engleski

Is There a Female Athlete? Perplexities and Complexities Inside and Beyond the Sex Verification Controversy

In my presentation, I will extend the understanding of sport as a traditional bastion of masculinity by arguing its powerful role in preserving the cultural notions of femininity as well, while safeguarding their strict and insurmountable difference. Although officially introduced as a tool for keeping women’s sports fair by excluding naturally advantageous male (and transgender) competitors, sex testing or sex verification facilitated cruel, unnecessary and humiliating practices that deterred many women from doing sports. Cases of Caster Semenya or Dutee Chand show not only complexities of the strict sex binaries but of the rigidness of gender norms as well, whose transgression ends in private and public sanctions significantly surpassing the alleged problem of fair play. What I want to explore further is what it means to be a female athlete – in history and today – while keeping in mind the traditional image of a woman as a negation of a man. Female athletes already distort that image, their extraordinary results sometimes being a sufficient condition for dissolving it in its entirety and causing a great cultural discomfort that even physical examinations, chromosome testing and testosterone measuring cannot dismiss. With the introduction of new eligibility regulations for female classification by the International Association of Athletics Federations numerous bioethical and biopolitical issues that have traditionally been arising from the subject seem to still be open. I will address some of them while concluding on the importance of non-scientific, non-medicinal and even non-ethical solutions of some of these issues.

sport ; bioethics ; gender ; masculinity ; femininity ; sex verification

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