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ABSTRACT
This paper is an examination of the concept of recognition and its connection with identity and respect. This is related to the question of how women are or are not adequately recognised or respected for their achievements in sport and whether eliminating sex segregation in sport is a solution. This will require an analysis of the concept of excellence in sport, as well as the relationship between fairness and inclusion in an activity that is fundamentally about bodily movement. I argue that attempts to address the problem of women’s recognition in sport need to do so in ways that neither eliminate sport as a fairness-regulated system for developing individual excellence in bodily movement nor that prevent women’s achievement of sporting excellence, with the regard that belongs to them. Doing this requires us to decide whether sport is about champions or about individual excellence.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. To be clear, I am not in favour of a rigid separation of the sexes, and have myself benefitted from being able to compete in a number of sports in women’s, mixed, and (nominally) men’s events. I have discussed some aspects of the segregation issue elsewhere (Howe Citation2015).
2. The situation described by Hegel is perhaps better grasped in the terms presented in Lugones (Citation1996), that is, as the capacity/necessity of oppressed or culturally erased individuals to pass through not just one, but several, ‘worlds’, their own and their oppressors. The consequence is that the subordinated individual becomes adept at recognising and expressing multiple languages of self and thus has a more developed consciousness of self.
3. This is extensively discussed by Sartre (Citation1966). See Part Three, Ch. One, IV ‘The Look’ and Ch. Three ‘Concrete Relations with Others’.
4. Darwall does in one place describe appraisal respect as categorical, but this is in arguing against a kind of conditional or instrumental appraisal. To describe someone as ‘smart’ only because they plead my case for me or in order to get others to view them in some way, is to fail to offer the kind of respect with which Darwall is principally concerned (Darwall, Citation1977, 44).
5. Thus, one might be so appraised if one had won without resort to ethically wrong conduct–or lost when one could have won because one refused to cheat. See Darwall, 43: ‘Furthermore, those features of persons which form the basis of appraisal respect seem to be those which belong to them as moral agents’.
6. See also Nance re: Fichte: ‘ … recognition is a public judgement that expresses an attitude toward the recognized, who endorses the attitude and the authority of the recognizer to make such a judgement ….[T]he element of mutuality is what makes recognition a unique practical attitude that is distinct from, say, respect or admiration, which need not involve “uptake” from the other who is respected or admired. Secret admiration is possible, but secret recognition is not’ (Citation2015, 612). Butler’s view is in this respect closer to Fichte’s than Nietzsche’s: ‘If I give an account of myself in response to such a query, I am implicated in a relation to the other before whom and to whom I speak. Thus, I come into being as a reflexive subject in the context of establishing a narrative account of myself when I am spoken to by someone and prompted to address myself to the one who addresses me’ (Butler Citation2005, 15).
7. Consequently, these examples are very different from the denial of the other inherent in the ‘how dare you’ response that many women (and others) encounter when questioning the right of those in dominant positions to proceed as they please unchallenged. Brett Kavanaugh’s US Senate confirmation hearing provided a particularly egregious instance.
8. See also Habermas (Citation1993), 189–191 on this point.
9. Thus, for example, the politically explicit recognition of indigenous peoples by settler governments is a recognition (I) of particularity and concrete history, one that is self-appropriated as defining for members of First Nations, but it is not simply a recognition of difference from non-indigenous peoples. It is also the recognition (P) of those peoples as peoples and persons, subsequent to a colonising history of failing to do so.
10. This is one of the reasons (there are others) that ‘esport’ isn’t a sport, but a different kind of activity with sportive analogies.
11. Fairness thus also stands as the sort of constitutive ethical principle of a practice to which Darwall refers.
12. Loland (Citation2002). Note also the complex classification systems in disabled sport, which are meant to balance abilities in a way to maximise fairness in competition. Indeed, disabled sport is a particularly trenchant example of the way in which bodies matter in both the defining and the conduct of sport as in defining disability, as well as in determining how inclusion and fairness interact.
13. Tännsjö relies on the statistical argument as a prelude to his suggestion (1) that highly competent women should not be prevented from demonstrating their superiority over most men (Tännsjö Citation2007, 349) and (2) that women should have the possibility of gaining their sporting equality with men through genetic modification (Tamburrini and Torbjörn Citation2005, 182), in effect, improving their statistical anomality to ‘catch up to’ the male standard. A fuller discussion of these views is in Howe (Citation2015). See also Sherwin and Schwartz (Citation2005)
14. A relevant recent study, however, is Knox, Anderson, and Heather (Citation2019).
15. See also Devine (Citation2018) on fairness in relation to athletes with a history of legitimate or illegitimate steroid use.
16. There are a number of possible explanations for this; a possibility is that the characteristics required for success are thus ‘hoarded’.
17. Which seems a more plausible explanation given such historical examples as the English FA’s ban on women’s football; see, e.g. Edwards, Davis, and Forbes (Citation2015, 390–392).