Today, we had two speakers come and discuss the role of women in sports in my Intro to Women's Studies class. While the women who presented were both great at providing interesting and personal examples from which they successfully expanded to frame relevant discussions on gender roles, equality and athletic culture, I felt the dialogue was constantly limited and muffled. What was making me so frustrated? Why did I feel as though we weren't pushing ourselves to bring individual accounts of gender and sports to a challenging level?
I think a lot of my restlessness stems from the assumptions we make about scientific "fact" and biological essentialism -- concepts that prevent us from exploring or dissecting particular topics regarding men and women because we believe in pure, fundamental differences that are rooted in things like, ah that's right, fucking "testosterone." The virtually undisputed "evidence" of "masculinity".....I like quotes....
So yeah, let's talk about testosterone, because that word was repeatedly used in class today to mean some kind of male strength elusive to the average female -- as though with the hormone came a neatly-packaged set of muscles and "manpower" unmatched by any woman. We regularly come to this type of conclusion that we feel undoubtedly splits men and women. But hormones themselves are used by the body for all kinds of processes and are not limited to the development of secondary sex characteristics, which they do, in fact, aid, but do not fully and exclusively serve.
Feminist-biologist professor at Brown University, Ann Fausto-Stelring, writes in her fabulous book Sexing the Body about the role cultural assumptions play in shaping scientific narratives: what are we studying in science? What are we not studying? How to societal frameworks circumscribe the facilitation of experiments? Science is not done in a vacuum, people....
Fausto-Sterling writes that "if hormones could not be defined as male and female by virtue of their unique presence in either a male or a female body, then how could scientists define them in a manner that would prove translatable among different research laboratories...?" She is emphasizing that this universal understanding of hormones as biological indicators of fundamental differences in men and women is much more complicated than we think, though it is constantly silenced and/or simplified in mainstream discourse.
This brings me back to the discussion today. People mentioned their own experiences, including many of the women in my class who felt they were regularly underminded, overprotected or held to a double standard as female athletes in high school: boys didn't want to hurt them and nobody wanted the girls to get hurt....
But many of these stories failed to answer burning questions, or should I say, to raise such questions: IS there in fact a known fundamental difference in men's and women's bodies that will forever be a separation of ability in athletics? One of the speakers mentioned co-ed sports on the professional level cannot happen because men and women, while equal, are different, but is that absolute truth? Do reproductive capacities extend to the baseball field as some sort of biological barrier?
Our bodies are wondrous things. They adapt to crazy environments, interact complexly with our emotions and cognitive development. They can shape and grow to fit amazing circumstances. Our culture creates our bodies as much what genes predispose them to. Who's to say that if different conditions or less limited possibilities would rule a culture, women and men wouldn't necessarily see athletic competition more egalitarian?
The assumption that women are "naturally" more fragile, less aggressive, physically weaker is assuming we can even define human nature when attempting to do so is in and of itself an act of cultural assignment based on our value systems. Humans are not pure forms of nature; we are messy, sometimes democratic, sometimes intellectually curious beings who make interesting ideas that affect the entire human system's understanding, treatment and production of bodies in different forms.
I disavow from the "women are inherently weaker" mentality. It's too limiting. You say women have always been a certain way, that football is somehow connected to levels of testosterone. I'm calling bullshit. Let's explore more. Push more.
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