Girls and Boys

Marginality score: 10/10

In what will probably be my last post of the Olympics (will be spending this weekend at family celebrations, rather than fuming over the marginalisation of some group or other), I want to look at the most marginal of marginal figures.

First off, an admission: I've used Caster Semenya. No, not like that; the above image has been a favourite starting-point of mine for introducing undergraduate classes to ideas about race and gender, usually in a book like Jackie Kay's brilliant novel, Trumpet:

(If you haven't read it, STOP READING THIS BLOGGING RUBBISH RIGHT NOW and go and get hold of a copy. Seriously.)

Semenya seems a lovely, down-to-earth, genuine (to use three fairly interchangeable adjectives) person. Oh, and the favourite for the WOMEN'S 800m. That's right, the women's race. Who cares if she has a bit more testosterone than the average woman? Michael Phelps has significantly bigger feet and lung capacity than the average man, but I don't see anyone accusing him of being part-fish.

Which leads me to my point: when people get irate about a perceived unfairness in sport, it's generally racially 'other' individuals who are taken to task. So this isn't a question about Semenya's gender, at all: it's an uneasiness (see Edward Said) rooted in her race.

As one final example, take a look at this Daily Mail article on so-called 'plastic Brits', who switched nationality to join the GB team. Not entirely coincidentally, there's mention of any male, white athletes: all three 'examples' (and they are ridiculous, justifying those inverted commas: both Shana Cox's parents and one of Tiffany Ofill-Porter's are British) are, surprise-surprise, black women. Again, it all comes down to race.

Gender Trouble; or, Why Some Areas of International Sport Appear to Be a Bit Edwardian, Still

Marginality: 7/10 (I thought this topic was either incredibly marginal [up near 10], because the sidelining aspects of gender in sport are such troubling issues, or not at all, because these questions are so very mainstream. In the end, I wussed out and split the difference.)


Ninety-nine years ago this summer, Emily Davison drew a definite and long-lasting link between gender and politics. Not only was her protest set against the back-drop of a sporting event, it was fatally enmeshed in one; nearly a century later, however, it appears that Davison's sacrifice hasn't meant an awful lot. At least if the following three stories are anything to go by.

(1) Zoe Smith
I've got the news round-up on in the background, and they've just shown highlights from Zoe Smith's weightlifting. She's an articulate, intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, beautiful young woman. Does any of this matter in the context of her sporting achievements this afternoon? Not a jot. What matters is that, at the age of 18, she came in the top twelve in the world in her weight class. There were only 11 women who did better than her, a full 10 years before her weightlifting peak. Yet internet trolls are more inclined to focus on her looks and her weight. I know there's been criticism of Tom Daley since his perceived failure today, but none of that was related to his physique; in Smith's case, could it perchance be to do with her gender?

(2) Japanese Football
(H/T @bengoldacre) As I posted on Twitter a couple of days ago, the Japanese Football Association have a strange attitude to gender equality: while the men's football team travelled in first-class seats on the flight to the UK, the women's team travelled in economy. This was in spite of the fact that the women's team are ranked 3rd in the world, while the men's team barely scrape into the top 20. Although the relative financial pulling powers of the two teams might have had something to do with this -- 'they attract more income, therefore they get more spent on them', sort of thing -- behind every financial decision is a political one: why do the male players, inferior to their female counterparts in terms of skill, attract more money? Until we start to address these sorts of underlying questions, the vicious circle (men are seen as better than women => they are favoured more => they have more spent on them => they are seen as better than women) will keep on turning.

(3) Victoria Pendleton
Yesterday, a press conference with Victoria Pendleton that focused on the rivalry between the British cyclist and the Australian Anna Meares kicked off with the frankly astonishing question 'is Anna Meares a cow?':

On Five Live, one of the journalists very astutely commented that she doubted a similar question would be asked of a male athlete, switching 'cow' for 'sod' (I suspect she would have used something stronger in a less public-broadcasting context). This got me thinking: why is this, and what does it imply about media attitudes to sportspeople? Put simply, this question demotes women: instead of competitors, they are petty bitches; instead of sportspeople, they are political-correctness-gorn-mad glorified housewives. And until these sort of attitudes start to change, we're all going to be the worse for it: women, men, athletes, and soundbite-hungry, morally defunct journalists alike.