PHYSICAL EDUCATION

Questions of sexuality and gender have been central to the history of physical education since the introduction of the discipline into U.S. colleges and universities in the late nineteenth century. The deeply entrenched cultural association between athletic prowess, heterosexual masculinity, and the male body has helped position the discipline as a key site for the analysis of LGBT identities and as a vehicle through which normative sexualities have been variously reinforced and transgressed.

With the emergence of capitalist industrial society in the nineteenth century, the distinction between leisure time and labor time became increasingly pronounced, and newly waged laborers and the middle and upper classes took to organized sport and exercise in large numbers. This trend was mirrored in the rapidly expanding higher education system where competitive intercollegiate athletics programs were complemented by the creation of physical education departments in which exercise specialists introduced young men to military drill and gymnastics. In each of these realms, sport was designed to cultivate a virile, tough, and implicitly heterosexual manhood that could sustain itself within what was widely viewed as artificial and effete urban society.

Women in Sport

Concern over the frailty of middle- and upper-class white women, whose enrollment in higher education was increasing during the same period, enabled women physical educators to enter the world of academe for the first time. From the 1890s onward, physical education departments for women created degree-granting majors as well as providing oftentimes mandatory physical exercise courses for female students.

Susan K. Cahn's Coming on Strong (1994), which examines the history of women in sport in the twentieth century, reveals that from the beginning, concerns about the sexual appetites and persuasions of physically active undergraduate women abounded. In the early decades of the century, concern focused on the belief that "mannish" female athletes might acquire masculine sexual behaviors and find their feminine inhibitions giving way to uncontainable heterosexual desire. But by the 1930s, female athleticism began to connote failed rather than excessive heterosexuality and physical educators worried that "mannish" athletes might have a propensity for same-sex desire. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War "homosexual panic," physical educators responded to the "crisis" of the "mannish lesbian athlete" by developing a curriculum that undertook an activist approach to heterosexuality: beauty and charm were emphasized over rigorous health and fitness, and mixed-sex "co-recreation" over what were formerly strictly segregated activities for men and women.

As white women largely deserted "manly" sports such as track and field in the 1930s, African American women, trained in segregated high schools and colleges in the South, began to blaze a trail of national and international success. In the early days of their participation, African American women were not constrained by the same stereotypes as their white counterparts, since ideal versions of black womanhood were not tied to a similarly limited set of characteristics and practices. This is not to say that their participation was entirely a positive development, however: African American women's participation did not produce high levels of anxiety among the white physical education establishment because they did not view African Americans as "real women" in the first place. This assumption, in addition to formal and informal racial segregation across the United States, meant that African American women, like other women of color, remained largely invisible in the dominant culture of physical education. This was to change with the sporting rivalries of the Cold War and a concerted effort on the part of both the black and white athletic establishments to cultivate black women athletes who were both more feminine (that is, more heterosexual) and more successful than their Russian counterparts. While white sports officials came to rely on black women to keep pace with Eastern European bloc athletes and to disprove Soviet charges of pervasive racial discrimination in the United States, black officials approached women's track and field as a measure of black cultural achievement and as a vehicle by which to insert into the public sphere carefully cultivated images of black women who were both feminine and morally virtuous.

New Scholarly Perspectives: 1970–2000

In the 1970s, with the emergence of the sociology of sport as a field of study within physical education, critical perspectives on gender, sexuality, physical education, and sport began to appear. Early work in this area focused on the "lesbian stigma" and the negative effect of "role conflict" and homophobic stereotypes on straight women in sport. Scholars of this era were particularly concerned about the "female apologetic," or the tendency for women athletes to perform traditional displays of heterosexual femininity in order to counter the lesbian stigma.

As the lives of LGBT people were increasingly taken to be legitimate subjects of study in the university at large, scholars in the sociology of sport became less fearful and euphemistic in their treatment of antinormative sexualities and genders. This shift manifested itself in life history and ethnographic research aimed at reclaiming the experiences of lesbian educators, coaches, and athletes in order to reduce their invisibility and the oppressive silence that surrounded issues of lesbian identity in the world of sport. Pat Griffin's Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport (1998) exemplifies this line of work with its detailed accounts of the harassment, discrimination, and silencing experienced by lesbian teachers and coaches, along with stories of their resistance to such oppression.

The pervasive cultural disjuncture between homosexuality and masculinity and thus homosexuality and sport meant that gay and bisexual men in this period remained largely invisible as scholars, teachers, or students of physical education. This absence was challenged in the 1990s by scholars seeking to make evident and to interpret the experiences of gay men in sport and to understand how male homoeroticism is enabled and constrained in heterosexual and homosexual men's sport cultures.

Inspired by Michel Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theories of "biological" sex as the product of regimes of gender and compulsory heterosexuality, what would most appropriately be termed "queer" scholarship in the sociology of sport also began to emerge in the 1990s. Queer studies of sport are characterized by a move away from both essentializing research about "lesbian experience" and from a deviance model in which sexual orientation is only made visible when LGBT people are the focus of discussion, thus leaving heterosexuality as the unexamined norm. Instead, queer studies seeks to understand the ways in which sport and physical education function as sites through which sexual identities are produced and naturalized as normal or deviant, but also through which apparently stable categories are disrupted and transgressed. Such work shares an assumption that sport and physical education are particularly potent realms for queer research because they are centered on the body and because of the continuing segregation of competitive sports along lines of gender. Through examples ranging from the Pumping Iron films, through the controversy surrounding transsexual professional tennis player Renée Richards, to "gender verification" testing at international athletic events, poststructuralist scholars have sought to displace notions of the body in sport as natural—and hence naturally sexed—and instead to explore the contingency and fluidity of sexuality and gender as they are manifested in sporting practices, cultures, and texts. In the context of the ongoing commodification of sport, researchers have placed particular emphasis on the effect of commercial pressures in the public presentation of activities that are viewed as gay (for example, men's figure skating) or lesbian (such as women's golf).

Although certain work in sport studies is attuned to the necessity of analyzing the intersection of sexuality with relations of race, class, gender, nation, and so on, categories such as "lesbians in sport" or "gay athletes" are still frequently deployed without consideration of their universalizing and thus exclusionary functions. While there exists a range of approaches to queer issues in the intersecting fields of physical education, the sociology and psychology of sport, and sport studies, the implicit subject of the discipline—American, white, and middle class—is yet to be decentered.

Bibliography

Adams, Mary Louise. "To Be an Ordinary Hero: Male Figure Skaters and the Ideology of Gender." In Men and Masculinities: A Critical Anthology. Edited by T. Haddock. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 1993.

Birrell, Susan, and Cheryl L. Cole, eds. Women, Sport, and Culture. Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1994.

Cahn, Susan K. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Connell, Robert. Gender and Power. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Griffin, Pat. Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport. Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1998.

Messner, Michael A., and Don F. Sabo, eds. Sport, Men, and the Gender Order. Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics Press, 1990.

Pronger, Brian. The Arena of Masculinity: Sport, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

Sykes, Heather. "Turning the Closets Inside/Out: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory in Women's Physical Education." Sociology of Sport Journal 15 (1998): 154–173.

Samantha J. King

see alsosports.

physical education as charm school

In Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women's Sport (1994), Susan Cahn describes a 1956 conference for directors of college women's physical education at which guest speaker Dr. Josephine Renshaw advised those in the audience to do all they could to encourage heterosexual interest among these women because the "muscular Amazon with unkempt hair, clod-hopper shoes, and dowdy clothing" might "revert to friendships with [her] own sex if disappointed with heterosexual attachments" (p. 164).