a liberatory effort, transgress and resist.[33]

All this is true, and yet, when I reviewed the past few years of two major journals, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Feminist Studies, I found only a handful of articles and reviews. Meanly, I wondered if sports were not being treated a little like mandatory gym class. I have my speculations as to why this might be true, if indeed it is. Perhaps the study of sports is thought to be too frivolous, too connected to the leisured classes, for serious work. As a subject, it may seem trivial in comparison to globalization, or maternity and the new reproductive technologies, or citizenship, or work, or poverty, or education and literacy. Perhaps, despite the work done since the 1960s, the study of sports is still too marginal academically. It has the allegiance of too few professors and graduate students. Perhaps the study of sports is construed as too hypermasculine. If, for these reasons or others, the study of women and gender is paying too little attention to its Atalantas, it is a profound academic mistake. For it shows an indifference to historical, social, and cultural realities that clamor for understanding and that exhibit a postmodern interplay of globalizing forces and local practices.

A fine book about sports in China, which incorporates the study of gender, succinctly makes my argument for me. The analysis of sports is significant. If we undertake it, we will understand "one set of practices in the entire repertoire of things that people do with their bodies . . . part of the entire culture of the body." So doing, we will see that the culture of the body "is strongly shaped by power relations, including state/society, class, gender, and ethnic relations, as well as the international relations between nations . . .." Moreover, sports are "one of the main arenas in which the body as a cultural artifact is publicly displayed." Sporting events are vital "cultural performances."[34] Though the culture of the body is shaped, sports are also a "liminal world of 'play' that offers an opportunity for controlled experimentation with new social structures." An example: in 1986, bikinis were legalized for women body builders. Bodybuilding offered a controlled realm for its introduction into Chinese society, a step that would be too radical if first taken at pools and beaches. (33)

Marginalizing the study of sports would also be ironic. For sports are inseparable from the central concerns of the study of women and gender as we now do it. Let me, from a large duffel bag of issues, select but three. First, after heroic efforts by women of color, the study of gender in the Americas is inseparable from the study of race. Yet, the complexities of American race are manifest on our putting greens and in our locker rooms. Significantly, according to the massive and indispensable study of intercollegiate athletics, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, Title IX did not proportionately increase the number of African-American women athletes - except in Division IA private universities.[35] Americans now celebrate some powerful and wealthy black athletes, accept some black coaches and managers, and note the beginning of black ownership of major league teams. It is, however, stupid to claim that American sports are the site of total racial equality. The Williams sisters are a fascinating chapter in United States history, a story of upward mobility, hard work, family, and talent. As athletes, they apparently strive to combine sports with other activities. They believe in education. When I watch their public appearances, I see poise, intelligence, humor. They inspire our admiration and applause, but only to a degree. Many Americans are ambivalent about the Williams sisters, especially tennis fans. They also inspire backbiting, accusations of not playing enough tournaments, whispers that they do not compete sufficiently hard against each other. Would many of us, I must ask reluctantly, be so stingy with our applause if they were two white sisters named Jennifer and Sarah?

Next, the study of women and gender has incisively asked about the construction of the bodies of the future. Obviously and logically, we have been centrally concerned with new technologies of reproduction and emergent versions of the "maternal body." We have also been fascinated with the figure of "cyborg," which helps to dissolve that increasingly fragile line between human and machine and between human and animal. In a recent bout with my periodontist, she poured a little vial of "biomaterials" in my gums. The biomaterials turned out to be pig stem cells. I, in my cyborgian moments, now think of the excitement of being partly porcine. Jokey though such meanderings are, they cannot distract us fans from the possible changes in the meaning of being human that genetic engineering might bring to our Atalantas and their brothers. A particular form of gene therapy, or more colloquially "gene doping," began as a medical advance, a form of healing for the elderly and for people with muscular dystrophy. Its aim is to use gene transfers - as well as drug therapies eventually - to strengthen muscles either through enhancing growth or inhibiting the inhibitors of growth. "Unfortunately," a scientist writes, "it is also a dream come true for an athlete bent on doping."[36] What, we must ask, are the meanings and consequences of such engineering to our construction of the human? To which athletes are these technologies available? Are we practicing a form of neo-eugenics, in which we seek to breed a superior race, based not on race but on the capacities to perform competitively? If so, what are the costs?

Third, the study of women and gender has had a particular moral and political responsibility to the educational institutions that are their home. Are we prepared to demand that our more sports-mad high schools, colleges, and universities do more than bring about gender equity? Will we work to reassert the primacy of academics over sports? And confront alumni and legislative and trustee anger? Are we prepared to stop being a cog in the American entertainment industry? Big college and university sports, run properly, can serve individual athletes, the school, and the community. If we believe in education, however, are we prepared to countenance stadiums that dwarf libraries and salaries for football coaches that dwarf those of faculty and staff? Nearly 20 Division 1-A football coaches now earn over $1 million per year. Are we prepared to admit students as students, not as gladiators with an unpredictable shelf life? Are we prepared to divert the monies that football soaks up to financial aid for poor students or to the so-called minor sports - men's wrestling, for example?

As I began, I promised that I would seek to align the values in the circuitry of being a fan, a feminist, and a student of women and gender. Let me end by offering a summary vision of our Atalantas. The fan shouts out, "Run, Atalanta, run. Run, Atalanta, run." The feminist has struggled to guarantee that in all her variety she can run in public, if she so chooses, and that if she does run, her training and equipment and rewards are as good as those of her brothers. She may even be running against her brothers, and if she wins, he will cheerfully give her an apple tree. And if golden apples are thrown in her path, she will pick them up, and carry them to victory, and then, after she has made sure her family is fed and sheltered, she will give some of her gold to a battered women's shelter or to a maternal health clinic or to a literacy program. The scholar of women and gender will, with the counsel of all the Atalantas, write this up as history or sociology or physiology and publish her findings in a journal or a book or on the Internet so that sons or daughters or nieces or nephews of our Atalantas will know that women can race with the wind and blow in the gale forces of justice.

Endnotes

1. I wish to thank the University of South Carolina, where an early version of this lecture was given on February 27, 2003. [Return to text]

2. Rosalind Rosenberg's wonderful new history of the women at Columbia University and its institutions, Changing The Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, makes this point in persuasive detail. [Return to text]

3. I read of this in a story dated July 4, 2002, on www.unicef.org. Jean Zimmerman and Gil Reavill, Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem and Save Girls' Lives, New York: Doubleday, 1998, is an excellent account of the importance of sports for young women. Zimmerman is a Barnard alumna. [Return to text]

4. In Mary R. Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, p. 44. [Return to text]

5. In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois played on Atalanta as the poetic name of the city of Atlanta, shrouded by the "Veil of Race," and interpreted the myth as a warning against greed and lustful Mammonism by both whites and blacks. Chapter V, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. New York: W.W. Norton, Critical Edition, 1999, pp. 54-61. [Return to text]

6. Michael Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004, p. 23. The book is perceptive, but unfortunately, Mandelbaum focuses on men's sports and rarely mentions women's. [Return to text]

7. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning make this point at far greater length and subtlety in their important Quest for Excitement, Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, pp. 313. Leisure activities, among them sport, provide a contrasting excitement in a life that otherwise demands "control and restraint of overt emotionality . . .." (p. 66) [Return to text]

8. Toska Olson, "Review," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26: 2 (Winter 2001), 578. Olson is discussing books about women engaging in practices of self-defense and martial arts. [Return to text]

9. Margaret MacNeill, "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," Sport and Postmodern Times, ed. Genevieve Rail, in SUNY series on sport, culture, and social relations, ed. Cheryl L. Cole and Michael A Messner. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 165. [Return to text]

10. Oskar Morgenstern and Martin Shubik, "Game Theory," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. VI, ed. David L. Sills. New York: Crowell Collier and MacMillan, Inc., 1968, p. 62. I quote this definition because of Morgenstern's major role in the development of game theory and his co-authorship in 1944 with von Neumann of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. [Return to text]

11. Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind, with a new "Foreword: by Mary Catherine Bateson." Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 17. [Return to text]

12. Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America - A Woman's Journey. New York: Penguin, 2000, originally published 1999, p. 151. [Return to text]

13. Jim Buzinski, New York Times, September 8, 2002, L+ SP 13. [Return to text]

14. Jane Leavy, the sportswriter and novelist, has told me in conversation that she found the heavier and more armored the sports uniform, the more hostile the athlete to the presence of women in the locker room. Football players were the most, basketball the least, baseball in between. [Return to text]

15. Mary Jo Kane, "Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sports as a Continuum," Journal of Sport and Social Issues (May, 1995): 191-218. [Return to text]

16. James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 117. [Return to text]

17. Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Spaces: The Ancient Greek Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, p. 102. [Return to text]

18. Rita Simon, "Young Woman Master's (sic) the Sport of Kings," The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter, 9, 5 (September/October 2002): 1, 7. [Return to text]

19. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 117-124. [Return to text]

20. AIAW ceased operations in 1982 and lost an anti-trust suit against NCAA in 1984. [Return to text]

21. A charming feminist re-imagining of the Atalanta story tells of a race between Atalanta and young John from her town. They race, but he refuses to marry her unless she wishes to do so. They talk, and become friends, and then happily go off on their separate adventures. See Betty Miles, "Atalanta," in Free To Be You and Me, ed. Marlo Thomas. pp. 128-135. [Return to text]

22. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, "We Learn America like a Script: Activism in the Third Wave, or, Enough Phantoms of Nothing." Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 40-54. [Return to text]

23. William J. Morgan, "Hassiba Boulmerka and Islamic Green: International Sports, Cultural Differences, and Their Postmodern Interpretation," in Sport and Postmodern Times, pp. 345-365. [Return to text]

24. I am grateful to Kathryn Pyne Addelson's essay, "Equality and Competition: Can Sports Make A Woman of a Girl?", Women, Philosophy, and Sport: A Collection of New Essays, ed. Betsy C. Postow. Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1983, pp. 133-161. In the same book, Mary Vetterling-Braggin, "Cooperative Competition in Sport," pp. 123-132, traces the debate between "competitive" and "cooperative" models in the 1920s and 1930s. [Return to text]

25. Shulman and Bowen, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, p. 138. [Return to text]

26. Welch Suggs, "Small Colleges Lag on Sports Opportunities for Women," Chronicle of Higher Education L: 41 (June 18, 2004): A1, 32-36 is a major report about the current status of gender equity in higher education. Smaller institutions are lagging behind those with major sports programs, but one must also look at individual sports. [Return to text]

27. A description of this drama and the sexism of Augusta is Marcia Chambers, "Ladies Need Not Apply," Golf for Women (May/June 2002): 108-113, 130. [Return to text]

28. February 23, 2003, p. 10 N SP. [Return to text]

29. Jo Ann M. Buysse and Melissa Sheridan Embser-Herbert, "Constructions of Gender in Sport: An Analysis of Intercollegiate Media Guide Cover Photographs." Gender and Society 18: 1 (February 2004): 66-81, quote from 73. [Return to text]

30. Shari L. Dworkin, "Review," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26:2 (Winter 2001): 580-583, quote from 581. Dworkin focuses on bodybuilding. An accompanying review by Toska Olson, pp. 577-580, takes up books on self-defense and martial arts. [Return to text]

31. Ann Chisholm, "Acrobats, Contortionists, and Cute Children: The Promise and Perversity of U.S. Women's Gymastics," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27: 2 (Winter 2002): 415-450. Chisholm also analyzes the stress on the heterosexuality of the older male gymnasts. [Return to text]

32. International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavior Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001, pp. 14913-4. [Return to text]

33. Jacques Gleyse, "Instrumental Rationalization of Human Movement," in Sport and Postmodern Times, p. 254. Ann Chisholm, "Review," Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 27:4 (Summer 2003): 1199-1203 argues, correctly I believe, that this book and other are new directions in sports studies, connecting them with feminist discourses, critical theory, and cultural studies. [Return to text]

34. Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 8. [Return to text]

35. Shulman and Bowen, p. 136. [Return to text]

36. H. Lee Sweeney, "Gene Doping," Scientific American 291, 1 (July 2004): 63-69. [Return to text]