Abstract:Male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport 1 in North America constitutes a "sport nexus" (Burstyn, 1999;Heywood & Dworkin, 2003) (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (Burstyn, 1999). Feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. In this article I consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels.Fraser (2007, 2000, 1997, 1993, 1987) has a long history of writing within the tradition of feminist political science/feminist theorizing on democracy and the public sphere (see also
This article examines the re-negotiation of sex-based boundaries within the context of transgender/transsexual inclusion in North American lesbian softball leagues. Semi-structured interviews with transgender participants combined with participant observation have been undertaken. We focus on the ‘climate’ ( Hall and Sandler, 1982 ) for transgender participation in lesbian softball leagues that have adopted radical (non sex-binary-based) transinclusive policies. The majority of our research participants report positive experiences of inclusion and our own observations inform us that trans participation has already changed the faces of these leagues to the extent that lesbian identity is being queered: it is shifting away, at least to some degree, from assumed biological commonality to cultural affinity. Positive experiences, however, were more uniformly reported by transgender women than by transmen. A number of transmen, while reporting experiences of inclusion, expressed both personal ambivalence about participating in lesbian sporting and non-sporting spaces and a desire for fuller inclusion in the form of sensitivity and awareness concerning the use of gendered pronouns and categorical invocations. Our study documents cultural processes of sex boundary re-negotiation. As such it builds on previous scholarship ( Travers, 2006 ) that suggests that lesbian softball leagues with non-sex-binary based transinclusive policies may offer a model for queering mainstream sporting spaces away from the socially constructed categories of the two sex system.
Citing section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 15 women’s ski jumpers took the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) to court over the exclusion of a women’s ski jumping event. In this analysis of the initial court case and subsequent appeal, I demonstrate that Canadian (and western) citizenship was contested in this legal battle and that gendered, raced, and classed dimensions of citizenship were at play. To make this case, I draw on critical feminist and critical race theorizing on citizenship. From my analysis, three key silences emerge. These concern the underlying assumptions of sex segregation, whiteness, and class privilege.
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