In this paper, I criticize Mika Hämäläinen’s recent argument for compensated sex-integrated individual competitions in ski jumping. I argue that Hämäläinen’s argument is problematic at least in four different ways. Two of my criticisms are intended to show that Hämäläinen ignores some important considerations which he should have discussed. On the other hand, I also argue that Hämäläinen’s argument is inherently flawed in two respects.

With recent controversies surrounding the eligibility of athletes with disorders of sex development and hyperandrogenism, as well as continued discussion of the conditions transgender athletes must meet to compete in high-performance sport, a wide array of scholars representing a diverse range of disciplines have weighed in on both the appropriateness of classifying athletes into the female and male categories and the best practices of doing so. In response to cases of high-profile athletes’ sex being called into question, the International Olympic (...) Committee, the International Association of Athletics Federations, and the National Collegiate Athletics Association, among others, published or updated policies addressing who is eligible to compete in the women’s sport category and under what conditions. This paper addresses the areas in which philosophical reasoning and ethical analysis can contribute to reopened debates about the surveillance of the women’s category in sport. Emphasis is placed on determining where the onus of responsibility should fall for ensuring the new policies are followed. (shrink)

This article explores the position of women in the sport of surfing. I contend that within surfing there remain many forms of oppression that have not been given appropriate attention in feminist studies. In this article I apply Iris Marion Young's analysis from “Throwing Like a Girl” to the sport of surfing. Young's article offers many insights into forms of domination and oppression that pervade the sport, and that are demonstrated through the restricted movement of female surfers. I conclude by (...) making suggestions for how to address these issues in surfing through a greater promotion of big-wave surfing. (shrink)

This article examines the gender politics of Euro 2012, an international men’s football tournament that took place in Poland and Ukraine, through two cases of female protest. Informed by Cynthia Enloe’s question ‘Where are the women?’, the case studies focus on Polish football fan and model Natalia Siwiec and Ukrainian women’s organisation FEMEN in order to render visible the heteromasculine nation–sport nexus underpinning Euro 2012. The analysis demonstrates how Siwiec emerges as the ‘caretaker’ of the Polish nation-state during the event (...) by exposing how female bodies can be used to recuperate a polluted and emasculated national image. In contrast, FEMEN’s stunts are highly critical of the heteromasculine nation–sport nexus and reveal their position as ‘rebels’; however, a closer analysis of FEMEN’s actions beyond Euro 2012 shows how they can simultaneously operate as ‘enforcers’ of the nation-state. The role of ‘enforcers’ is especially pertinent in relation to the western nation-state’s contemporary ‘othering’ of Islam in the post-9/11 context. Both case studies demonstrate international politics in the making and call for closer scrutiny of the gender politics constitutive of seemingly apolitical and ‘inclusive’ sporting events. (shrink)

In this article, we frame men’s club football as an “extremely gendered” organization to explain the underrepresentation of women leaders within the industry. By analyzing women’s leadership work over a 30-year period, we find that women’s inclusion has been confined to a limited number of occupational areas. These areas are removed, in terms of influence and proximity, from the male players and the playing of football. These findings reveal a gendered substructure within club football that maintains masculine dominance in core (...) football leadership roles and relegates women to a position of peripheral inclusion in leadership roles. Through a discourse analysis of gender pay gap reports, we show that men’s football clubs legitimize women’s peripheral inclusion by naturalizing male dominance at the organizational core. These findings are significant because they demonstrate that men’s football clubs, as masculinity-conferring organizations, have excluded women from core roles to maintain their masculine character while superficially accepting women into roles that do not challenge the association of football with hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, organizational change may be possible only if women are granted greater access to core organizational roles. Here, we offer a new theoretical framework for “extremely gendered” organizations that can be applied to other sporting and male-dominated contexts to analyze women’s access to core leadership roles. (shrink)

Few studies have examined how groups of individuals enact different patterns of gender relations within and across contexts. In this article, I draw upon nine months of fieldwork and 15 semistructured interviews conducted with eight- to 10-year-old swimmers on a co-ed youth swim team. During focused aspects of swim practice, gender was less salient and structural mechanisms encouraged athletes to interact in ways that illuminated girls’ and boys’ similar athletic abilities, undermining categorical, essentialist, and hierarchical gender beliefs pertaining to athleticism. (...) However, in the swimmers’ unfocused free time, the salience of gender was high and structural mechanisms encouraged swimmers to engage in “borderwork.” In this context, similarities between the genders were obscured and girls and boys instead interacted in ways that affirmed essentialist and categorical—but nonhierarchical—meanings of gender. By paying attention to structural mechanisms and the variable salience of gender, we can thus see the various conditions under which children deploy different patterns of gender relations, and how less oppressive gender relations can potentially “spill over” from one context to the next. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have critically analyzed the effects of sex segregation in numerous social institutions, yet sex-segregated sport often remains unchallenged. Even critics of sex-segregated sport have tended to accept the merits of women-only teams at face value. In this article, we revisit this issue by examining the underlying assumptions supporting women’s and girls’ teams and explore how they perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, we analyze the 14 U.S. court cases wherein adolescent boys have sought to play on girls’ teams in their (...) respective high schools. The courts’ decisions reveal taken-for-granted, essentialist assumptions about girls’ innate fragility and athletic inferiority. While the courts, policy makers, and many feminist scholars see maintaining teams for girls and women as a solution to the problem of boys’ and men’s dominance in sport, the logic supporting this form of segregation further entrenches notions of women’s inferiority. (shrink)