Gender and sports studies: An historical perspective

Abstract

In the late 1970s, scholars from North America began to incorporate gender in their critique of contemporary sport, and soon thereafter European sports scholars also embraced gender as a transformative concept in the discipline of Sports Studies. Initially, scholars focused on the female athlete as a subject from a disciplinary perspective. With the inclusion of gender in the 1980s, scholars turned from a "categoric" to a "relational" perspective and gender was thus expanded beyond that of a distinct category and redefined as a dynamic, relational process that introduced new directions, theories, and paradigms for research in Sports Studies as the focus shifted from the female athlete to a cultural critique of sport using interdisciplinary and cultural studies perspectives. Most recently gender has been viewed as both interrelational and intersubjective as scholars began to challenge the universalizing nature of feminism and its uniformity in the 1990s. A paradigmatic shift toward intersectionality emerged and enabled scholars to critique the view that gender was monolithic; rather they purported that it intersects with a number of other dimensions of human experience and identity such as age, ethnicity, race, and social class in sport. This shift encouraged a more trandisciplinary and transnational focus concerning the study of sport. This perspective has paralleled and contributed to the inclusion of such topics as language, power, narrativity, and representation and has yet again transformed the scholarly analysis of sport.