Introduction: women's sport and gender in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Through the unifying theme of sportswomen from sub-Saharan Africa, this volume breaks new ground within the study of women and gender. The collection also widens the canon of scholarship on sports, in which African women have long been on the periphery of methodological, theoretical and empirical discussion. This introduction has three parts. First, it sets forth the motivation for studying African sportswomen. Second, trajectories within scholarship on women and gender are traced from the second wave of Western feminist writing to debates about the category of ‘gender’ in Africa. This interdisciplinary review serves as the backdrop for the accompanying essays, a description of which comprise the final section of this introduction. The essays within this collection contribute new perspectives to studies of gender, sport and Africa, and African sportswomen offer a promising new approach for studying sport in society.

Notes

^1. For reviews of gender in African Studies published in the 1980s, see Stobel, ‘African Women’; Robertson, ‘Developing Economic Awareness’; and Hunt, ‘Placing African Women's History’. More recent reviews include Mama, Women's Studies and Studies of Women; Hunt, ‘Introduction’; and Lewis, ‘African Feminist Studies’.

^2. See, for instance, Guttmann, Women's Sports; Cahn, Coming on Strong; and Jarvie and Thornton, Sport, Culture and Society. For critical analyses of sport and gender, see Hargreaves, Sporting Females; Flintoff and Scraton, Gender and Sport; Heywood and Dworkin, Built to Win; and Markula, Feminist Sport Studies.

^3. A comprehensive explanation for the performance gap between African men and women in sports is not possible here but see, for instance, Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women. Its central premise is to understand ‘why African women have no time’ (p. 1). For accounts of exceptional female African athletes, see, for instance, Chepyator-Thomson, ‘African Women Run for Change’; Saavedra, ‘Maria Mutola’.

^4.Bale and Sang, Kenyan Running.

^5. For a recent review of the field of African sports, see Vidacs, ‘Through the Prism of Sports’.

^6. Ibid., 336.

^7.Wacquant, ‘Social Logic of Boxing’; Frey, Last Shot.

^8. Baseball: Klein, Sugarball. Football: Lopes, ‘Successes and Contradictions’; Armstrong and Giulianotti, Football in Africa. Basketball: Frey, Last Shot; Mandle and Mandle, Grass Roots Commitment; and Ralph, ‘Prototype’. See also Washington and David, ‘Sport and Society’.

^9.Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport; Jones, ‘In Pursuit of Empowerment’.

^10.Pelak, ‘Negotiating Gender/Race/Class Constraints’; Pelak, ‘Local-Global Processes’.

^11.Saavedra, ‘Dilemmas and Opportunities’; Meier and Saavedra, ‘Esther Phiri and the Moutawakel Effect’.

^12.Hartmann-Tews and Pfister, Sport and Women.

^13.Massao and Fasting, ‘Women and Sport in Tanzania’; Jones, ‘Women and Sport in South Africa’.

^14.Saavedra, ‘Football Feminine-Development’.

^15.Chepyator-Thomson, ‘African Women Run for Change’.

^16. There is a vast literature that examines gender in Africa. Further examination of this corpus of work can be found in the section below.

^17.Barber, ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, 1.

^18.Bloomfield, Africa United, 15.

^19. In her definition of popular arts, Barber wants to ‘include decorations on mammy wagons and fancy break labels but exclude religious doctrine, football, and carpentry’. Her justification for the latter is that although football and carpentry communicate ‘all kinds of meanings’, this is not their main function; Barber, ‘Popular Arts in Africa’, 41, 75.

^20.Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 165.

^21.Martin, Leisure and Society; Fair, Pastimes and Politics.

^22.Bale and Sang, Kenyan Running.

^23. In challenging universal assumptions about African women, Ifi Amadiume makes the point that ‘a picture of Bank women as universally deprived only reinforces racism’. See Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, 5. For other work on women who ‘push the boundaries of “acceptable” behavior’, see Hodgson and McCurdy, “Wicked” Women.

^24.Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’.

^25.Hunt, ‘Placing African Women's History’, 371.

^26.Mazrui, ‘Africa's Triple Heritage of Play’. However, scholars have critiqued his argument for historical demarcations that are both arbitrary and incorrect. See, for instance, Habtu, ‘Fallacy of the “Triple Heritage”’.

^27.Madougall, ‘Women Who Became Athletes’, 51.

^28.Ajayi-Soyinka, ‘Who is Afraid of Agency?’ 72; Hunt, ‘Placing African Women's History’, 371.

^29.Philip, ‘Scouting an Anthropology of Sport’, 43.

^30. What follows is an overview of the trajectory of the study of women's and gender's history. It does not claim to provide a full historiography of feminist thought but rather an identification of some of the major trends, ideas and debates that have influenced the field.

^31.Boydston, ‘Gender as a Question’, 561; Bay, ‘Introduction’. The word ‘feminist’, as used here, refers to the second wave of feminism, the twentieth-century women's rights movement.

^32.Freedman, No Turning Back, 226.

^33. This outgrowth of scholarship can also be attributed to other factors, including but not limited to national political and economic conditions, the rise of the women and development industry and the emergence of state feminism. See Ampofo et al., ‘Women's and Gender Studies’.

^34.Boserup, Woman's Role in Economic Development. For work influenced by Boserup, see, for instance, Bryceson, Women Wielding the Hoe.

^35. This periodization coincides with previous reviews of the literature. See also Robertson, ‘Developing Economic Awareness’, 101; Hunt, ‘Introduction’, 12.

^36.Hafkin and Bay, Women in Africa; Bay, Women and Work in Africa; and Robertson and Berger, Women and Class.

^37.Cornwall has pointed out that images of African women's power derive largely from studies of West Africa. See Cornwall, ‘Introduction’; Sow, ‘Social Sciences in Africa’; and Hafkin and Bay, ‘Introduction’.

^38.Evans, ‘Gender’, 230; Meyerowitz, ‘History of “Gender”’, 1346.

^39.Rubin, ‘Traffic in Women’, 90.

^40.Butler, Gender Trouble; McDowell, Capital Culture; and Dayton and Levenstein, ‘Big Tent’, 800.

^41. Since the passage of Title IX, high school girls' sports participation increased from 294,015 in 1971 to 2,784,154 in 2001. See Dworkin and Messner, ‘Introduction’, 348.

^42.Dayton and Levenstein, ‘Big Tent’, 817.

^43.Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy; Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation; and Ollengurger and Moore, Sociology of Women.

^44.Canning, ‘Gender History’, 6006; See especially Chapter One in Gordon, Transforming Capitalism and Patriarchy; Sow, ‘Social Sciences in Africa’.

^45.Geiger, ‘Women and Class in Africa’, 120.

^46. Ibid. This was similar to the analysis used within the domestic labour debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which focused on how unpaid work in industrialized countries lowers the costs of maintenance and reproduction of the labour force. This debate legitimated feminist questions within a Marxist paradigm but was also criticized for its failure to identify or analyse gender relations implicit in the household division of labour. See Benería, ‘Toward a Greater Integration’.

^47.Dayton and Levenstein, ‘Big Tent’, 795.

^48.Scott, ‘Gender’, 1064; Stamp, Technology, Gender, and Power.

^49.Scott, ‘Gender’, 1064.

^50.Canning, ‘Gender History’, 6007.

^51.Scott, ‘Gender’; For discussion of the impact of Joan Scott's essay, see Scott, Gender and the Politics; AHR Forum, ‘Revisiting Gender’.

^52.Scott, ‘Gender’, 1055.

^53. Ibid., 1067.

^54. Ibid., 1067; Meyerowitz, ‘History of “Gender”’, 1347.

^55.hooks, Ain't I a Woman; Zeleza, ‘Gender Biases in African Historiography’; hooks, ‘Black Women Shaping Feminist Theory’; and Collins, ‘Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought’.

^56.Dayton and Levenstein, ‘Big Tent’, 797.

^57.Kent, ‘Mistrials and Diatribulations’, 15.

^58. Ibid., 13.

^59.Flax, Disputed Subjects, 30.

^60.Bruening, ‘Gender and Racial Analysis’, 331.

^61.Collins, Black Feminist Thought.

^62.Hoff, ‘Reply to My Critics’, 25.

^63.Jonasdottir, ‘On the Concept of Interest’, 38.

^64. Ibid., 38.

^65.Mama, Women's Studies and Studies of Women; Ampofo et al., ‘Women's and Gender Studies’.

^66.Nzomo, ‘Women and Democratization Struggles’, 136.

^67. Ibid., 141.

^68. Ibid., 137.

^69.Mama, ‘Shedding the Masks’.

^70.Boyce Davies and Greeves, Ngambika.

^71.Gordon, Transforming Capitalism and Patriarchy, 37.

^72.Oyěwùmí, Invention of Women; Oyěwùmí, African Women and Feminism.

^73.Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, 185.

^74.Butler, Gender Trouble; Butler, Bodies that Matter.

^75.Meyerowitz, ‘History of “Gender”’, 1348.

^76.Dayton and Levenstien, ‘Big Tent’, 796.

^77.Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 14. For a recent review of the field, see Dayton and Levenstein, ‘Big Tent’.

^78.MacIain, ‘Let Us be United’, 108. The point must also be made that these viewpoints represent only some of the approaches for rethinking gender in feminist theoretical analysis of African women, and that this account leaves unexplored the vast range of current issues related to women's lives at various political and socio-economic levels across the continent.

^79.Boydston, ‘Gender as a Question’, 561.

^80.Hoff, ‘Reply to My Critics’, 27.

^81.Lloyd, Beyond Identity Politics, 56.