Gender and jockography: post-feminism and resistance in female sports autobiographies

Abstract

While research consistently shows news media’s devaluation of female athletes, “the jockography,” or sports autobiography, is one form of widely-consumed media through which female athletes can construct their own representation. However, there has been little consideration of the genre. This essay addresses this gap by analyzing how thirty women’s jockographies published since 1992 rhetorically construct female athletic identity and sports practice. It finds that most athletes, regardless of their sport or racial or class background, constitute their identities and participation in ways that reinforce post-feminist notions of upward mobility and heterosexual femininity while failing to confront inequalities affecting women in sport. Nevertheless, a few recent jockographies challenge normalizing discourses, asking readers to recognize differences between women and confront inequities shaping their athletic experiences.

Keywords:

• Sports
• media
• autobiography
• post-feminism
• gender

Notes

1. See for example, Wilt Chamberlain’s A View From Above (1991) in which Chamberlain claimed he slept with twenty thousand women; Jose Canseco’s jockography, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big (2005), which started a Congressional inquiry into sports doping; Andre Agassi’s Open (2007), which hyped Agassi’s use of crystal meth; or Hope Solo’s Solo: A Memoir of Hope (2012), which detailed her controversial benching and fights with her teammates during the 2007 World Cup.

2. In his interviews with ghost writers of celebrity sports memoirs, Pipkin documents how athletes are not just “passive object[s] for the book,” but participate actively in the construction of their autobiographies (2008, 11–14). He cites ghost writers like Roy Johnson, who declares that jockographies are about “what the athletes wants to tell” (13), and Peter Knobler, who asserts that “Everything that gets in the book is clearly from [the athlete] … The athletes talk it, they tell it, they read it to make sure it’s right” (12). Athletes originate themes and determine what is important to tell as well as how they feel about it, and their worldviews are incorporated into their books. Because ghost-written jockographies tell athletes’ stories by drawing upon the athlete’s memories and self-images as well as their “understanding of the meaning of … life,” they are as “authentic” as individually penned autobiographies (11–14).

3. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant have shown, racial identity should not be understood as a fixed category; race is a fluid, historically contingent construction which evolves over time (1994, 157). Racial designations in this study are thus based on how authors self-identify in their books.

4. Steve Martinot’s (2000) review of the historical construction of class in the US provides insight into the racialized nature of class politics. Arguing that race is “the primary mode of organizing labor itself” (51), Martinot traces the production of class back to the economic system of plantation slavery and the creation of social distinctions between European and African bond laborers through the heterosexual regulation of female sexuality. Functioning alongside the slave market, colonial statutes that assigned children to the servitude status of their mothers served colonial planters’ economic interests and “invented whiteness” by creating distinctions between women of European and African descent (46). While all women were relegated to “the level of productive resources,” women of European descent became the “embodiment of purity” as well as whiteness (48). Thus, according to Martinot, “racism and white supremacy” produce class structure in the US (51). Similarly, Jeffrey A. Brown (2005) notes that “skin color and gender behavior have become signs of class rank in that they are indicative of an individual’s ability or inability to conform to dominant standards of conduct” (75–76). For example, Brown observes that the term “white trash” is applied only to “economically disadvantaged whites” who “need to be double marked as trash” to show their perceived distance from whiteness (76).

5. Notably, confessions of traumatic sport experiences are by athletes in individual sports. This reflects the far greater number of jockographies by individual athletes, but also indicates female team participation’s psychologically protective effects (Women’s Sports Foundation 2009, 45).

6. A few athletes contest notions of moderation. Kerri Strugg, whose vault on an injured leg won an Olympic gold medal while reigniting public debates over girls’ participation in such a demanding sport, criticizes opinions that gymnastics is too risky, calling it “sex discrimination.” She asks readers whether her experiences are different from a teenaged football player “who smashes his body into blockers and spends six hours a day training” (1997, 32). Ultra-runner Pam Reed similarly opposes perceptions that her extreme training practices are unhealthy. Stating that excessive behavior is part of elite practice, she asserts “I am an elite athlete. It actually took me a long time to acknowledge that … I want to live up to that reality” (2006, 26). Reed refuses demands for moderation which she sees as limiting her potential.

7. An exception is Chamiqua Holdsclaw’s confession of experiences with depression. However, Holdsclaw does not blame her illness on sports, writing, “I can’t wait to get back out there on the court” (2012, 234).

8. Solo has been attacked for what many perceive as inappropriate outspokenness, individualism, and lack of gratitude to the 1999 World Cup players. ESPNW commentators described her as potentially harming women’s sports due to her inability to be “a good team player” (ESPNW 2012). Williams and her sister Venus have been pilloried by the press, presented as intruders into the wealthy, white world of tennis, characterized as “‘uppity’ black women,” and portrayed as deviant, animalistic, and threatening (Douglas 2002, 7.5; McKay and Johnson 2008). Williams faced particular condemnation for speaking back to a line judge at the 2009 US Open, and for comments she made to Rolling Stone in 2013 about a famous rape case.