ABSTRACT
In 2010 Caster Semenya was included amongst the New Statesman's 50 People Who Matter.1 Semenya was the only sportsperson amongst politicians, business leaders and a handful of entertainment celebrities, ‘with global influence and the power to change the world’. Such rankings are notoriously subjective but the reason for Semenya's inclusion is both interesting and relevant here. After winning the women's 800 metres at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin aged eighteen, Semenya was suspended by the IAAF amid media speculation about whether she was male or female. No details of what tests found (or did not find) were ever released, and Semenya, who denies having undergone hormone therapy, resumed competing in women's athletics eleven months later. The New Statesman thus included Semenya in recognition of her importance to gender politics. Indeed, it would be unthinkable (impossible?) that anyone from any other walk of life could pose this kind of challenge to such a fundamental premise of contemporary society: the division of the human population into two discrete categories, male and female. This chapter looks at the relationship between sport and gender and between the sociology of sport and the sociology of gender and asks what these relationships reveal about the significance of the subdiscipline in the broader sociological landscape.
