K. L. Broad's Sporting Gender: Queer Resistance In Sports

Analysis – Section 1: Sex Tests To give a brief background, sex tests were created and administered by the International Olympics Committee Medical Commission (IOCMC) in 1966, and is used against women who had more masculine features than their peers. Jayne Caudwell, author of Sporting Gender: Women's Footballing Bodies As Sites/Sights For The (Re) Articulation Of Sex, Gender, And Desire, researched female-athletes and their experience with oppression in that sense. In fact, the test is designed so that men cannot get away with playing as a woman (Caudwell 378). This is truly exemplified when one athlete, “Laura (age 33) quotes remarks from male speculators: ‘Well, we don’t think that number 9 on the other side’s female’ and ‘Have you had

K.L. Broad, an associate professor at the University of Florida and author of The Gendered Unapologetic: Queer Resistance In Women's Sport, researches, “… how women’s rugby in the early 1990s can be understood as a site of queer resistance in sport, with the attendant controversies of any queer act” (K.L. Broad 182). She argues that the underlying, “assumption has been, ‘sports are masculine; therefore, women in sports are masculine; therefore, women in sports are lesbians’” (182). This assumption plainly illustrates how women, lesbian or not, are discriminated against for even playing a sport. Broad clearly goes into rugby, as that is a very rugged and physical sport, and studies how these women interact with their male and female

Once again, Jayne Caudwell researches and analyzes multiple films and the impact of feminism, sexuality and its oppression in the themes of these films in the paper Girlfight And Bend It Like Beckham: Screening Women, Sport, And Sexuality. Caudwell first analyzes how, “[the] films’ themes—struggles to participate in boxing/football and explicit focus on sexual identity—run concurrently. As a result it is possible to conclude that despite the films being about sport and women’s entry to previously denied sport spaces, they are also, unsurprisingly, about sexuality” (257). Caudwell uses the themes of both movies to connect it to the similarities it shows in society. She sees that the sports which are mainly tied to that of male athletics, and how these women are unable to live without the fear of being targeted against in their field. It should also be pointed out that Caudwell is an English professor, and as such her use of football is equivalent to that of soccer in the United