Playing with Gender: An Exploration of USA Ultimate's Gender Inclusion Policy in Action

• In Event: Queering the Everyday: Identity, Sport, and the Minor Improvisations of Queer Life

Abstract

This paper explores how sport may offer us an improvisational site for reimagining gender and embodiment. In 2020, the same cultural moment in which trans-exclusionary sporting policies were beginning to gain public attention and traction across the US and Europe, USA Ultimate, the governing body of ultimate frisbee in the United States enacted a broadly inclusive gender policy. USAU’s policy enabled athletes to participate within men’s, women’s, or mixed divisions according solely to their own self-determined gender identity. USAU has likewise adopted strategies for enabling nonbinary and gender diverse athletes to participate without explicitly aligning themselves with a binary gender identity. And yet, drawing on Deleuzian onto-epistemologies, I maintain that even the most “inclusive” policies continue to stabilize and sediment particularly gendered formations. Therefore, in this paper I consider the tensions between the stabilizing forces of policy and the liberatory potential of improvisational play. To this end, I offer a discursive analysis of ultimate frisbee policy, intertwined with several close readings of dynamic, interactional movements of athletes at play.

Biographical Information

Janeanne Levenstein (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in the Sports Studies subtrack of American Studies at the University of Iowa. Janeanne's dissertation, provisionally titled "Transing Sports (Studies): A Discursive and Material Analysis of Ultimate Frisbee Policy and Play" examines how gender diversity has been acknowledged and integrated into three US-based ultimate frisbee governing organizations.

Author

• Janeanne M Levenstein