Sport in the British Deaf Community

Deaf people are widely perceived as being disabled and consequently socially disadvantaged, particularly those who rely on sign language for communication. Profoundly deaf people in mainstream sport are a rarity, and at the highest levels only a few examples can be found throughout the history of professional sport. This apparent lack of participation only serves to reinforce the idea that deaf people are in some way incapable of taking part in little more than perfunctory sporting activity. However, this is not the case. Deaf people have been involved in a variety of sporting endeavours since the dawn of organized sport. In this article, the extent and diversity of deaf people's involvement in sport will be outlined, drawing on a longitudinal study of the activities of deaf club members from across north-west England. The different sports their members engaged in, the extent of such activity and the importance of such involvement in bonding and maintaining communal identity among deaf people will all be demonstrated. In doing so, it is intended that the general perception of deaf people as being socially isolated, particularly in relation to sport, will be shown to be false.     

Factors impacting participation of European elite deaf athletes in sport

Abstract

This study examine 53 European elite deaf athletes for their family's hearing status, use of hearing aids, communication preference, education in integrated or segregated settings, family members' encouragement for participation in sports, coach preference (hearing or deaf), and conditions for competitive events with deaf or hearing athletes. These data were gathered through semi-structured interviews administered in the athlete's native language. Deaf athletes reported that when given the opportunity to compete with hearing athletes, it enhanced their opportunity for competition. Participating in sports with hearing athletes played an important role in the integration of deaf athletes into mainstream society. If adaptations to communication can be made in these integrated settings, the ability of deaf athletes to participate in such settings will increase.     

From Pleasure Rows and Plashing Sculls to Amateur Oarswomanship: The Evolution of Women’s Amateur Rowing in Britain

Abstract

This paper considers the emergence of amateur women’s rowing between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in light of contemporaneous social norms relating to gender and sport. It does not seek to identify a foundational point for women’s rowing, nor does it offer a comprehensive survey of the development of the sport over this period. Instead, it considers women’s rowing in three key contexts: women’s university colleges, at the end of the nineteenth century; the first women-only rowing club on the Thames, established in 1896 by Dr Frederick Furnivall; and the formation of a governing body for the women’s sport in 1923. Analysis of the conditions within the sport in these environments, and their implications, leads to more nuanced consideration of the women’s sport, and of gender as a normative social construct more widely. Discussion focuses on gendered influences on sporting behaviour, manifested in institutional regulation and hegemonic authority, and the intersection of class and gender.     

Vertical Ground Reaction Forces of Children during One- and Two-Leg Rope Jumping

Abstract

Sport offers opportunities for children to identify and resolve moral issues. Moral issues in sport have primarily been studied from the researcher's perspective, with the child's perspective relatively ignored. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature and content of the issues children experienced in sport. Interview participants consisted of 7 boys and 8 girls ranging in age from 10 to 12 years (M = 11.6 years, SD = 1.7) who had competitive youth sport experience. An inductive content analysis revealed that children identified issues surrounding three overall dimensions concerning fairness of adult's actions, negative game behaviors, and negative team behaviors. Specific examples of issues included unfair actions by coaches, disrespecting opponents, and selfish behavior in practice. The self-identified issues both confirmed and expanded upon the content found in hypothetical moral dilemmas in sport.     

The up-front legacies of France 2019: changing the face of ‘le foot féminin’

ABSTRACT

The drive to develop women’s football in France, a game 100 years old albeit one long-stigmatised, was thrust into high gear in 2011. Since then, a confluence of events and cultural changes, from on-field results and officials’ investment of greater resources to winning the 2019 World Cup host bid, greater mediatisation of women’s players, and more – including the spectacular 2010 meltdown of Les Bleus in South Africa – have combined to energise and grow the game. This newfound dynamism was unforeseen a decade ago and illustrates some of France’s biggest World Cup legacies: the up-front investments underpinning the sport’s development during the 2010s, and the ways the country has repackaged itself as a champion of women’s football and women in football, forever changing the face of ‘le foot féminin’.     

‘You Had to Cover Nadia Comaneci’: ‘Points of Change’ in Coverage of Women’s Sport

Abstract

In the 1970s, women’s sport underwent significant change in the United States resulting in an increase of participation opportunities and funding at the interscholastic, intercollegiate, professional and international levels. Yet, media outlets continued to ignore women and, at best, portray them in gender stereotypical ways. Considering the lack of progress for women in sports media coverage, this study employs sport historian Jaime Schultz’s ‘points of change’ framework in order to identify those moments that constituted an ideological shift in the process of covering women’s sport. Drawing upon oral history interviews with journalists who wrote about women’s sport in the 1970s and 1980s, this research provides a deeper look into how journalists experienced and addressed the shifting gender ideologies of the time period. Journalists’ memories, accompanied by their articles, reveal how media practitioners negotiated meanings about femininity and athleticism in response to events that challenged deeply embedded assumptions about gender and its intersections with ethnicity, race and sexuality. This exploratory research, thus, identifies several ‘points of change’ – or points of struggle, conflict and resistance – and calls for a re-periodization of the history of women’s sports coverage.     

You Can Make the Difference: Women in Sport in Taiwan

Abstract

This article aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of changing cultural norms that have enabled and constrained women’s sport activities. It aims moreover, to analyse the changing nature of women’s sport activities in Taiwan. I want to show that what men can do, what women can do – and what I want to, what I can, and what I will do. I also address how I became interested in sports history and the pursuits I have made in that field.     

Sex,drugs and science: the IOC’s and IAAF’s attempts to control fairness in sport

Abstract

This paper traces the history of two important policies in sport: rules against drugs and ‘ambiguous’ athletes in women’s events. We identify three phases in the work of the International Olympic Committee’s and International Amateur Athletic Federation’s medical committees: (1) from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, the medical grounding of the committees and the members’ worldviews encouraged the groups to enlist scientific techniques to solve drug use and sex ambiguity issues; (2) from the 1970s to the 1980s, administrative confusion underscored both committees, but scientific personnel gained legitimacy and furthered their own agendas; and (3) from the 1980s to the mid-1980s, the seeds of diversion in sex and drug tests were sown. The central finding of this study is that the stakeholders who shaped anti-doping and sex testing policies took for granted concerns regarding ethics and instead increasingly relied upon medical, scientific, and technical practices to define and control fairness in sport.     

The Itinerary to Explore Headwaters of the New Left’s Cultural Studies

Abstract

The 1980s was a period when the academic current for leisure studies led to the birth of the study of sports history. Japan was not a latecomer in this scholarly stream. More significantly, cultural issues were thought not the part of various phenomena in a society, but the key issues for class integration and class strife. After writing my PhD thesis on Pierce Egan, one of the earliest sport journalists influenced by the idea of early radicals in the nineteenth-century Britain, my attention turned over to the question of why the study of sport history was necessary. There was the academic impact inherited from the New Left’s belief that ‘without understanding the state of people’s culture, class issues are unable to be truly comprehended’. The Initiation of sport journalism had a similar destiny. This consequence appears to be a synchroflash between the early radicals’ concern in popular culture in the nineteenth century and the New Left’s interest in cultural studies in the twentieth century. There was an obvious reason why the radical essayists and contemporary academics had to pay attention to the ‘cultural turn’ with critical thinking in a society.     

A Life Surrounded by Sport History,as a Non-Sporting Critical Feminist

Abstract

I am a historian, specialized in sport history and in women’s history, and started my research career in Finland in the mid-1970s. The main framework of my research has been popular movements and voluntary organizations in sport, from the nineteenth century to nowadays, with a social historical, grassroots and minority emphasis. Class, gender, language and ethnicity have been the main points of view in my work. In my paper, I discuss less my relation to sport history as science and its theories and methods. Instead, I approach the subject more as a personal process: how I, as a non-sporting woman, came into sport history and women’s history in sport, and which circumstances and contacts have been forming my research interests and life. At the end, I discuss sport historians’ contemporary relation to the understanding of (sport) history and its representations, asking how is the responsibility of the past affecting our ways to understand and interpret the past.     

Experiencing Nationalism in International Sport: The Shanghai Liangjiang Women’s Basketball Tour of Japan,Korea, and Southeast Asia, 1931–1935

Abstract

International sport provides an environment where individuals experience their nations in various ways that could shape their identities, knowledges, and behaviours; however, this has been long neglected in the studies of the history of Chinese women’s sports. Remarkably successful in competitions in Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, the Shanghai Liangjiang Women’s Basketball Team is an ideal case that could answer the following question: how did international sport shape Chinese sportswomen’s sense of nationalism in the early 1930s? Through examining team members’ self-identification, gendered choices in international games, constructions of the Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast Asians, this article explores the complicated relationship between national identity building, women’s daily experiences and international sport. It argues Chinese women’s participation in international sports in the early 1930s reinforced their national identifications and nationalistic sentiments. Female players’ shared national pride and humiliation overshadowed their entire foreign experiences.     

Sport physiology research and governing gender in sport—a power–knowledge relation?

This article sets out to show how physiological knowledge about sex/gender relates to power issues within sport. The sport physiology research at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (Swedish acronym: GIH) during the twentieth century is analysed in relation to the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation during the same period. The analysis is constituted by Michel Foucault's notion of power–knowledge relations and regimes oftruth. The construction of sex/gender in the physiological research changes over time. Comparative studies on the function of ‘sexual difference’ during strenuous work, which, in hindsight, might be seen to restrict women's sport participation, was gradually displaced by a lack of interest in sexual difference, and later by a growing fascination with sexual difference from a ‘gender perspective’ in terms of women being ‘different but equal’ to men. This displacement goes hand in hand with a displacement of the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation, where a pre-World War II strategy of excluding women's competitive sport participation, restricting women's physical exercise to gymnastics, was after 1945 followed by a strategy of including women. This was at first in the name of ‘women's right to do sport’—where the physiological research advocated this endeavour—and later in the name of ‘women's right to do sport on their own terms’. However, the research was still being conducted based on the male physiology as the norm.     

‘They Came to Sneer,and Remained to Cheer’: Interpreting the 1934–35 England Women’s Cricket Tour to Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

This paper focuses generally on the history of women’s cricket during the earlier twentieth century, primarily on the 1934–35 England women’s cricket tour of Australia and New Zealand, and more so on the New Zealand dimension. The tour occurred at a critical time for women’s team sport in both countries in that from the 1920s consistent local and then national competitions brought continuity to previously fragmented activities. Hence the tour provides a useful barometer for a wide range of attitudes to sporting participation by women and reveals contrasts between Britain and Australasia. At the same time, there are specific attitudes to the playing of cricket by women that need to be explored. Here there are some obvious differences between accounts in dedicated women’s cricket sources and the specialist women’s press, both of which sought to encourage the game on its own terms, and those in sources with a broader scope and male-dominated editorship which were more inclined to trivialize and disparage women’s cricket and to judge it against the men’s game.     

‘Not Merely an Isolated Game’: Women’s Association Football in Australia

ABSTRACT

Australia has participated in the world-wide growth of women’s football particularly since the 1970s, but long before that the game was played recreationally and competitively by women in Australia. Women have struggled to overcome active opposition to their taking part in the sport and neglect of their achievements which are considerable. This article provides an outline of the history of the game both nationally and in its international context. It also tries to capture the experience of some of the pioneers of the women’s game and its modern practitioners, revealing some of the ways in which overt and covert discrimination still hinders recognition of their achievements.     

Opportunities to interpret: a methodological discussion of insider research,perceptions of the researcher,and knowledge production

Abstract

Insider research is increasingly common in sociocultural studies of sport. Less common is insider research in socio-historical work. As a women’s lacrosse umpire and a lacrosse scholar, I maintain multiple investments in the sport; this insider perspective and role fosters unique considerations during the research process. In this article, I assess my position as an insider in women’s lacrosse and the manners in which relationships – both actual and perceived – impact knowledge production. My experiences and this article exemplify the importance of consistent reflexivity throughout the research process; my role as an umpire was ever-present, even when I was unaware in the moment. Reflexivity enabled my recognition and analysis of this status. A researcher’s multiple group and professional affiliations, whether consciously employed or tacitly assumed, impact the knowledge that is shared and produced.     

The Role of the Lebanese-Australian Diaspora in the Establishment of Rugby League in Lebanon

Abstract

The Lebanese Rugby League was formed in 1997 in Sydney when a team comprised of Australian-based players of Lebanese descent participated in an international tournament. The Lebanese national team later qualified for two rugby league men’s World Cups (2000 and 2017). The case demonstrates how diasporas can shape sport development. The accomplishment of the Lebanese team has also given the small country some exposure at the global level. Additionally, since 2002, a new sport has been established in Lebanon, making the country one of the few cases in the world where rugby league is more popular than rugby union. This paper examines diaspora issues including the assimilation of Lebanese emigrants into Australian sporting culture and strategic uses of citizenship. Furthermore, the research sheds light on the ‘glocalized’ development of rugby league in Lebanon by its establishment at private Lebanese universities while it is known in Australia for its working-class origins. There is a relationship of mutual dependence between diaspora and homeland: without its diaspora, Lebanon could not participate in the World Cup, and without domestic development in the sport (which includes, since 2015, also women’s teams), the diaspora would not be permitted to participate in global championships.     

Women,Sport, and the Press in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Abstract

The concept of women engaging in physical recreation was anathema to late nineteenth-century Mexican society. While underlying scepticism continued throughout the decades that followed, post-Revolutionary reforms provided a surprisingly open arena within which both men and women could practice sport. We analyze how the issue of gender influenced these reforms and the degree to which this affected popular participation in sports. Identifying media coverage as a barometer of broader society’s perceptions of female sporting activity, we consider the salient trends in the Mexican press, how these changed over time, and the ways in which female journalists approached women’s sport. Our findings suggest the need for caution in leaping to gender-based assumptions and provide evidence that, in some respects, male journalists became more enlightened than their female counterparts in confronting underlying prejudices.     

‘You look like a machito!’: a decolonial analysis of the social in/exclusion of female participants in a Colombian sport for development and peace organization

Abstract

This article critically explores the relationship between the gendered nature of sport in Colombia and girls and young women’s social in/exclusion in football (soccer) through the lived experiences of female participants involved in a local Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) organization. Building on 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork and Lave and Wenger’s theory of Community of Practice (CoP), I explore the complex and connected gendered social elements that constrain girls and young women’s participation. Analyzing these processes and mechanisms through a decolonial lens, I reveal the existence of colonial residues that perpetuate and reinforce females positioning as peripheral actors in sport. The findings demonstrate how female participants are required to negotiate spaces with contradictory gendered meanings and confirm that social transformation within masculine structures is difficult to achieve. This research encourages SDP researchers to further engage with decolonial theory.