Gender and the ‘cultural turn’ in the study of sport and physical cultures

Abstract

The study of gender, as it pertains to sport and physical cultures, began with the study of female athletes in the 1960s. With the increased participation of women in sport, scholars in North America and Western Europe began to study female athletes as they challenged the patriarchal ideology upon which sport was based, provoked questions about ideas concerning femininity and masculinity, and eventually raised questions about the basic nature and purpose of modern sport. In the humanities and social sciences, researchers began to explore the subject of the female athlete from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in sports studies, most notably in sport history and sport sociology. With the inclusion of gender in the research in the 1980s, the focus shifted away from the female athlete to a critique of culture and sporting culture. The “cultural turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s was concurrent with changing perceptions of gender as scholars embraced interdisciplinary and later transdisciplinary perspectives to further examine sport and to incorporate the concept of physical cultures. It is in this historical context that the shifting, crossing, and transforming of gender boundaries can be situated and understood as critical to the ongoing research concerning gender. Indeed, the focus on physical cultures – rather than sport – suggests yet another “turn” in the research and a point of view that seems worthy of consideration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.