| CODE | GRS3012 | ||||||||||||
| TITLE | Sport, Gender and Sexualities | ||||||||||||
| UM LEVEL | 03 - Years 2, 3, 4 in Modular Undergraduate Course | ||||||||||||
| MQF LEVEL | 6 | ||||||||||||
| ECTS CREDITS | 4 | ||||||||||||
| DEPARTMENT | Gender and Sexualities | ||||||||||||
| DESCRIPTION | An intersectional lens will be applied to the phenomenon of sport so as to explore crucial aspects such as social class, race and ethnicity, age, disability, geographical location, cultural and and political implications and historical milestones. It will delve into current issues experienced in the sporting domain, mainly sexism, elitism, homophobia and transphobia, xenophobia and racism, ageism and ableism to mention a few. Deviant aspects associated with the sporting world, including doping, violence, sexual abuse and gambling will be discussed. Major sporting milestones and personal narratives will form part of the learning experience, contesting concepts of nationality, the gender binary, physical strength, power and health. From the mid-nineteenth century, when modern sport in the West took an organized form, right up until the present day, it has been a distinctly gendered activity. The huge imbalance between the public’s recognition of men’s and women’s sport incorporates a long-established commonsense ideology that males, by their very nature, are more suited to take part in energetic and aggressive forms of physical activity than are females. This reflects the power of men to dominate sport participation, mediation, management and finance. The quest for equality of opportunity in sport has been one of the main thrusts of feminist interventions. This study-unit will look at liberal sport feminism, linked to policies and programs of positive discrimination in favor of women. It will also delve into radical sport feminism, that emphasizes the failure of equal opportunity initiatives, focusing attention on the centrality of sexuality to women’s oppression in sport and the redistribution of power through separatism. During the 1990’s and into the twenty-first century, the struggle for better opportunities for women in sport had spread to most parts of the world, incorporating women with different, social, cultural, political and religious backgrounds. At local, regional, national and international level there was a notable growth of women’s sport organizations. Single-sex organizations placed women’s experiences at the centre of decision-making, resisting male control and sexist attitudes and practices. This study-unit will examine how today women are owning their bodies like never before and are participating nationwide in all sport disciplines, relegating to the dustbin mythologies of the “weaker” sex and assumptions of female incompetence. An important feature of cultural feminism has been recognizing the heterogeneity of women, taking into account the way in which gender intersects with class, race, sexuality and other systems of domination. During the early to mid-twentieth century blackness came to be seen as a signifier of natural sporting ability. The invention of the idea of the natural black athlete means that when black women participate in sport, they often face a different set of assumptions than white women about their femininity (or lack thereof) and their sporting ability. Because black sportswomen exist at the intersections of racial, gendered, sexual and class oppression, they encounter a unique set of circumstances about how their bodies are sexualized on the sport field. Representations of black women within the white sport media complex are mediated by stereotypes but in ways that are often multifaceted. This study-unit maps how the varying meanings of black identity and femininity come together in the body of the black female athlete, accentuating the sexualization of the black female form while at the same time black sportswomen attempt to resist those same images. It considers how the notion of black women athletes are ‘invading’ the masculine-coded white sport field. It will look at the ways in which black women athletes come to represent the nation; and examines the discourse around black women athletes as national representative and the cultural politics this generates for reclaiming the space in sport. Muslim women have been markedly marginalized in international sport, one explanation is that the roots of modern sport are grounded within Western culture, and sport, in its current Western form, is not part of mainstream Islamic society. This study-unit will probe into this phenomenon and how women and religion are finding their space in the sporting world. Sport, through the embodiment of masculine ideals, is one of the primary practices in which young men construct their gender identities. Ritually sport celebrates physical abilities and male superiority. Throughout the 1990’s boys and men involved in competitive team sports were encouraged to exhibit, value and reproduce conservative notions of masculinity, including misogyny, aggression, competitiveness, a willingness to sacrifice, obedience to authority, compulsory heterosexuality and homophobia. The hyper-masculinisation of male athletes was thought to help men to symbolically prove their right to dominate women and to make sport extremely inhospitable to gay male athletes. Fear of homophobia has encouraged most players with non-normative sexual orientations to hide their differences, to pass as straight as homosexuality has been systematically vilified in sport. This study-unit will investigate the role as well as the social an physical expectations of men in sport. The main characteristics of sport, gender and sexuality were always framed according to heterosexual norms, putting pressure on many young males and females with different sexual orientations to compare their own body-types and identities with those of mediated images of young, beautiful and desirable (by implication heterosexual) bodies. Yet, Patterns of male and female participation, concepts of self as male or female, and biological or assigned sex, alongside sexuality, have changed historically in ways relating to scientific, cultural, social and political ideas and practices. This study-unit will explore the huge gender and sexual diversity in sport; a diversity which reflects the personal preferences of sport men and women and breaks down commonly understood norms of gender and sexuality. However, relations of power do not come from heterosexual males alone, as gender and sexuality are not just categories of differences, and lesbian visibility in sport was a reminder of this, at times generating further “othering” and hostility. While there have been improvements over time, gender and sexually diverse individuals within sport experience sexual prejudice as they work within a strongly hetero-sexist culture. The institutionalized nature of sport’s gendered and hetero-sexist culture brings to light the primacy of personal sexual orientation identity and the freedom to express it. Drawing upon Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) social identity theory this study-unit will explore how within sporting contexts personal identity, an identity people hold that is critical to their self-concept, constitutes a key element of an individual’s self-image, represents who they are as a person and helps shape how people feel about themselves. Sexual minorities who have a strong sexual orientation personal identity have come to embrace their sexual minority status and to incorporate it as a key part of the self. Their sexual orientation represents an important part of their self-image and how they see themselves as a person. This study-unit seeks to demonstrate the importance of diverse and inclusive environments for sexual minorities in sport, and the psychological safety in fostering a strong sexual orientation personal identity. Few institutions maintain a sex-segregated structure more rigidly than sport. This strict adherence to a system based upon a static and binary understanding of sex has presented considerable barriers to the participation of transgender athletes, who have traditionally been faced with policies of overt exclusion by sport organisations. In response to challenges from transgender athletes and activist groups, many sporting bodies have begun to adopt policies that appear, at least ostensibly, to be designed to include transgender athletes. This study-unit will provide an overview and analysis of this shift from polices of overt exclusion to supposed inclusion, that might still conform to conservative views of sex and gender. At the height of the Cold War, it was feared that Eastern Bloc countries were trying to win medals by cheating, having men disguise themselves as women to gain unfair advantage in the sporting field. Tests that were originally supposed to catch cheats have subsequently become a clumsy model for detecting people with intersex variations. Following the particular case of Caster Semenya, the subject of intersexuality has received unprecedented attention from sport organizations, journalists and scholars worldwide. Theoretical debates about sex tests and competitive advantage to one side, this study-unit examines how athletes with intersex variants have been and still are publicly humiliated and their efforts trivialized, their intentions doubted and their identities questioned for being born different. Study-unit Aims: - To give a holistic understanding of the multifaceted aspects of sport, whilst accentuating the implications of gender and sexuality; - To explore the relationship between the social construct of gender and it's impact on the sporting world; - To raise awareness about social privilege and it's influence in the world of sport; - To highlight how socio-cultural expectations construct the lived realities of sport; - To introduce theories from feminist and queer ideologies that can relate to sport. Learning Outcomes: 1. Knowledge & Understanding By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to: - Recognize the intersection between individual and collective identities and the sporting world; - Identify how sport has been social constructed, potentially ostracizing non-conforming individuals; - Distinguish between ideal and realistic sporting social outcomes; - Recognise numerous ways in which the gendered and sexuality are interlinked in sport; - Identify how gender and sexual identities have influenced, or been influenced by experiences in sport. 2. Skills By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to: - Value the multiplicity and complexity of both gender and sexual orientation in sport; - Discuss how diversity of cultural and religious influences affect the participation in sport of girls and women. Main Text/s and any supplementary readings: Main: - Hargreaves, J., & Anderson, E. (Eds.). (2014). Routledge handbook of sport, gender and sexuality. Routledge. - Cosh, S., & Crabb, S. (2012). Reconceptualising the female athlete triad: locating athletes’ bodies within the discursive practices of elite sporting environments. Psychology of women section review. - Plaza, M., Boiché, J., Brunel, L., & Ruchaud, F. (2017). Sport= male… But not all sports: Investigating the gender stereotypes of sport activities at the explicit and implicit levels. Sex roles, 76, 202-217. (available on HYDI) - Scandurra, C., Picariello, S., Amodeo, A. N. N. A., Muollo, F., Sannino, A., Valerio, P., & Valerio, G. (2013). Heteronormativity, homophobia and transphobia in sport. In Bioethical issues (pp. 195-211). Editoriale Scientifica. (Open Access) - Van Ingen, C. (2003). Geographies of gender, sexuality and race: Reframing the focus on space in sport sociology. International review for the sociology of sport, 38(2), 201-216. (available on HYDI) - Eng, H. (2019). Doing sexuality in sport. In Queering Norway (pp. 105-125). Routledge. - De Soysa, L., & Zipp, S. (2019). Gender equality, sport and the United Nation’s system. A historical overview of the slow pace of progress. Sport in Society, 22(11), 1783-1800.(available on HYDI) - Krane, V. (Ed.). (2018). Sex, gender, and sexuality in sport: Queer inquiries. Routledge. - Johnson, C. W., & Kivel, B. (2007). Gender, sexuality and queer theory in sport. Sport and gender identities: Masculinities, femininities, and sexualities, 93-105. (available on HYDI) - Henne, K. (2014). The “science” of fair play in sport: Gender and the politics of testing. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39(3), 787-812. (available on HYDI |
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| STUDY-UNIT TYPE | Lecture and Online Learning | ||||||||||||
| METHOD OF ASSESSMENT |
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| LECTURER/S | Claire Lucille Azzopardi Lane |
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The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints. Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice. It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2024/5. It may be subject to change in subsequent years. |
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