Assessing the sociology of sport: On gender identities in motion and how to de-essentialize difference(s)

Abstract

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, one of the leading Spanish scholars on gender and sport, Montserrat Martín, considers research on how entrenched gender identities empower males and marginalize females. In assessing the trajectory of research, it is noted that work in the sociology of sport has challenged and facilitated change in understanding gender identities with emphasis on both the “multiplicities of difference” and on “shared affinities” in the construction of gender. A continuing challenge has been to get past entrenched gender binaries; it is suggested that more sophisticated intersectional understandings, about men–women, gay–straight, people of colour and not, are needed, not only to blur boundaries, but in the process to reinvent understandings about our gendered identities. A key challenge for the future is to provide examples and analysis through which it is possible to show how sport, instead of reproducing the inertia and stability of social gender identities, blurs the borders and hierarchies between and within each of them.