I have been asked to write an article for the Scholar and the Feminist Online, a special issue occasioned by Catherine R. Stimpson's keynote address at Barnard College in 2004, "The Atalanta Syndrome: Women, Sports, and Cultural Values." In this talk, she argues that "the Atalanta Syndrome names a cultural illness in which women are vulnerable and devalued," and speculates that even though female athletes may overcome that "illness" through their athletic performance and the heightened status it gives them, they, like the Atalanta in Greek mythology, may end up trapped by this syndrome despite their best efforts. I am delighted to respond to Stimpson's talk and contribute to a special issue focused on women and sports for a number of reasons. Her talk raises significant questions I believe feminists should be thinking about more than they previously have been.

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. As Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward write in this issue, "despite women's dramatic surge in participation and achievements among women athletes during the last three decades, feminists generally have not seen sport as a major theater for gender politics and cultural transformation." There are many possible reasons for this lack of feminist attention, and as Sabo and Ward discuss the major factors, I will not similarly speculate about the reasons here. What I will offer instead is an account of the female athlete's contradictory place in the contemporary "sporting empirical," of the ways that place is framed by the athlete's relation to current versions of feminism, and of the ways both feminism and female athletes are framed by the dominant discourse of neoliberalism.[1] As such, I will try to answer the following questions: (1) How does Atalanta (the contemporary female athlete) function in an era of late global capitalism? How does her sporting practice help her to locate and identify herself within this context? How does gender as a marker structure her participation? (2) How does sport formulated as an "immersive practice" provide the resources through which she can negotiate identity markers that might otherwise be determinative?[2] (3) How does Atalanta support and contest the neoliberal agenda characteristic of the current era of globalization through her sporting practice, a practice defined broadly to include both competitive and immersive experiences, which often happen simultaneously?

In taking on this particular task, I am positioning myself as a "contextual sport studies researcher" who is also a participant.[3] I have been a competitive athlete since I was 13, a post Title-IXer who attended a Division I university on a full athletic scholarship in track and cross-country. I compete in a different sport (powerlifting) today, and participate in ashtanga yoga and running. I have also been a scholar who writes about the body, female athletes, and feminism since my PhD dissertation, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture, which became a book published by the University of California Press in 1996. I can literally say that the focus of this journal's special issue - the cultural value of sport - has been the focus of my life, and I have been framed and shaped in the most fundamental ways by its contradictions. In fact, though I was not specifically named, I am the Third Wave feminist Stimpson references in her talk when she speaks of how, when reading the literature on women's sports, she finds the voice 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 coaches.[4]

I would note two things of interest in Stimpson's account of my life story as represented by the particular essay she was reading here. First, Stimpson references what was in my original text a quotation from a newspaper article, an article that strategically misrepresented what happened on a daily basis - I was able to train with and regularly perform better than not just the JV male runners, but also many of the varsity. This public misrepresentation of actual comparative achievements helps to reinforce the idea that even the best female athletes cannot compete with men at the same level, which, especially in endurance sports more suited to female physiology, like long-distance running or swimming, simply is not true. As Stimpson notes elsewhere in the talk, such representations work to deemphasize what sport studies theorist Mary Jo Kane has articulated as the continuum of athletic achievement. Kane observes that all women do not fall on the less accomplished and all men on the more accomplished end of the continuum; rather, some women perform better than some men in particular sports, and some men perform better than some women in others.[5]

Second, the language of "a champion runner, fierce, single-minded in pursuit of victory, a model of rugged individualism, sacrifice for a higher end, and American performance" points directly to my internalization of the emergent neoliberal discourses of this period, the turn in the early 1980s toward economic globalization and its attendant practices of deregulation and outsourcing. In the words of globalization theorists David Held and Andrew McGrew, the structural realities of this turn "embod[ied] the creation of a single global market, which, through the operation of free trade, capital mobility, and global competition [was seen by its supporters as] the harbinger of modernization and development."[6] It is precisely the ideologies associated with "free trade, capital mobility, and global competition" defined as "development" - equal opportunity within the self-regulating free market, each man (or woman) for him or herself in a spirited competition for the economic success that provides the only direction forward - that informed my experience as an athlete during this period (and I would argue that these assumptions are even more normative today). "Fierce single-mindedness, rugged individualism" were inculcated and encouraged by coaches to the exclusion of any emphasis on cooperation or teamwork, and competition between team members was a regular part of practice. To cite one particularly memorable example, my coach used to make my roommate do a 600-meter interval while I did an 800-meter interval starting at the same time, causing me to compete all the more fiercely to stay ahead while being handicapped by having to run an additional 200 meters each time. Since this practice first, foregrounded the differences in our abilities, and second, made it look to all who watched like my roommate, who was a member of the second string, was keeping up with me, neither one of us was at all happy with this arrangement, though we never questioned it. Some might say that this exaggerated emphasis on one-on-one competition and daily worth-proving and status-seeking had to do with the fact that I was competing in an individual rather than a team sport, and that this made individualism more normative than it would be in a sport such as basketball, which is true. However, it is still the case that the model of sporting practice that took hold in the 1980s emphasized individualism in a historically unprecedented way, promoting an individual star system and setting up competition between players for the best endorsement contracts and media attention. As the work of prominent sport studies theorist David Andrews and many others has shown, the convergence of corporate interests and the global media worked during this period to produce a star system based on individual achievement, a system that replaced older models based on ideas such as self-sacrifice to the larger whole and teamwork.[7]

The pervasive public rhetoric that devalues women's sports achievements at the same time it holds up female athletes as superwomen who are different from most women informed a large part of my ambivalence toward the sporting empirical that Stimpson referenced in her quote from my life story. This ambivalence is something I have written about repeatedly for the last ten years, as it is an ambivalence particularly reflective of larger cultural issues and trends. It arises in response to contextual factors such as the institutional structures that govern sport, the larger economic factors associated with these, and the way both impact, and are impacted by, dominant cultural ideologies of gender undergoing significant negotiation.[8] I am assuming, according to the precepts of a contextual cultural studies model, that personal narratives "don't claim to show a real, valid culture underneath the official version waiting to be revealed," but rather serve, when analyzed contextually, to "expose dominant configurations of power . . . by tracing the articulation of economic, political, and social forces in the cultural field" (King, 31, 33).[9] Some of those factors include the fact that my high school and college running career took place in the early 1980s post Title IX and therefore at a time when I had athletic opportunities an earlier generation did not have.

But I was also beginning college at the same time as the regulatory structures shaping intercollegiate sport were undergoing significant change, as the male-dominated NCAA took over the female-operated Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), which had been the controlling body for women's athletics at the collegiate level during the 1970s. I can remember my college coach reassuring all the scholarship athletes on the women's cross country team that this shift to the NCAA (which had only happened months before I began college) was good for us in that we would get more stable funding throughout our college careers, as well as better access to media coverage and to a more highly developed network of competitive events. Trained as we were in the precepts of individual achievement and opportunity divorced from any larger factors, I remember us all agreeing that the switch to the NCAA (women don't know how to run large public institutions anyway, right?) gave us much better opportunities than those we would have been afforded under the marginalized AIAW. Given that our ideological training in the early 1980s, the Reagan/Thatcher years, took place in the larger context of a neoliberal agenda that promoted globalization through the deregulation of trade barriers and emphasized economic growth as the way to end all social problems, it is not surprising that we internalized this kind of thinking. Nor is it surprising that our allegiances reflected a movement away from the more socially progressive, community oriented ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s put forward by female athletic educators and toward the fiercely competitive individualism of the 1980s and beyond.

I. Immanence, Transcendence, and Neoliberalism

Of course, this distinction was not something I was aware of then. In order to make sense of the emergent discourse of neoliberalism - defined as "the Washington consensus of deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment programs, and limited government"[10] - as the backdrop for my competitive athletic career in the Reagan 1980s, as well as to make sense of the contradictory positionalities of women in sports more generally, I have found a theoretical model borrowed from ecofeminism most informative. In Mary Mellor's 2000 essay, "Ecofeminism and Environmental Ethics: A Materialist Perspective," she argues that in Western philosophical traditions that inform gender relations, as well as relations of race, class, and sexuality, "women are materially placed between 'Man' and 'Nature.' In a very real sense, gender mediates human-nature relations." This is so, Mellor argues, because "women embody nature both materially and symbolically. Unlike dominant men who are represented historically as in culture and above nature (transcendent), women are represented as steeped in the natural world of the body (immanent)" (212).[11] Of course, some men (wealthy, white) are more fully associated with culture and transcendence than others, and some women (poor, non-white) are more associated with nature and immanence than others, for these designations are raced and classed as well as gendered. As might be read in the picture below, the primarily white women, and very skinny white women at that (the thin body is coded as transcendent, the ample body as immanent), of my intercollegiate cross country team perhaps came as close to transcendence as women are ever allowed to come. Indeed, I would argue that a large part of our fierce dedication to our sport was this quest to ascend to the space of power occupied by white men with money. For at the time, the precepts of liberal feminism promised us equal opportunity and access to this space, with sport constructed as a training ground for the skills we would need to compete there. That we were attending the university on scholarships was dependent upon these liberal premises, which had informed the passage of Title IX and given us unprecedented opportunities.[12]

Fig. 1: The University of Arizona Women's Cross Country Team, 1982. Author is in the first row, second from the right.

Mellor's argument does not just rest on identifying the binaristic division between transcendence and immanence that informs gender, however. Very important for my discussion of women in sport, she also shows how

the association of women with nature represents hu(man)ity's need to confront its own materiality - that is, humanity's existence in ecological and biological time . . . Hu(man)ity as a natural species is embodied in its physical being and embedded in its natural context. Ecological time is the time it takes for organisms, individuals, populations, and communities to undergo repair, renewal, change, and evolution . . . biological time reflects the time-scale of the human life cycle and its need for rest, repair, and renewal. Women's socioeconomic position can therefore be seen as representing the way in which male dominated society makes women responsible for the needs of humanity in relation to ecological, and particularly, biological time. This is because women's work largely concerns the needs of bodily life . . . The historical identification of women with the natural is not evidence of some timeless, transcendental, unchanging, abstract essence, but of the material exploitation of women's work . . . Someone has got to live in biological time, to be available for crises, the unexpected as well as the routine.[13]

Within the structure of globalization and its emphasis on dematerialization and the currency of information ("the information economy"), what is forgotten is the way humans as a species are "embodied in physical being and embedded in natural context." Mellor's emphasis on two different modalities of time is crucial here. Ecological time, the time of evolution and ecological process, is the longest time scale. Biological time, which mirrors the human life scale, extends itself over an individual's lifespan. Both of these kinds of time, Mellor argues, are what contemporary economic practices have struggled to forget, displace, and transcend:

Western society has been created above and against nature, using the sex/gender division of labor as (one) of its vehicles to sustain itself and promote economic wealth . . . [W]omen's underpaid and unpaid work fuels profitability by being used to bridge the gap between the pace of ecological and biological time (the needs of the body and the natural world) and the unsustainable pace of commodified society. In Western societies, power has been defined and "realized" by the ability of certain privileged individuals and groups to (temporarily) free themselves from embodiedness and embeddedness, from ecological time and biological time. They do so by ignoring or running roughshod over both ecological time, which represents the pace of ecological sustainability for nonhuman nature, and biological time, which represents the life cycle and pace of bodily replenishment for human beings.[14]

A hallmark of the contemporary social order based on globalization, then, is the way it "runs roughshod" over ecological and biological time, ignoring or forgetting their existence, with privileged individuals "freeing themselves from embodiedness and embeddedness" as, precisely, an exercise of power. Such "freedom" involves subscription to a different, faster modality of time. Much of the literature emphasizes that within globalization, time is characterized by "time-space compression . . . the way in which instantaneous electronic communication erodes the constraints of distance and time on social organization" - a speeding up that facilitates the (temporary) transcendence of biological and ecological time.[15] I will designate this modality of time-space compression as "tech time." Tech time - which maintains a focus only on the global economic and media structures to the exclusion of the biological and ecological worlds that sustain them - is related to the bottom-line focus of the neoliberal agenda, which says not only that the free market and its "progressive" technologies are the best possible system, but that "this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be."[16] Within this way of being, economic growth and the accumulation of wealth are the only things of importance, and are marked by the "increasing concentration of value, and value-making, in the financial sphere".[17] The dominance of this view is sustained by, in the words of media scholar Robert McChesney, "the global media system, [which is] better understood as one that advances corporate and commercial interests and values and denigrates or ignores that which cannot be incorporated into its mission . . . [W]ith hypercommercialization and growing corporate control comes an implicit bias in media content. Consumerism, class inequality, and individualism tend to be taken as natural and even benevolent, whereas political activity, civic values, and anti-market activities are marginalized."[18] Since, as scholars have established throughout the last twenty years, competitive sport tends to be linked to individualism, hypercommercialization, and corporate sponsorship, it is this version of sport that is represented in the media, although it does not encompass the potentiality of sport as a whole. Sport, as an immanent practice that aims for transcendence of the body's limitations, marks a liminal space between biological time and the kind of time associated with globalization and transcendence, and it can be experienced differently in different contexts. The later part of the paper will take up the different, non-dominant modalities of sport.

There are many ways, however, that sport is complicit with the values associated with neoliberalism and its attendant immersion in tech time. The effort to live in tech time represents not just acceleration but also the effort to overcome biological time through body practices and technologies such as plastic surgery, gene replacement therapy, and performance enhancing steroids. Such practices are hallmarks of globalization, which offers the free market as the source of all possibilities, including transcending the "limitations" of biology. Much advertisement in the fitness industries directly makes this claim:

Fig. 2: Fitness Competitor Monica Brandt in an Ad for Universal Nutrition Products

It is highly significant that during the eighties, at least in the "developed" Western world, sport and the related fitness industries were complicit with, in Samantha King's words, "the emergence of the fit body as a primary emblem of neoconservative ideologies of the period."[19] Much work in cultural studies has been done to establish links between the built-body aesthetic of movie icons such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, the deregulation and increasing corporatization of the public sphere and, for instance, Reagan's infamous "Star Wars" program.[20] In terms of locating bodily aesthetics and practice, scholars such as Susan Bordo have written extensively on how the supposed plasticity of the postmodern body within this larger economic structure is linked to a dream of transcending the body's limitations.[21]

Given the lesser status historically granted to us because of our supposedly weaker bodies, the discourse of athletics as the transcendence of limitations was particularly compelling to us female athletes in the early 1980s. To prove that we were "not just girls," and therefore subject to weakness, incompetence, and emotionality, we had to train harder and be even more focused and single-minded than our male counterparts - we had to be better neoliberal subjects, so to speak. Our fit bodies and athletic performances were the outward expressions of our abilities to transcend biology and gender limitations, and the fact that many of us had eating disorders was not unrelated to this. As white women striving for success in a public sphere newly supposed in the West to be egalitarian, our athletic careers allowed us to dispense, temporarily, with our historical connections to immanence and caretaking. As Mellor writes,

to take their place in the modern Western public world, women must present themselves either as autonomous individuals, "honorary men" who are expected to work in the public sphere while avoiding domestic obligations undertaking them in the "free" time, or by paying someone else (often another woman or "domestic servant") to carry out that work. In societies that aim to transcend biological and ecological time, it would never be possible for all to participate freely and equally, as patterns of unsustainable transcendence on the part of dominant groups will be mirrored by patterns of subordination and exploitation for those who have to carry the burden of unsustainability.[22]

The cultural anxiety about female athletes retaining their femininity is not, I think, unrelated to the kinds of materialities that Mellor describes here. Retaining femininity means precisely retaining those linkages to the biological body and biological time - as Mellor notes, "someone has got to live in biological time." Anxiety about women breaking that link - who will do the basic work of caretaking then? - is directly related to the omnipresence of discourses such as "she's an athlete, but still feminine" (which certainly informed the heightened femininity of the women pictured in my team photo - I was actually wearing a red and blue bow - Arizona's colors - in my hair).

While many scholars have documented the relationship between homophobia and the emphasis on femininity (femininity defined, I would argue, as the willingness to signify immanence), what has been less discussed are the ways "retaining femininity" is also connected to retaining one's biological role of immanence, of living in biological time and caring for the bodies of others.[23] Of course the two issues are related: dominant homophobic discourses see female athletes as "mannish," and it is this "mannishness" which threatens to break the presumed link between the biological female body and social practices of caretaking. But the cultural assumptions behind terms like "femininity" and "masculinity" are directly informed by the linkages Mellor outlines, so that "femininity" equals immanence and a predisposition to care for others, while "masculinity" equals transcendence and a predisposition to "get one's own." This is racially inflected to the extent that historically whiteness has been associated with transcendence, and every other racial category with immanence, so that it is easier for white female athletes than for their non-white counterparts to be associated with transcendence, although there is still pressure to reconfigure even white female athletes in terms of immanence.

Anxiety about female athletes and femininity, evident everywhere in newspaper and magazine articles, network and cable broadcasts, and sometimes even advertising, is an anxiety that the "someones" who have traditionally had to "live in biological time" will renounce that position. As Mellor points out, when privileged white women take to the public sphere, someone else - usually non-white women from economically disadvantaged backgrounds - has to step in to fill the breach. But there is, furthermore, often an attempt within global media to contain the ways female athletes signify transcendence and to re-link them visually with immanence:

Fig. 3: Re-linking Immanence: World Champion Soccer Player Brandi Chastain in Gear Magazine, 1999.

As scholars have often noted, female athletes often seem all too willing to participate in this visual linkage between their athletic bodies and their bodies as unquestionably feminine - immanent.[24] As a normalizing social discourse, this one seems to have remarkable structuring power.

This was a powerful discourse that every athlete on my team internalized. As exemplars of Stimpson's "Atalantas," "honorary men" who were granted the possibility to "transcend" and occupy the public sphere in a visible way, becoming part of tech time and free market "opportunity," on the women's cross country team we came as close to transcendence as perhaps any women can get. As athletes trained in the model of sport as zero-sum competition, a model which clearly mirrors neoliberalism's relentless focus on the bottom line ("winning is the only thing"), we used our sport as a means to accede to power "defined and 'realized," as Mellor writes, "by the ability of certain privileged individuals and groups to (temporarily) free themselves from embodiedness and embeddedness, from ecological time and biological time."[25] Perhaps the clearest way I can express this is through the images and grounded description from a poem, included in The Proving Grounds, in which transcendence is a main theme:

For the Women's Cross-Country Team, 1983

Puma shoes that season
In perfect shades of blue and gray:
Deep blue, like angry skies before monsoons
Gray stripes like thick layers
Of silver, our Adidas briefs
So light they hung on our hips
Like feminine hands, remember
Our fantasies of hips, our long bones
Stretched by the squat-jumps
We thrusted before training
Each 10-miler, timed,
Our hips thick and tight
As grapefruits, oranges, lemons, limes,
The smallest and tightest the closest
To bones the best, the lightest to fly
Over dust-soaked fairways,
5-minute miles
Each mile and not feeling it,
Drifting, rising, our arms spiders
Our wrists without flesh
All of us tight in a pack
And breathing one stroke
Taking the switchbacks
Like pumas, like male big-horn sheep:

Anthea, Tracy, Stacy,
Kathy, Liza, Kim,
Do you remember how the Arizona Daily Star
Applauded us, pretty girls, death's heads
Seven perfect wind-up toys
Running toward some reference point
That vanishes where the horizons end -
Do you remember, my teammates,
We got as close to perfection as this.[26]

When "perfection" is defined as "transcendence" - and Mellor's article makes clear that it is defined this way within the presuppositions of sped-up, dematerialized, post-industrial, global capital - people, perhaps especially women who are devalued within the "Atalanta Syndrome," will attempt to embody that definition of perfection. We certainly did. "Our hips thick and tight/As grapefruits, oranges, lemons, limes,/The smallest and tightest the closest/ To bones the best, the lightest to fly/Over dust-soaked fairways," shows the elements of tech time, of the desire to transcend the body or at least diminish it to its most elemental form. "The smallest and tightest the closest/To bones the best," makes hips, traditionally the signifiers of flesh and reproductive femininity, become "thick and tight," an image of shrinkage in which they are first "grapefruits," then "oranges, lemons, limes." This kind of self-willed diminishment of the body and desire to rise out of it, to become bones, marks the internalization not just of media images of skinny models whose images we strove to replicate - as athletes none of us particularly identified with models - but of something much deeper: the whole Western philosophy of transcendence and improvement of the vulnerable biological condition through technology.

"Drifting, rising, our wrists without flesh," focused on nothing but our training, striving each day to run the fastest in that particular practice, eating almost nothing, we were applauded as the dominant culture's definition of beauty and achievement. We endlessly repeated the motions we thought would enable us to enact these definitions and once and for all transcend the stigma that was our gender: "seven perfect wind-up toys/running toward some reference point/that vanishes where the horizons end." We never got there of course, each of us developing some form of long-term injury or illness from overtraining, each of us learning the hard way that transcendence is an illusion. "Someone has to live in biological time," and although the advanced consumer economy under globalization promises transcendence to those who can afford it, at some point biology, human vulnerability, and materiality make themselves felt, both on the microcosmic level of the individual and on the macrocosmic level of the environment, which is exploited to produce the goods that allow for temporary transcendence in the "developed" world.

As so many ecologists, sociologists, and even economists have argued, current patterns of consumption are unsustainable, and we can no longer afford to ignore the biological and ecological dimensions, as these are linked to current environmental crises such as diminishing oil and water supplies, global warming, the destruction of ecosystems, and the extinction of species. As I will argue, sport defined differently from the competitive model serves as a mediatory experience between humans and nature that can increase our ecological awareness and investment in that ecology - an investment that, in a globalized culture characterized by the ethic of self-fulfillment, is not easy to foster. As Phil Macnagten argues, however, "in an individualized society environmental concerns are likely to be felt most acutely when they impinge on the body, typically in relation to questions of food and health."[27] Sport is one means of fostering, in environmental historian Peter Hay's words, a "pre-rational impulse" that for most people "establishes identification with the green movement . . . [giving rise to] a deep consternation at the scale of destruction wrought, in the second half of the twentieth century, in the name of transcendent human progression."[28] This is a role for sport, and for female athletes, that has been little discussed, and its logic can be most clearly seen in those dimensions of sport that are defined not solely as competition, but also as an "immersive practice."

II. "The Non-Negotiable Needs of the Body": Biological Time and Sport as Immersive Practice

Despite the emphasis on competitive models of sport perpetuated by the dominant sport institutions and media, a different understanding of sport is possible. The biological dimensions of sport experience, as many female athletes have found, can themselves be experienced quite differently from the negative significations that global capitalism and tech time would assign them. Looked at in a different way, the biological becomes something to be embraced rather than transcended or escaped. The position of women in sports is always contradictory, and I have up until this point only emphasized the negative sides of that contradiction. But as "For the Women's Cross County Team" begins to show, it is evident there is another, more positive potentiality that emerges from the team's physical training. Looking at the poem and the experience it describes from a slightly different angle, another picture emerges. This picture was there from the beginning but was backgrounded, since, as Mellor shows, the cultural logic of transcendence erases the biological: "the social relations underpinning current patterns of unsustainability" are those that place value on the transcendent/technological at the expense of the immanent/biological. While we experienced that erasure when we constructed our daily practice as a competition between each other leading to the "higher" goal of competing more effectively against opposing teams in meets, something else was happening simultaneously alongside our reckless quest for "perfection" in these terms.

Alongside that desire for transcendence, there is another experiential modality: "5-minute miles/Each mile and not feeling it,/All of us tight in a pack/And breathing one stroke." In the image of the breathing pack, something other than the relentlessness of individual competition begins to come forward, namely, an embodied collective breathing, each individual woman transformed into something larger than herself, living and existing in that moment in a heightened physical state where activity is effortless, all bodies synchronized to the motion of the pack and handling "5 minute miles/Each mile" without "feeling it." This is an experience variously represented as "being in the zone," being outside of the usual sense of time (that is, tech time), or being connected to something larger. That this kind of effortless physical state of extraordinary achievement is gendered as masculine - "Taking the switchbacks/Like pumas, like male big-horn sheep" - says more about the ways achievement is traditionally gendered than anything intrinsic to the experience itself, which takes place outside the boundaries of tech time, more fully linked to the biological world of immanence and the ecological realities that give rise to it. The women's cross-country team, rising together up the switchbacks of a remote desert trail, our bodies synchronized with each other as the shale and sand our feet fly on, marks a different kind of experience than that measured by the stopwatches and record books of tech time.

What this different kind of experience points to is a crucial doubleness that shapes the athletic experience. Occupying a space neither wholly co-opted nor entirely transformative, the female athlete oscillates between transcendence and immanence, tech time and biological time. If "someone has got to live in biological time," Atalanta both does and does not live there. Her sporting practice makes her transcendent and immanent simultaneously. A sense of immanence, a reconnection to biological time experienced through physical activity, as outlined above, has been termed by sociologist Nigel Thrift as an "immersive practice." "Immersive practices" are those that "constitute a 'background' within which nature is encountered as a means of gathering stillness, both inside and outside the body. A central component lies in the temporality of the practice."[29] Sport formulated as an "immersive practice" takes a practitioner out of tech time and into biological time. The immersive is the alternative to the competitive model of sport, with its relentless focus on the bottom line of winning to the exclusion of the athlete's health, a focus which in turn embodies the dominant neoliberal culture and its own relentless focus on economic growth to the exclusion of other factors such as public health and human welfare. Through her participation in an immersive practice - which is always, if you look for it, an aspect of the athletic experience - Atalanta knows she is immanent, but partakes of the transcendent signifiers neoliberalism offers even as she disavows or accepts them. The female athlete reconfigures the binary between transcendence and immanence, articulating a way to live in tech time and biological time simultaneously. If one shifts the lens away from a bottom-line focus on competition and the zero-sum game of winning, a different experiential model based around the idea of immersive practices begins to emerge within sporting practices that reconnect us with biological time (this is why "being in the zone" is also experienced as being "out of time").

Empirical studies of the experiences of female athletes show that, regardless of gender inequalities on both material and representational levels, women experience their sports as immersive practices for which they will rearrange their lives to continue having. In a recent article on female surfers, Ceri Pritchard et al. report that "surfing, for many of the women we interviewed, is an integral part of their lives and many would change their life course in order to pursue it."[30] Surfing, like other sports that allow direct connection to nature, is a particularly good example of immersive practice, but it is possible to experience this sense of sport anywhere. Robin Janiszeufski, a surfer and cancer survivor, describes just such an experience when she writes that "surfing removes the need to close my eyes and seek the voice inside. The face of the wave defines my being. I hear, see, smell, and taste the ocean. Through surfing, I experience a pure joy and higher-mindedness that has no substitute. Surfing has become the metaphor for how I move through life on land."[31] What Janiszeufski describes is clearly based on being part of something, experiencing the body as connected to rather than separate from the world around it.

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.[32] 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"[33] - early Polynesian surfers are thought to have ridden deliberately "with waves, flowing in smooth rhythm with their natural direction."[34] 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."[35] 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.[36] 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,"[37] 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."[38] 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."[38] 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.

It should be noted, however, that the positive rhetoric and potentialities around women and sports have also been appropriated in ways that work to serve a neoliberal agenda, as I have argued elsewhere.[39] On the level of representation, for instance, the ideal image of female athletes perfectly incorporates the neoliberal ideal of the can-do, do-it-yourself, take responsibility-for-yourself identity that is mapped particularly on girls in order to demonstrate neoliberalism's supposed extension of opportunity to all. As sociologist Anita Harris writes, "today [girls] are supposed to become unique, successful individuals making their own choices and plans to accomplish autonomy . . . To be girl-powered is to make good choices and to be empowered as an individual."[40] In addition to appealing to young women as an important consumer market, girl-power advertising images that make use of female athletes cultivate ideals of uniqueness, strength, and autonomy, as in this ad from the Roxy sportswear website:

Fig. 4

This image of the healthy athletic female body is meant - and perhaps is interpreted by viewers (if the advertising works successfully) - as a synecdoche for the successful life. Just having bodies like these signifies success on the cultural level. While it is clear that all audiences do not read images the same way, and that images are often read counter to their message and reappropriated for oppositional ends, this does not mean that they do not simultaneously communicate messages that normalize - in this case, the idea that the athletic female body is representative of the success the athlete will have in her life.[41] The way the image is coded directs viewers to read it in a certain way. For instance, Susan Bordo notes that muscles and athleticism, once coded male and working class, "today frequently symbolize qualities of character rather than class, race, or gender status" (emphasis mine).[42] The "character" these girls demonstrate with their bodies is that of the powerful, self-determining consumer subject, the image of a health and happiness that come through successful participation in the neoliberal ideology of the DIY, self-determining lifestyle, which assumes equal opportunity when, in fact, opportunity, like wealth, is distributed highly unevenly.[43]

In addition to raising these structural questions, it is also possible to read the young, "Generation Y" female athlete today as having a different relationship to gender than did my "Generation X" cohort. In her work on women's surfing, Krista Comer writes that Gen-X athletes, the first generation post-Title IX, concentrate more on becoming hard-core competitors in the masculine model, "turning themselves from 'just girls' into athletes," proving they can do anything a man can do and succeed in sports in those terms. According to Comer, Generation Y, however, faces a different struggle: "Their questions are about how girls can be agents in the scripting of their own embodied lives in the midst of consumer culture into which, since the mid-1970s, young people have been born."[44] The Gen-Y athlete's "strategies for managing sexism"[45] are characterized more by the logic of "girl-power," the idea that "her mental health is stable and secure, guaranteed by sports activities. She is backed by her girlfriends when the going gets tough, and they bring her back to sisterly sanity when she gets too boy-distracted . . . she does not denounce her 'girl-ness' and, in effect, insists that girl-ness be valued, taken seriously."[46] It is possible that young female athletes, today's Atalantas, have taken the "girl-power" messages promulgated by consumer culture in the 1990s and turned these into a strategy that allows them to value immanence (their "girl-ness") and experience sport not in only its competitive, transcendent modality but in its potentiality as an immersive practice as well.

As I hope to have shown, sport is an immensely complex cultural site that contains many contradictory messages, possibilities, and meanings. As sport grows in importance as a cultural institution, it will be in the best interest of feminists of all kinds to take it seriously as a subject of critical inquiry, and as a crucial site for activism and public policy interventions. I have given a large part of my life to undertaking this inquiry, and an even larger part to experiencing the benefits of body, spirit, and mind that sport in all its various forms has to offer. The female athlete occupies an ambivalent space within the larger context of U.S. neoliberalism. She is at once the symbol of the free market's supposed opportunity and transcendence of limitation, and, when examined with an emphasis on immanence and immersive practices, an agent of its potential transformation.

Endnotes

1. David Andrews, Daniel S. Mason, and Michael L. Silk, "Encountering the Field: Sport Studies and Qualitative Research," Qualitative Methods in Sport Studies (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 9. [Return to text]

2. Nigel Thrift, "Still Life in the Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature," in Bodies of Nature, ed. Phil Macnaghten and John Urry (London: Sage, 2001). [Return to text]

3. David Andrews et al., Qualitative Methods, 12. [Return to text]

4. Stimpson takes this quote from the essay I co-authored with Jennifer Drake called "We Learn America Like a Script: Activism in the Third Wave; or, Enough Phantoms of Nothing," in Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, ed. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 46. Catharine R. Stimpson, "The Atalanta Syndrome: Women, Sports, and Cultural Values." [Return to text]

5. See Mary Jo Kane, "Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sport as a Continuum," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 19: 191-218. [Return to text]

6. David Held and Anthony McGrew, "The Great Globalization Debate," in The Global Transformations Reader, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), 28-9. [Return to text]

7. See David Andrews, ed., Michael Jordan, Inc: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). [Return to text]

8. See especially The Proving Grounds (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2005); Pretty Good for a Girl: A Sport Memoir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). [Return to text]

9. Samantha King, "Methodological Contingencies in Sport Studies," in Qualitative Methods in Sport Studies, ed. David Andrews, Daniel S. Mason, and Michael L. Silk (Oxford: Berg, 2005). [Return to text]

10. Held and McGrew, "The Great Globalization Debate," 5. [Return to text]

11. Mary Mellor, "Ecofeminism and Environmental Ethics: A Materialist Perspective," in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. Michael E. Zimmerman, J. Baird Callicot, Karen J. Warren, Irene J. Klaver, and John Clark (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), 208-227. Mellor's argument is itself reminiscent of Susan Bordo's discussion, in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), of the liberal and radical feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s, which tended to be characterized by what Bordo terms the "Transcenders" and the "Red Bloomers": "On the one side are the "Transcenders - for whom the female body, undetermined by nature or history, can be recreated anew by feminism. On the other side are the "Red Bloomers" - for whom the female body is a source of pleasure, knowledge, and power, to be revalued rather than remade" (37). It should be noted that Mellor, like Bordo, sees her feminist position as residing between the two, "describing sex/gender relations as neither entirely socially constructed nor entirely 'natural.' Humans are both cultured and natured; human-human relations are embedded in and constructed from human-nature relations" (214). [Return to text]

12. For a description of the ways this opportunity was not always distributed equally between women, particularly on the basis of race, see many of the essays in this volume. [Return to text]

13. Mellor, "Ecofeminism," 214, 216 (emphasis mine). [Return to text]

14. Ibid., 214-15. [Return to text]

15. Held and McGrew, "The Great Globalization Debate," 3. [Return to text]

16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Globalization as Empire," in The Global Transformations Reader, 118. [Return to text]

17. Manuel Castells, "Global Informational Capitalism," in The Global Transformations Reader, 312. [Return to text]

18. Robert W. McChesney, "The New Global Media," in The Global Transformations Reader, 266. [Return to text]

19. David Andrews et al., Qualitative Methods, 26. [Return to text]

20. See especially Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (N.Y.: Routledge, 1993) and Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). [Return to text]

21. See Susan Bordo, "Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture," Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 10th anniv. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 245-275. [Return to text]

22. Mellor, "Ecofeminism," 215. [Return to text]

23. On linkages between women's sports and homophobia, see Pat Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1998) and Mary Jo Festle, Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women's Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). [Return to text]

24. See, for instance, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, "Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference: Images of Women and Men in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games," Sociology of Sport Journal 7, no. 1 (1990): 22-43. [Return to text]

25. Mellor, "Ecofeminism," 214. [Return to text]

26. Leslie Heywood, "For the Women's Cross Country Team, 1983," in The Proving Grounds: Poems (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press), 39. [Return to text]

27. Phil Macnaghten, "Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life Practices," The Sociological Review 51, no.1 (2003): 68. [Return to text]

28. Peter R. Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 2-3. [Return to text]

29. Macnaghten, "Embodying the Environment," 75. [Return to text]

30. Ceri Pritchard, Natalia Quacquarelli, and Christine Saunders, "Women in Surfing: Changing Equalities Over a Life Course," The University of Liverpool Research Report Series, no. 4 (2004), http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/undergraduate/
fieldclasses/santacruz/SCRS2004/index_page.htm. [Return to text]

31. Robin "Zeuf" Janiszeufski, "The Spirit of Rell," in Girl in the Curl: A Century of Women in Surfing, ed. Andrea Gabbard (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2000), 69. [Return to text]

32. See Drew Campion, Stoked: A History of Surf Culture (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 32-36. [Return to text]

33. Matt Warshaw, Encyclopedia of Surfing (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 552. [Return to text]

34. Douglas Booth, "Ambiguities in Pleasure and Discipline: The Development of Competitive Surfing," Journal of Sport History 22, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 194. [Return to text]

35. Ibid. [Return to text]

36. 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. [Return to text]

37. Macnaghten, "Embodying the Environment," 82. [Return to text]

38. 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). [Return to text]

39. Leslie Heywood, "The Girls of Summer: Social Contexts for the 'Year of the Woman' at the 1996 Olympics," in The Olympics at the Millennium, ed. Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaeffer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 114. See also Leslie Heywood and Shari Dworkin, Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), especially chapter 2, "Sport as the Stealth Feminism of the Third Wave," 25-54. "Producing Girls: Empire, Sport, and the Neoliberal Body," in Physical Culture, Power, and the Body, ed. Patricia Vertinsky and Jennifer Hargreaves (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). [Return to text]

40. Anita Harris, Future Girl, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. [Return to text]

41. On the ways consumers read images against the grain of their dominant messages, see John Fiske, "Introduction," in Media Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1-19. [Return to text]

42. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 24. [Return to text]

43. See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Patterns of Global Inequality: United Nations Development Report 1999," where it is reported that "OECD countries, with 19 percent of the global population, have 71 percent of global trade in goods and services, 58 percent of foreign direct investment and 91 percent of all internet users . . . The assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP (Gross National Product) of all least developed countries and their 600 million people . . . The fifth of he world's people living in the highest income countries had 86 percent of world GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the bottom fifth just 1 percent" (The Global Transformations Reader, 425). [Return to text]

44. Krista Comer, "Wanting to be Lisa: Generational Rifts, Girl Power, and the Globalization of Surf Culture," American Youth Cultures (2004): 251. [Return to text]

45. Ibid., 241. [Return to text]

46. Ibid., 239. [Return to text]