The purpose of this paper is to expand the usefulness of equal opportunities legislation for females in sport by providing a philosophically based opposition toward the long history of gender stereotypes, embodied in the AEC, that currently limit its effects.

Both the approach taken by World Rugby to address the question of trans women participation in women’s rugby and the paper by Jon Pike that explains the ethical justification for the exclusion of trans women players from world rugby are compelling when understood within the dominant rugby/sport narrative. However, in this article, I suggest that what is absent is a radical feminist understanding that engages with the political purposes of separate sport spaces for women in producing feminist counternarratives that challenge (...) men’s power in/over sport. Decisions about the inclusion of trans women in women’s sporting competitions should be made on a sport context-by-sport context basis oriented by broader feminist political goals. (shrink)

This article analyzes data available in published studies of rapists’ self-reports and argues that according to their own accounts, many men developed inaccurate impressions of women’s desires through a confident form of role-taking. While rapists’ inaccuracies have been previously described as instances of “miscommunication”or lapsed role-taking, they do not always indicate lack of emotional or intellectual depth to role-taking. The article adds to the profeminist, symbolic interactionist literature on role-taking by arguingthat relations of disavowedmale-male desire andthe exchange of women make (...) the possibility of men’s sensitive knowledge of women’s sexual desires problematic. Some of these forms of knowledge are outlined, and an approach to rape prevention is briefly suggested. (shrink)

Drawing on Butler’s theoretical background, research on the ethics of violence has focused on the importance of dominant society-wide schemes and norms in building individuals’ moral sense of violence. Studies explain how violence is normalized and made socially acceptable. In our analysis, we build on the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot that places particular importance on the fact that fairness must always be appreciated in situations and provide a “grammar” to describe competing normative approaches. Studying rugby, we show how (...) the different market players (consumers, broadcasters, journalists) justify the violence that occurs during rugby matches. We contribute to the literature on the ethics of violence by providing a pragmatic understanding of violence. We contribute to the economies of worth by investigating violence in a regime of justice and justification work in a reality test (in contrast to a test of worth). This understanding of violence enables us to offer some recommendations to encourage more responsible justification work about violence. (shrink)