Sport beyond gender and the emergence of cyborg athletes

Abstract

The essay is based on two premises: (1) sports culture (as we know it) is based upon rather specific (masculine) gender structures; (2) technological innovations play a significant role in modern sport. I combine these two premises and discuss whether technologies can be used as tools in order to make sport gender neutral and therefore more genuine or authentic. I argue that we have good reasons to make such a claim, based on the fast development of sport technology as a whole. But this claim is not unproblematic. In fact, the main problem may not be the advantages that come with the technologies, but that we tend to hold on to conservative ideas regarding gender. Nonetheless, perhaps the development of sport technologies may undermine the foundation of gender, which may in turn lead to the birth of a new kind of athlete: (non-gendered) cyborg athletes.

Notes

¹ Shogan, ‘Disciplinary Technologies’, 94.

² The easiest way of describing the concept of cyborgs is to say that it is a hybrid of organic life and technological systems. The more popular way of describing it is to say that it is a combination of ‘man’ and ‘machine’. See for example, Davis-Floyd and Dumit, ‘Cyborg Babies’; and Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’.

³ In recent years there have been a philosophical debate on this issue, see for example: Tännsjö, ‘Against Sexual Discrimination’; Tamburrini and Tännsjö, ‘The Genetic Design'; Sherwin and Schwartz, ‘Resisting the Emergence’; Harris and Giordano ‘What is Gender Equality?’; Jönsson, ‘Who's Afraid of Stella Walsh?’.

⁴ Loland, ‘Sport Technologies’, 158.

⁵ Loland, ‘Sport Technologies’, 159.

⁶ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 171.

⁷ Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 175–6.

⁸ By ‘radical’ I here mean someone who is not happy with formal equality only, but wants to see a society where also informally based inequalities are erased.

⁹ Butryn, ‘Cyborg Horizons’.

¹⁰ Butryn, ‘Cyborg Horizons’, 112.

¹¹ Butryn, ‘Cyborg Horizons’

¹² Butryn, ‘Cyborg Horizons’, 123.

¹³ Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 150.

¹⁴ Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 150

¹⁵ Moi, What is a Woman?

¹⁶ Moi, What is a Woman?, 114.