Cohesive Narratives: Dissolving Aotearoa/New Zealand's Heroines of Water

In this paper, the biographical sporting narratives produced about a selection of New Zealand's most successful women swimmers are interrogated and analyzed. It is argued that biographical narratives, ironically, pay insufficient attention to the complexity and fluidity of ‘character’. As such, it is suggested that the interrogation of fictional characters is a useful way of exploring the cultural conditions of possibility which shape the (re)production of sporting heroines. To this end, the narrative of a fictional swimmer, Alex, is compared and contrasted to the biographical sports narratives of New Zealand women swimmers, and the untapped political possibilities of a fictional sports heroine are discussed.

Notes

[1] Duder, Alex, 1.

[2] Jackson and Andrews, Sport Stars; Whannel, Media Sport Stars; Whannel, Sport Stars, Narrativization and Masculinities; Smart, The Sport Star; Haig-Muir, ‘Qualified Success?’; Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity; Rojek, Sports Celebrity and the Civilizing Process; Lines, Villains, Fools or Heroes?.

[3] Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport.

[4] Baker, Contesting Identities; Tudor, Hollywood's Vision of Team Sports, are two such examples.

[5] This is, of course, not to ignore the work of Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes; Messenger, Sport and the Sprit of Play in American Fiction; Berman, Playful Fictions and Fictional Players.

[6] Foucault, The Subject and Power, 777.

[7] Duder, Alex.

[8] Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 1.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 1–5.

[11] Ibid., 5.

[12] Ibid., 1–5.

[13] Munt, Heroics of Desire, cited in Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 2.

[14] Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 2.

[15] The selection is purposeful as it includes both the literature of sports ‘scholarship’ and that of fictional literature.

[16] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 197.

[17] http://www.swimforlife.org.nz/ and http://www.watersafety.org.nz/.

[18] For the purposes of analysis, several New Zealand women swimmers who are constructed as heroines in three different texts are drawn upon. They are: Jean Stewart, the first (and only) woman to win an Olympic swimming medal for New Zealand; Violet Walrond, the first woman to compete for New Zealand at an Olympic Games; Rebecca Perrott, Commonwealth Games medal winner and Olympic medal hopeful before the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games; and Meda McKenzie – esteemed ocean swimmer. The texts are cited each time a quotation is borrowed from a particular narrative. Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen; Romanos, Our Olympic Century; Williams, Between the Lanes.

[19] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 208.

[20] Ibid., 197.

[21] Cahn, Coming on Strong.

[22] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 210; Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 26.

[23] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 212; Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 26.

[24] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 203.

[25] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 208; Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 70. Here the following works are also referred to: Lenskyj, Out of Bounds; Cahn, Coming on Strong; Twin, Out of the Bleachers; Obel, Bruce and Thompson, Outstanding Research About Women and Sport in New Zealand.

[26] Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 29.

[27] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 204, 207–28.

[28] Ibid., 215.

[29] Ibid., 208, 215; Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 141.

[30] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 205–206.

[31] Ibid., 206, 219.

[32] Keeping in mind that all heroines that are discussed finished swimming competitively prior to 1980. Moreover, the biographical text predominantly drawn upon was published in 1982.

[33] Williams, Between the Lanes, 3–4.

[34] Ibid., 57.

[35] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 209.

[36] Ibid., 210.

[37] Ibid., 208.

[38] Ibid., 212, 219.

[39] Williams, Between the Lanes, 76.

[40] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 211; Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 26.

[41] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 213, 215.

[42] Ibid., 205.

[43] Ibid., 212; Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 70.

[44] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 214.

[45] Duder, Alex, 33.

[46] Ibid., 4.

[47] Ibid., 23.

[48] Ibid., 70.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid., 86.

[51] Perrott made the decision to withdraw from the Olympic Games before the decision to not send a New Zealand team was announced - despite reportedly being in the best form of her life, and all but guaranteed an Olympic medal.

[52] Simons, New Zealand's Champion Sportswomen, 206; Romanos, Our Olympic Century, 152.

[53] Duder, Alex, 67.

[54] Ibid., 66.

[55] Ibid., 68.

[56] Ibid., 26.

[57] Ibid., 33.

[58] Ibid., 57.

[59] Ibid., 88.

[60] Ibid., 46.

[61] Alex's unfortunate hockey accident in which she breaks her leg forces her to also ‘break’ with the other things that make her who she is – a high-achiever with many and varied interests. In her quest for Rome she is cut off from all her other activities. She is resigned that she will now only concentrate on swimming, but while her leg is ‘broken’ she cannot even be that swimmer.

[62] Duder, Alex, 68.

[63] Ibid., 94.

[64] Ibid., 133.

[65] Duder, Alex, 133.

[66] Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, 3.

[67] Ibid., 3, refers to a mountain climbing mother who died during a climb and was publicly abhorred for neglecting her duties as a ‘mother’.

[68] Duder, Alex, 143.

[69] Borrowed from Sprawson, Haunts of the Black Masseur.

[70] Duder, Alex, 157.