Women’s Standpoints and Internalism in Sport

Abstract

David Fairchild explains that sport is an evocative symbolic system that demonstrates the apparently ‘natural’ division of humans into two separate and dichotomous genders, and also demonstrates the apparently ‘genetically based’ hierarchy between the genders in terms of sporting results. Additionally, this hierarchy of performance translates into a hierarchy of authority, such that men occupy the most powerful positions in coaching, administration and the sports media. The initial section of this paper will follow on from Fairchild to suggest some changes that are necessary before women will gain semantic authority over their participation in sport. The paper will then suggest that the expansion of the discursive space in sport to include alternate standpoints produced by women [and other marginalised groups] can follow tactics employed by feminist standpoint theorists to expand discursive space in other fields. The final section of the paper will look at how a feminist politics in discursive sport will need to challenge what William Morgan has suggested is the recently acquired dominant position of ‘interpretative broad internalism’ in sport philosophy as one of the foundational underpinnings of internalism explains sport as a perfect practice. This underpinning has been used in substantive practice to undermine the knowledges of women athletes and commentators. This final section will look at some examples of translating private authorship into political authority for women in sport.

Keywords:

• Standpoint feminism
• Authority
• Women
• sport

Notes

1. MacKinnon explains that ‘if you are the tree falling in the epistemological forest, your demise doesn’t make a sound if no-one is listening’ (1987, 169).

2. Leslie Francis’ views on the reconstruction of basketball by women athletes to foreground passing and player movement (1993–94, 43) may also make the women’s game in college or the WNBA a more appropriate model for junior and recreational participants than the men’s game of dunks and isolation plays. My feeling in watching the NCAA final four basketball competitions for 2013 was that the best team to observe for such participants was UConn women’s team. I apologise for sinking back into the discourse of perfection, but they were pretty close to perfection.

3. Translating these experience-based perspectives into dominant discourses is not fully discussed or developed in this paper, and it would involve devising new strategies for the female to assume epistemic authority. Marianne Janack suggests that the important and pragmatic question for feminists to address is to work out how to have their experiences included in theory making; in other words, how can their experiences be given epistemic authority? (1997, 130). Once authority is granted, privilege and justification will follow automatically.

4. I would suggest that elements of Iris Marion-Young (1980) convey this anger. Marion-Young, in describing the source of women being physically handicapped, points accusingly at patriarchal culture which trains women to be ‘physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified’ (1980, 152). Marion-Young’s hours spent practicing a feminine walk (1980, 154) implies anger towards their oppressors.

5. As an example, Ruth Hubbard looks at the way that evolutionary theory starts and ends with the ‘Man the Hunter’ evolutionary story, a story that was dominated by the development of male skills and abilities. As these types of deconstructive ideas were developed in a variety of areas of the natural and social sciences, there developed a ‘more general criticism… of how gender bias was itself shaping the norms and standards of those disciplines’ (Grasswick and Webb 2002, 188).

6. I am going to ignore the realist/antirealist debate in this paper, although I concur with Morgan’s response to Dixon’s support for realism that the ‘view from nowhere’ leaves us with a complete absence of values (2004, 165–170). My feminist response to realism is that for groups who do not have epistemic authority, realism has often been a terrible starting position.

7. Morgan’s antirealist position is much more able to accommodate changes in normative judgements that would suit feminist goals for two reasons. Firstly, he acknowledges that the internalist position that success in sport should correlate with excellent performance exists because ‘people like us go in for sports that feature this kind of excellence’ (2004, 171). If other people don’t go in for this form of excellence, then they are free to produce an alternate vision of sport. Secondly, Morgan also points to the work of moral entrepreneurs who can change the deep conventions that produce current support for this internalist principle (2012). I would presume that feminist standpoint theorists could be considered moral entrepreneurs who could produce a rival conception of sport that would support externalist feminist goals and could generate a different community of practitioners. Finally, Morgan is acutely aware of the ‘social and historical forces that shape so much of our sporting lives’ (2012, 66). I have no doubt that the dominance of men and male interests in the social and historical context of sport has a lot to do with the current normative evaluations that are made.

8. Watson (1993, 513) and others have noted that the pursuit of excellence also results in disadvantage for certain categories of men. The difference is that the pursuit of excellence discriminates [in most sports] against all women.

9. I think an excellent model for this liberatory externalist perspective actually comes from John Russell’s (2004) example of James ‘Cool Papa’ Bell, inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 for his outstanding achievements playing in the Negro Leagues. Russell demonstrates that Bell’s moral qualities were also excellent by giving a couple of stories which show Bell’s generosity in promoting the careers of other Black baseballers players, Jackie Robinson and Monte Irvine. Russell notes that it was Bell’s recognition of the external contingencies of his time, the need for Black baseball players to push through and eliminate the barrier on Black players in the Major Leagues, which elevated Bell’s actions from privately generous to politically important, and contributed to the normative judgment that Bell was a good sport. From a standpoint position, the important point is that Bell was able to recognise, not just the boundaries between sport and other parts of life, but the significant overlaps. Breaking the Black barrier in Major League Baseball was a significant turning point in broader race relations in the United States. I’m not sure that Bell’s pursuit of private perfection in baseball would have allowed for such vision.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Burke

Institute of Sport, Exercise and Active Living, College of Sport and Exercise Science, Victoria University, PO Box 14428, Melbourne City, MC, 8001, Australia.