Thinking the Unthinkable

Abstract

The purpose of this article is twofold: to capture the injustice inherent in the gendered bifurcation of baseball and softball (Cohen, 2009) via the prism of critical feminist sport studies; and to begin to imagine a girl-friendly/women-and trans-inclusive future for baseball that is less fertile for cooptation into post-911 USA security state discourses (Dworkin & Wachs, 2009; Mohanty, 2012). In this article I link the 'unthinkability' (Lemert, 2007) of the occupational segregation of baseball in North America to the dominance of the ideology of the two sex system and European disasporic morality (Lemert, 2002). To illustrate the extent of this occupational segregation via the gendered bifurcation of baseball and softball (Cohen, 2009), I draw on feminist sport studies to examine the exemplars or 'texts' (McDonald and Birell, 1999) of three