Athletes in the Pool,Girls and Boys on Deck

Abstract

Few studies have examined how groups of individuals enact different patterns of gender relations within and across contexts. In this article, I draw upon nine months of fieldwork and 15 semistructured interviews conducted with eight- to 10-year-old swimmers on a co-ed youth swim team. During focused aspects of swim practice, gender was less salient and structural mechanisms encouraged athletes to interact in ways that illuminated girls’ and boys’ similar athletic abilities, undermining categorical, essentialist, and hierarchical gender beliefs pertaining to athleticism. However, in the swimmers’ unfocused free time, the salience of gender was high and structural mechanisms encouraged swimmers to engage in “borderwork.” In this context, similarities between the genders were obscured and girls and boys instead interacted in ways that affirmed essentialist and categorical—but nonhierarchical—meanings of gender. By paying attention to structural mechanisms and the variable salience of gender, we can thus see the various conditions under which children deploy different patterns of gender relations, and how less oppressive gender relations can potentially “spill over” from one context to the next.