The Atalanta Syndrome:
Women, Sports and Cultural Values

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.¹ 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.² 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.³

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.”⁴ 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.⁵ 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.”⁶ 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.

1. 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. [↩]
2. International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavior Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001, pp. 14913-4. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. 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. [↩]
5. Shulman and Bowen, p. 136. [↩]
6. H. Lee Sweeney, “Gene Doping,” Scientific American 291, 1 (July 2004): 63-69. [↩]