Thread by @elmyra

Hey so who's been watching the winter Olympics and wants me to talk about docile, socially constructed bodies and why no women figure skaters do quad jumps, and women snowboarders only get 3m of amplitude on the half pipe while the men get 5m? Cos in gonna, in a bit.

Alright, let's do this. Here's a lovely introduction to the postmodernists from @existentialcoms: existentialcomics.com/comic/224

One of the big ideas in postmodern thought is the everything is socially constructed. Which is something a lot of people struggle with.

Because I'm a solid, physical body, sitting on a solid, physical sofa, in a solid, physical house. Nothing about that can possibly be socially constructed, right?

So let's see how something as solid and physical and intimate as your body is socially constructed.

Here's a quick intro to/reminder of Foucault's idea of docile bodies:

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @elmyra view original on Twitter

So, what do docile bodies and social constructionism have to do with the Olympics, and why aren't women figure skaters doing quad jumps?

Disclaimer at this point: sport, especially at Olympic level is incredibly cisheteronormative. It doesn't cope well with anything other than cisgender dyadic bodies. Just ask Caster Semenya.

In a way that's what this entire thread is about. So I'm going to be talking about the kinds of bodies that sports governing bodies recognise as "women" and "men" - which are broadly speaking the bodies of cisgender dyadic people.

We can (and probably will) take this conversation further to see how this recognition and privileging of some bodies over others works to exclude and harm bodies and people who are othered by it. But that's the advanced class.

Now, here's what you get when you do Google image searches for "man", "woman", and "couple".

You might notice a few things here. 1. There are no black people. There are, in fact, hardly any people of colour (slightly more women than men, none in the couples).

2. There are hardly any people over 35, and the ones who are there are still painfully good-looking.

3. There's is considerably more variation of body type among the men than the women.

And 4. (this is most obvious in the couple shots) women are smaller than the men. Even the women athletes in these shots are small and slim, and in the couple shots we have men enveloping and bodily carrying women.

Zoologists call this "sexual dimorphism". It's a problematic term but I'm gonna use it for a moment.

Humans are a bit sexually dimorphic. More so than cats, considerably less so than, say, this lovely moth (image by Didier Descouens - CC BY-SA 4.0):

And this is where biologists & evolutionary psychologists come in with genetics, hormones, hunter-gatherer societies, etc.

These are bodies, right? They are the way they are, it's all genes, and maybe a bit of exercise and nutrition. Nothing socially constructed here.

Wrong.

Physiology is a thing, but physiology is shaped and mediated by our social context.

Look back at those pictures of "women". Those petite, delicate bodies, those faces we process as "beautiful". Those are the qualities that globally dominant Western cultures associate with "femininity".

And sport is one of the institutions that fiercely guards and reproduces dominant ideas about gender, masculinity and femininity. This plays out differently in different sports.

Generally, men and women compete separately. And for the purposes of sport "men" and "women" are defined as people whose bodies were assigned male or female at birth and whose gender matches that assignment.

Sport, especially elite sport, really struggles to accommodate trans and intersex people. To the extent that they come up with increasingly ludicrous tests and definitions of what "men" and "women" are.

[horrible violence against people whose bodies don't conform to those standards] Here are some of the gory details of what athletes who fall outside the "norm" are put through: newrepublic.com/article/136083…

Now, sports that construct themselves as "artistic", notably gymnastics and figure skating, have a slightly different way of enforcing gender norms. They're baked into the judging criteria.

Presentation and aesthetics are a bit part of how performance, and especially women's performance, in these sports is judged. And this in turn privileges certain body types. Slim, slight, invisibly muscular. Strength is hidden beneath an illusion of vulnerability.

Femininity is performed in these sports for the entire time the athlete is in public view. The make-up, the sequins, the fixed smiles, the presentation to the judges. Watch it, it's stunning.

There was a beautiful moment in the Olympic figure skating team event the other day where Ekaterina Bobrova, the Russian ice dancer, broke her perfomance of femininity right at the end of the long programme.

She's really pleased with how it went, she's tired and relieved, and you can see it in her face, and she also really aggressively high-fives her partner. And those aren't facial expressions or body language you normally see from women on the ice.

And within about two seconds she composes herself and puts on that graceful smile and body language. Track it down if you can, it's amazing to watch.

So having to hide your musculature and strength under a veil of femininity, (which in turn is defined as smallness, grace and vulnerability) ultimately puts limitations on what you can do with your body.

One of the best places to see this is elite gymnastics where women do not do the rings and men do not do beam. Here's a couple of good articles on the history of that: jezebel.com/5932478/female…

bustle.com/articles/17808…

What would women who could do the rings look like? Probably a bit like swimmers. Which is not a body type that's acceptable in gymnastics.

What would women look like who could do quad jumps in figure skating? Probably not that different to Hillary Knight. Again, not a body type that's rewarded or even acceptable in figure skating.

Now, what really gets me is snowboarding. Because on the face of it that's not a sport that's judged on the same gendered criteria of artistry and aesthetics as figure skating or gymnastics.

You'd think under all the skiing gear, helmets, scarves and goggles, it would be quite hard to perform femininity.

And still, as my friend whom I made watch slope style and half pipe for the first time in her life last night pointed out, the body types of the men and women riders are really rather different. You can tell even under all the gear.

And that translates to performance. Women get an amplitude of about 3m above the half pipe, men about 4-5m. The best women do 1080s (three revolutions), the best men 1440s (four revolutions).

Now, this is where I start to speculate, based on some theoretical knowledge of subcultures and a tiny bit of exposure to skateboarding and snowboarding cultures.

The seminal work on subcultures is Sarah Thornton's Club Cultures: Thornton, S. (1996). Club cultures: Music, media, and subcultural capital. Wesleyan University Press.

In it, she looks at the British clubbing scene in the early 1990s - a youth subculture that constructed itself as fiercely independent, anti-establishment, countercultural.

And what Thornton finds is that that subculture found ways to reproduce the same kinds of hierarchical structures of taste and cultural capital that mainstream and high cultures had.

It wasn't an "anything goes" kind of environment - some people were trend setters, some people were more respected than others, and you had to conform to certain styles and tastes, even though those were different to the mainstream.

Skateboard and snowboard cultures also construct themselves as countercultural. Snowboarding becoming an Olympic sport was hugely controversial in the community, seen as antithetical to the values of the sport.

Snowboarding's first Olympic medal lasted for 48 hours before Ross Rebagliati was disqualified because he tested positive for... wait for it... marijuana. (This disqualification was then reversed, and there's a whole other discussion to be had here re race.)

But much like any other subculture snowboarding reproduces hierarchical structures. Moves are named after people, some people find it easier to access than others (hint: it's a massively expensive sport), some people set trends.

One of the structures it reproduces is a gendered hierarchy. It's a very masculine culture. Women find it harder to access the sport, find it harder to be taken seriously as athletes in their own right rather than "just hangers-on".

And I have the sneaky suspicion that because the people with the most subcultural capital tend to be men and they decide whom they will admit and accept to the community, there are certain looks and body types of women who find it less hard (not easy!) to gain access.

And those happen to be the body types that may find it harder to do 1440s and to get 5m amplitude above the half pipe.

(What is an absolute delight though is watching those women keep pushing those boundaries. Seriously, watch Chloe Kim last run in the final, it was epic.)

But yeah, elite sports are a great illustration for how bodies are socially constructed and made docile. Some body types are valued and privileged by the structures of those sports. Some are penalised and excluded.

If the structures of those sports were different, the body types we'd see would be different, and the performances would be different.

For an example of the reproduction of gendered hierarchies in sport taken ad absurdum, see the hilarity of a women-only esports tournament trying to limit the number of lebian and trans women participants per team: business.financialpost.com/technology/gam…

This is really interesting one to me, because it's a great example of an alleged subculture or counterculture trying to gain respectability in the mainstream.

"We want to be recognised as a sport and other sports do this, so we should." rather than "We can make this up and radically redefine how sports deal with issues of gender and sexuality."

As a final thought I want to come back to that dominant Western construction of women and femininity as delicate, vulnerable and fragile. That construction is deeply, deeply racialised and impacts women of colour very differently.

Take a moment to read Sojourner Truth's 1851 speech "Ain't I a woman?" sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/sojtruth-w…

In it she takes that construction of femininity and absolutely shreds it to pieces, revealing how it's racialised.

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!"

"I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman?"

"I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?"

In the equivalent of three tweets, she does a stunning piece of deconstruction and discourse analysis 75 years before Foucault was even born.

And that racialised construction of femininity still operated in sports too. Go read up on Surya Bonaly if you don't believe me:

External Tweet loading...
If nothing shows, it may have been deleted
by @peachyblackgorl view original on Twitter

So. Bodies. Docile. Socially constructed.

And maybe you think that it's only sport and it doesn't really matter. But these constructions of femininity have profound material impacts on people's lives, in and outside sport.

[sexual abuse] If you somehow missed the Larry Nassar scandal in US gymnastics (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Gymna…), that's a good example of how that construction of femininity combines with other power structures to enable horrific abuse.

Here's a challenge: what would a radically different approach to sport look like that didn't reproduce sexism, racism, ableism, cisheteronormativity, and abuse?

I'm not looking for carving out niches for marginalised groups. I'm looking for ways of dismantling the whole thing, breaking it wide open.

Answers on the back of a postcard.

In the meantime, you can buy me coffee ko-fi.com/elmyra

Or if you'd like to help me gain the financial stability to do more of this work, you can support me on Patreon: patreon.com/elmyra

And while I'm here, a massive thank-you and shout-out to my first three patrons: Charlie, CL Gamble, and Tal S. You folks rock! :D