‘Eligibility regulations for the female classification’: somatechnics, women’s bodies, and elite sport

ABSTRACT

Employing Nikki Sullivan’s notion of somatechnics, this article looks at the bodies of women athletes as sites of embodied subjectivity and considers how they are marked in medical discourses produced by significant cultural entities such as sporting governing bodies and their medical experts involved in the management and treatment of women athletes born with particular intersex variations. Somatechnics is understood in this paper as co-constitutive by developing understanding of how bodies are seen and produced in ways that are always already intertwined. To do this, we draw on two interviews with Dr Patrick Schamasch, the former Medical and Scientific Director of the International Olympic Committee and Dr Hermina Schneider, a Sports Medicine Expert of a European National Olympic Committee and their unique, unreported, and unofficial discourses and actions concerning contemporary eligibility regulations/tests in women’s sport. Building on the notion of somatechnics, our, focus is on developing understanding of the regulation of the corporeality of women athletes. Our aim is not to elucidate the truth of such regulations, but to contribute to an understanding of how modificatory practices aimed at women athletes endure, and the rationales governing the thinking behind those who are the authors of eligibility regulations for the female classification.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersex
• bodies
• somatechnics
• modificatory practices
• eligibility regulations for the female classification
• embodied subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Following a Congress decision in June 2019, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) changed its official name to World Athletics (WA). As this research deals with time periods prior and post to the name change, we adopt the acronym IAAF/WA when referring to the organisation throughout this analysis.

2. We will collectively be referring to sex testing/femininity testing/gender verifications /hyperandrogenism regulations/differences of sex development regulations as eligibility regulations/tests in women’s sport.

3. This analysis makes use of the following terminologies when referring to the same cohort of people: ‘intersex’, and ‘differences of sex development’ (DSD).

4. The Darlington Statement (Androgen Insensitivity Support Syndrome Support Group Australia, 2017) informs our investigation of somatechnologies and eligibility regulations/tests in women’s sport.

5. Some of MacLure’s questions that were useful for this analysis were: 1) How are different knowledge claims established and defended? 2) Where does this text get its authority? 3) How does this text persuade [or not persuade]? 4) Where does power reside in this text? 5) Whose ‘voices’ are privileged in this text? Who is silenced? 6) How are subjects drawn in this text? Who gets agency? 7) Where are the gaps, silences and inconsistencies in this text? (Macluse, 2003, p. 82).

6. Body Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves (2003) and Body Modification Mark II (2005).