ABSTRACT
As Le Jingyi climbs from the pool, for perhaps the millionth time, and as the water cascades off her impressive shoulders, slender waist and defined musculature, she reminds us of the terrifying consequences of women’s entry into sport. Her presumably soft and feminine features have been replaced by hard muscle, and her womanly proportions are obscured by a masculine physique. No longer strictly female, yet not quite a man either, the image of Jingyi has become the predictable media adjunct to any report on illicit doping in sport, visually confirming that for women to transform their bodies to such a degree, they must systematically consume large quantities of dangerous chemicals. As such, she represents the unsettling outcome of the intrusion of technology into the body, offering a horrifying reminder of what can happen when the nature/artifice binary is disturbed. Thus, Jingyi represents a troubling future, where essentialist categories collapse, where gender fusion and confusion abound and where the nature of femininity is overshadowed by the spectre of the monster. By re-examining Jingyi’s physique each time an allegation of illicit per-
formance enhancement emerges, we are repeatedly compelled to confront the nature of the body and its relationship to technology from the particular perspective of gender. If technology represents an inorganic Other against which the organic Self is defined, then, in this case, Jingyi offers a technologised exemplar that invites, indeed, forces, women to evaluate their own and other bodies. The purpose her body serves is thus not unlike those unrealistic images presented through the bodies of media starlets, celebrities and representatives from the worlds of fashion and entertainment. In both cases, bodies function as explicit reminders of what femininity definitely is, or what it most assuredly is not. Thus, Jingyi, and those with bodies like hers, warn of the gender consequences of tinkering with nature. What the images of Jingyi reveal is that the female body is particularly
scrutinised within the context of sport and is subject to specific sanctions if it transgresses. Of course, the body is the central focus of various
discourses of surveillance and their corresponding disciplinary measures. The emergence of medical practices, for example, literally opened the body to scrutiny, which meant, according to Rosa Braidotti (1994: 89), that not only could the functioning of the body be deciphered, but it was ‘transform [ed] into a text to be read and interpreted by a knowledgeable medical gaze’. This gaze is not restricted to the medical fraternity, and an increasing emphasis on the visual has meant that ‘ways of seeing’ have become technologised and integrated into the everyday practices of culture. The media have, of course, refined the gaze to a fine art, not only producing and sanctioning a cultural scopophilia, but circulating and further entrenching normative discourses of gender and the body within society. Through institutions such as these, the female body is reduced to a series of iconic surfaces to be deciphered and judged, and any variation in what is considered the ‘appropriate’ female form is placed under a cultural microscope. This is particularly evident within sport, where gender binaries reinforce an enduring suspicion of the presence of women within this ‘arena of masculinity’ (Pronger 1990). Modern sport has always been firmly linked to a patriarchal project that
seeks to establish and maintain strict cultural boundaries that police what is feminine and what is masculine. It is well documented that sport is a gendered institution and since its inception has been utilised as part of the hegemonic reproduction of patriarchal society (McKay 1991; Messner and Sabo 1990; Lenskyj 1986). Numerous researchers have focused on the way that women’s entrance into sport is limited through various discourses that render them secondary to men, physically incapable of aggressive physical exertion and as sexualised objects for the male gaze. Studies that focus on the media have identified a variety of marginalising strategies that have restricted women’s participation, including the processes of trivialisation and symbolic annihilation (Hargreaves 1994; McKay 1991; Lenskyj 1986). Sport is, thus, rendered a masculinising ritual, embodying characteristics of strength, power, aggression and confidence. By contrast, female bodies are portrayed as weaker, graceful, flexible and attractive. Those who stray from this feminine ideal are regarded as bodily, and perhaps morally, deviant and are often read as poor parodies of their male counterparts. Whilst women are denigrated for their involvement in a range of sports, especially those requiring power, strength and physical contact, their participation is often recuperated through a range of hetero-feminine and heterosexual discourses. Sports magazine covers and calendars that stylise and reduce the female form to a series of desirable and unthreatening surfaces remind the spectators that these women might be athletes, but physically they remain heterosexually desirable and feminine. It is clear, then, that sport, as a ‘masculine arena’, functions to establish and police the binary oppositions male/female and masculinity/femininity. Although Michael Burke (1998: 25) suggests that the ‘most interesting
cases of mythmaking to support dichotomous sex categories occur when females enter sports that have traditionally been gendered male’, the situation
is a little more complex. Attempts to differentiate male from female occur not when women simply play sport, even ‘masculine’ sport, but specifically when women seek to step outside the traditional feminine form. Unlike in the nineteenth century, or even for much of the twentieth century, women who play sport are no longer regarded with the same level of suspicion or concern, prompting some young women to question whether there even remains a gender divide in sport. Those who ‘bulk up’, daring to approach or even replicate the masculine athletic physique, are, however, still repudiated as mannish freaks (Cahn 1993). By ‘wearing’ their bodies in a masculine way (Budd 1997), female athletes, such as tennis player Amelie Mauresmo, provoke reactions that seek to reestablish essentialist gender categories and eliminate the confusion that their appearance augurs. Mauresmo’s first grand slam final appearance at the 1999 Australian Open prompted obtuse comments from Lindsay Davenport, who remarked that she thought she was playing against a man, and Martina Hingis, who explicitly declared that the Frenchwoman must be ‘half a man’ (Hillier and Harrison 2004). Sports Illustrated added to the colourful representation of ‘muscular Mauresmo’ with the following introduction: ‘Amelie Mauresmo’s thickly muscled shoulders bulge from her dark blue tank-top, and she struts cockily around court like a weightlifter in the gym’ (CNN/Sports Illustrated 1999). When the tall, muscular Chinese swimmers first came to international attention in the early 1990s, the media constructed their performances as monstrous spectacles and charged them immediately with illicit enhancement. In 2006, Australian swimmers Libby Lenton and Liesel Jones’ buffed bodies generated comparisons with former East German and Chinese swimmers, prompting one media commentator to proclaim the duo as ‘so feminine’ unlike the East Germans and Chinese who had ‘real masculine features, like a protruded jaw line’ (Williams and Wilson 2006). Clearly, when women exceed the accepted boundaries of the female body and adopt ‘masculine’ characteristics, femininity is manifestly threatened and is worthy of public comment. Whilst the institution of sport, constructed as a ‘natural’ activity, reaf-
firms sex and gender binaries within the public sphere, technologies have the potential to blur those borders, and performance enhancing agents, in particular, pose particular risks, specifically to female bodies, as they threaten to dissolve carefully juxtaposed gender categories. Yet, ‘natural’ bodies are believed to be biologically determined rather than culturally ascribed, and the sex categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’, in particular, are assumed to be fixed and identifiable through bodily scrutiny (Vertinsky 1990). The use of apparently ‘unnatural’ substances jeopardises established physical borders that demarcate male from female and exposes the athletic body as a site of anxiety. The disruption of these gendered margins through muscle-building and fat-reducing technologies, for example, allows for not only the masculinising female but also the feminising male. The blurring of biological, particularly visual borders, is seen as a greater threat, than the
blurring of cultural borders that are understood to be, if not on a continuum, then at least more fluid categories. Male/female, on the other hand, are considered immutable, scientific categories, and are perceived as biologically rather than socially defined. This is not to say that the two are not linked, but it might be possible to accept a code of feminine behaviour that is inconsistent with the hegemonic ideal, but only as long as the body conforms to strict ‘natural’ sex categories. This chapter examines a range of cultural responses to women taking
performance enhancing substances and contextualises these within wider debates about fears of the monstrous feminine: that is, women who challenge the limits of what signifies ‘femaleness’. It interrogates specific cultural responses to female athletes who take, or are accused of taking, performance enhancing drugs, revealing how a fear of ‘supra-female’ athletic performance disrupts our understanding of both the male/female and nature/ artifice binaries and provokes horror at the dissolution of those borders that clearly establish male and female as separate physical and biological categories. At the same time, bodies that conform to normative expectations of ‘femaleness’ are, despite ingesting chemicals, restored as appropriately female and excused for their ‘minor’mistakes. Scrutinising the athletic female body generates a series of narratives that link women, through technology, to the realm of the monstrous, creating an almost hysterical cultural response that condemns the appearance of these potentially transgressive bodies.
