Conclusion: Sex Power and the Games Conclusion

Abstract

This book started with a series of tensions and puzzles; firstly about the contradictions of the Olympics in negotiating the democratic principles of the Olympic Movement and the demands of elite sport in a climate of increased commercialisation and professionalisation. Secondly there are issues of what is said and what remains unsaid, for example about unravelling the discourse of widening participation and what sort of language is it that uses sport, and the games in particular to provide equal opportunities and how can the powerful forces which are divisive and exclude some people, be explained. There is always the danger of constructing those who are targeted as outside or under represented, as victims, especially within the charitable discourses of social inclusion. Those not in the mainstream are worthy but not elite athletes. Visibility and invisibility are central to the discussion in the book as are the power axes which operate to produce opportunities and to deny them, none more so than in the case of sex gender which has been deployed to provide explanations of the processes and systems and the enfleshed engagements through which the games are constitute. The games reflect social and cultural materialities but sport is also specific and constitutive of those wider social relations and divisions. One of the particularities of sport is its enfleshed and embodied practices and encounters. Sex matters in sport; it provides the basis for the organisation of competitions, events and structures. The Olympics are more egalitarian in many ways, including participation in the sports themselves but there are diverse and multiple ways in which inequalities are perpetuated through sex gender. Sex gender is powerful constituted through the enfleshed practices of sport which travel into other social and cultural spaces.