Gender

In 1978, Canadian sports sociologist Ann Hall formally introduced the concept of ‘gender’ in sport studies2 in a monograph entitled Sport and Gender: A Feminist Perspective on the Sociology of Sport, in which she reviewed the sociological research and literature as it related to the female experience in sport and offered a critique of this material from a feminist perspective. Hall’s use of the term ‘gender’ was, to the best of my knowledge, without precedent in sports studies and, in retrospect, her early work seems crucial to the development of sports studies because it brought the concept into the discourse and called for a feminist perspective, which would begin to significantly alter research in sports studies. With the work of Hall and others, who began to use the concept ‘gender’ rather than ‘sex’, the focus of research began to shift away from the female athlete toward the concept of ‘gender’ and later to a critique of sport and physical culture, as I have argued elsewhere.3 As I will attempt to show in this chapter, the concept of ‘gender’ would be further expanded beyond that of a distinct category and redefined as a dynamic, relational process that introduced new directions, theories and paradigms for research in the discipline of sports studies. Moreover, the inclusion of the concept of ‘gender’ – along with such concepts as race, social class and ethnicity, as well as a turn toward postmodernism and deconstruction (and the introduction of theories of hegemony and power) – further encouraged the study of such topics as globalization, post-colonialism, space and the media, which moved the development of the discipline of sports studies from a disciplinary to an interdisciplinary focus. Most recently ‘gender’ seems to have been viewed as an interrelational concept by scholars, and this perspective has paralleled and contributed to the inclusion of such concepts and topics as power, representation, narrativity and language with a more recent transdisciplinary and transnational perspective in the study of sport.4