ABSTRACT
Feminism is a potent influence on the current intellectual, social, and cultural landscape, and the most identifiable contributor to the hotchpotch of conceptual, sociological, and normative questions concerning sex, gender, and sexuality. Yet it has had remarkably little to say about sport. Feminist philosophers and sociologists of sport have thought this a blind spot of considerable significance, for at least three (overlapping) reasons. First, sport is a site for the reproduction of masculine character qualities esteemed in patriarchal society and critiqued in feminism. These qualities include aggression, competition, instrumental (goal-directed) rationality, the repression of pain, and the repression of emotion. Success in sport is success at masculinity. If feminism’s critique of masculinist culture is to approach completion, then it needs to reckon with a massive social practice that celebrates masculine character qualities. Second, as Young argues in the first essay of this anthology, the historical exclusion of women from sport has considerable conceptual and existential ramifications. Sport celebrates the human as bodysubject, therefore its historical exclusion of women reinforces the female human as body-object. Third, sport is, perhaps by historical accident, a site for the reinforcement of social attitudes challenged by feminists and others. These include notions of what it is to be an authentic man or woman, and related hostility towards gays and lesbians. Gay men are lesser men, girlish and therefore trespassers upon sport. Lesbians are lesser women, mannish and perhaps fit for sport, but not fit to be women.
