Impacts on Identity
Women in Hell: A Feminist Criticism on the Current State of Women's Professional Wrestling
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Rhett Cuozzo
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is a worldwide cultural phenomenon. It dominates all other major sports and sports’ networks in ratings and on social media. Traditionally, it has been a male-centric industry, but in 2015, the addition of Stephanie McMahon and Paul Levesque, aka Triple H, to the Board of Directors resulted in equality in the women’s division of WWE as female wrestlers began being celebrated more for their in ring ability than for their looks. Accordingly, analyzing WWE through a feminist perspective will demonstrate the newfound equality for women that many feminists have sought for so long, and though there may be disagreement based on the “wave” of feminism to which one subscribes as to whether this equality is true, it cannot be disputed that women’s professional wrestling has achieved more in the past two years than since WWE’s inception. The reason such a claim can be made is because two of these women, Charlotte Flair and Sasha Banks engaged in a match reserved for the best, strongest, and most respected wrestlers: a match called “Hell in a Cell.” Consequently, WWE has elevated women to a position heretofore apportioned for men by sending these two women to hell.
Before Soccer: Sportsmen and Public Spaces in Modern Brazil
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tiago J. Fernandes Maranhão
Modern sports are an important aspect to understand the relation between physical culture and nationalism. Norbert Elias explains that the concept of “sport” itself takes particular historical configurations with the passage of time. Elias divides “modern sport” into various differential categories. The complex nature of Elias's categorization is evident. I will use the one referring to “active leisure sport”, undertaken by people either as individuals or in a group. Between the final decades of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, Brazilian cities experienced a new urban reality, with the prevailing ideals of speed, dynamism, and innovation. My research focus on how this new urban atmosphere favored the flourishing of a taste for sports and physical activities in Brazil. Foucauldian concepts such as “discipline” and the “care of the self” will also pave my way to tell how the use of physical culture became a pivotal strategy in shaping modern Brazilian. The study of a northern city (Recife) contributes to the historiography of national identity and sports in Brazil (primarily focused on the southern cities of Rio and Sao Paulo) by understanding the impact physical culture had on the debates that sought to construct a “Brazilian nation.”
Body Politics of Women in Sport: Understanding the "Deviant Bodies" of Athletic Women
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aiswarya Aanand
This paper deals with the etymology and origin of the term ‘deviant body’ as a social construct and looks at how women athletes with said bodies are understood within the domain of "Gender and Sport." Theorizations on Gender have taken a huge leap in understanding and exploring the multiple identities it can create through the politics of the body. Looking at it through the angle of sports helps us to navigate through the politics that these "gendered bodies" create, where established identities have to be heteronormative in order to be allowed to compete at any level. Considering the body as an investigation ground, this paper looks at the lives of select women athletes like Pinky Pramanik, Santhi Soundarajan and Caster Semenya to analyse how the heteronormativity is enabling or disabling their athletic performances. By undertaking a review of the existing theoretical frameworks on the construction of gender and identity (Butler (1993), Messner (2007)), I attempt to place these women athletes with "deviant bodies" against the backdrop of contemporary "apologetic" practices that are devised to achieve acceptance in the current sporting culture. The paper further explores the Foucauldian concept of ‘disciplined body’ to understand how women’s sport is a location wherein the politics of identity, resistance and sexuality are performed. It further explores how practices of "gender testing" further reiterate the patriarchal ideology of a "feminine sporting image." This paper will serve as a necessary framework to interrogate the disparities in evaluating superlative athletic performances between men and women.
