Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture, and Exercise

INTRODUCTION by

Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture, and Exercise is an anthology edited by Anne Bolin, Professor of Anthropology at Elon University, and Jane Granskog, Professor of Anthropology at California State University at Bakersfield. The book investigates women’s place in sport and exercise from a socio-cultural vantage provided by the fields of the anthropology of sport, the sociology of sport, and feminism. We offer this collection as a contribution to the emerging field of sports ethnography and the study of women and gender relations in the interdisciplinary field of sport/exercise/physical activity and the body—hence the title Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture, and Exercise. The title suggests that women’s participation in sports and exercise has not come without struggle into the sports arenas marked by male hegemony. This book evolved from the intersection of our lives as anthropologists , feminists, and athletes. As baby boomers growing up before Title IX, we reaped the benefits of the social revolution of the 1960s, which opened new vistas for women. We pursued our respective careers as anthropologists and feminists. Anne pursued her research on gender by studying the lives of transgendered people while Jane’s interest in gender progressed by investigating the adaptive strategies of peasant women in Mexico. It was not until our research shifted into sports and exercise that our lives intersected. Anne began ethnographic research among women bodybuilders while Jane worked with women triathletes . A critical component for instigating such research for each of us lay in the fact that we both first became participants in the sports we I N T R O D U C T I O N ‫ﱰﱯ‬ ANNE BOLIN AND JANE GRANSKOG 1 chose to investigate. It was, in fact, the impact that such participation has had on our lives overall that led us to explore the impact of such activities, and the embodiment of self that emerged as a result, upon women in general. Through the grapevine of our discipline, which includes numerous mechanisms for like-minded people to find one another, we established our friendship (a process actually aided by the fact that very few anthropologists were doing the kind of research we were engaged in at the time). We remember back to 1988 when the American Anthropological Association meetings were in Phoenix, Arizona . Independently of one another and before we met, we both noted that we were the only two papers during the conference devoted to issues of women and sport. We wanted to meet each other to talk about our research but kept missing each other. As scholars and athletes with training agendas, our schedules didn’t seem to mesh. However, after becoming friends, we solved that dilemma by training together whenever the opportunity arose—often at the various conferences that we scheduled to attend together. Finding each other wasn’t the only catalyst for our research. Another very important person intersected our lives and brought us together to meet other scholars working in the area of gender and sport. Alan Klein, whom we later came to regard as the parent of contemporary sport ethnography, brought us into the North American Society for the Study of Sport Sociology (NASSS). It was through the presentation of papers at the annual meetings of NASSS in the early 1990s that the impetus for putting together a book that simultaneously addressed issues of sport ethnography and the participation of women in athletic activities emerged. It was also at these meetings that we first encountered the significant research that was being carried out by other feminist scholars in sport sociology, notably the seminal work of Susan Birrell, Nancy Theberge , Sharon Guthrie, Shirley Castelnuovo, CL Cole, and others. The critical analysis of the role of gender in sport that these scholars provided set the tone for our subsequent work. We have entitled our book Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture and Exercise because, as Susan Birrell (1988:459–502) and Ann Hall (1993:48–68; 1996) so clearly argue in their respective reviews of the literature on women’s history in sports and research about women and gender relations in sport/exercise, the view often is one in which women have been invisible, excluded, and marginalized. The following quote vividly illustrates the situation of women/sports relations in societies in which power, prestige, and access to resources is a privilege of men. The following account is offered as a poignant example of this exclusion and taken from the writings of the...