From powerhouses to pixies and back: Boys, men, and troubled masculinity in artistic gymnastics

Abstract

Gymnastics, as Natalie Barker-Ruchti (2008) notes, has been described as the sport of pixies since Olga Korbut's emergence on the world stage in the 1970s. Implicit in this claim is the notion that gymnastics is a sport for women and girls. Contrary to this public perception, men and boys have participated in modern gymnastics competitions since the nineteenth century, decades before women were allowed to compete in the elite ranks of the sport. This misperception creates a conundrum for boys and men who participate in what is still often perceived as a girls' sport (Schmalz & Kerstetter, 2006). How has the tension between gymnastics participation and masculinity been created and maintained among its participants, administrators, and spectators, and how is this tension manifest today? To address these questions and the theoretical concerns underlying them, this chapter does the following: (1) explores ideas about masculinity expressed about the burgeoning men's gymnastics programs in Europe in the twentieth century, (2) analyzes competition regulations that purport to minimize differences between men's and women's performances while simultaneously highlighting the supposedly inherent differences between male and female bodies, and (3) critically examines media practices that constitute male gymnast bodies within frameworks of compulsory heterosexuality and traditional manhood, thereby "protecting" those bodies-and the sport itself-from charges of failed masculinity, to use Jack Halberstam's (2011) term. I argue that, because of the fraught relationship between men's gymnastics and its somewhat more popular women's counterpart, male gymnasts occupy a precarious position in the public imagination, a position from which their bodies serve as a repository for anxieties about unstable gender norms.