Beyond Caster as object? Examining media constructions of Caster Semenya through decolonial thinking

ABSTRACT

The popular media coverage of South African track and field star Caster Semenya showcases how colonialist discourses shaped the sexed, gendered, and racialised meaning of her public biography. Yet, when researchers study Semenya as their research ‘object’, does this act of inquiry reproduce the knowledge constructs of Western coloniality as well? In this article, we consider both issues by conducting and reflecting on our poststructuralist analysis of popular media coverages of Semenya’s athletic career, with specific attention to her dealings with gender-verification testing. We examine the discursive construction of Semenya’s public biography by popular newspaper outlets in the United States and South Africa from 2009 to 2019, arguing that both geopolitical locales maintained Western social binaries and scientific discourses concerning Semenya’s sexual identity in similar, yet distinct ways. Drawing from the poststructuralist methodology of intertextuality, we reflect on its capacity to deconstruct the colonial discourses shaping the cultural meaning of a non-Western athlete of colour such as Semenya, as well as its relation, as a method of knowledge production, to the epistemological legacies of Western coloniality. We also contend that by approaching Semenya as the ‘object’ of our poststructuralist framework, our analysis implicitly reproduced, rather than challenged, the Eurocentric subject/object framework of modern (Western) epistemology. Thus, our purposes are empirical, methodological, and reflexive as we seek to contribute to critical analyses of the constructed cultural meaning of celebrity athletes while subjecting our own research assumptions and frameworks to poststructuralist and decolonial deconstruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoloniality
• poststructuralism
• Caster Semenya
• colonialism
• media analysis

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jaime Schultz, Mary McDonald, and Cheryl Cooky for their generous feedback and encouragement in earlier versions of this article. They would also like to thank the reviewers and editors for strengthening this article through their constructive and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. While we draw from Susan and McDonald’s (2012) use of intertextuality, the concept is drawn from Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s (1969) intertextualité, which she coined in 1966. The concept was subsequently adopted and reformulated by scholars focused on the intersections of power, language, and signification, including the semiotician Roland Barthes and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (Alfaro 1996; Orr 2003).

2. While ‘normal’ circulating testosterone ranges for males and females vary across studies, generally, the reported healthy range is around 7.7 to 29.4 nmol/L for males and 0.1 to 1.7 nmol/L for females (Handelsman, Hirschberg, and Bermon 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Anna Posbergh

Anna Posbergh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland-College Park. Her dissertation explores medicalised understandings of protection in science-driven sport policies. She recently co-wrote an opinion piece for the British Medical Journal on the medical and ethical implications of World Athletics’ 2019 female eligibility regulations.

Samuel M. Clevenger

Samuel M. Clevenger teaches Sport Management at Towson University. His current research focuses on the historical intersections of sport, physical culture, and Western colonialism, as well as the history of physical culture in the rise of modern town planning. His research has been published in Rethinking History, Sport in Society, and Sport, Education and Society.