Querying Sport Feminism: Personal or Political?

Abstract

Sport feminism is hard to define. In reality, there has been no coherent, cohesive, authentic sport feminism, but many different manifestations, philosophies or feminisms which, it has been argued, have common characteristics with the many faces of mainstream feminism (Hargreaves, 1994; Hall, 1996; Birrell, 2000, pp. 25–41). Like the latter, sport feminisms have occurred both at the intellectual level, resulting from ideas, arguments, theories, or academic discourses and, secondly, as expressions of political action through membership of official bodies, sport organizations and related institutions. However, until postmodernism emerged, all the different forms of sport feminist activity have had a common kernel: to expose, challenge and eliminate gender-based dominant policies and practices. Sport feminisms have been linked historically to anti-discriminatory work regarding subordinated women (and relatively recently to the production of hegemonic and subordinated sporting masculinities — see, for example, Messner & Sabo, 1990) in particular to their sense and reality of dislocation, marginalization and disenfranchisement in sport.