(Re)configuring the "Female" Athlete: Contextualizing the Emerging Female Athlete Health Science Movement

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Femininities

Abstract

The contemporary landscape of women’s sports has become defined by contention. Discourse regarding eligibility in the women’s category and the very definition of the modern “woman athlete” has rapidly increased in recent years, becoming household debate both within and beyond the sporting world. A particular subset of actors–from governing bodies, to coaches, to sports scientists, to fans, to players themselves–have started calling for interventions, including an increase in research, evidence-based coaching approaches, and science-forward sports technologies designed exclusively for the “female athlete.” In this paper, I investigate this "for women, by women" turn in women’s sport by asking how a variety of actors have come to construct social meaning out of scientific knowledge about sex/gender and the bodies of women athletes, and enact these meanings through different practices? I argue that several of these practices have led to the emergence of a “female athlete health science” movement, comprised of a constellation of research pursuits, performance technologies, and approaches to defining and studying athletes competing in the women’s category in novel ways motivated by lay and binary understandings of sex/gender. I argue that the “female athlete health science” movement uses the rhetoric of sex essentialism, sexual dimorphism, and biological determinism under the banner of feminism, aiming to unite supporters of women’s sport and women athletes by championing inclusion while doubling down on exclusion. How has this paradigm shift facilitated an unprecedented use of science to define and advocate for the “woman” athlete, and (re)configured a notion of woman athlete that is inseparable from biology? This paper will explore the stakes of the scientific meanings and messages that this movement has championed, and what kinds of justice-oriented feminisms are or are not possible in the context of this burgeoning (re)configuration of sex/gender and scientific meaning in sport.

Author

• Cassidy Gabriel, Yale University