Tomboys, Dykes, and Girly Girls: Interrogating the Subjectivities of Adolescent Female Athletes

If you really think about it there have been a lot of female athletes who have come up over the years. There was a time when we couldn't do anything and now we have lots of female athletes. There is nothing wrong with it. I LOVE being a female athlete. Dena, track and basketball When I first started playing, it was to keep my grades up, and then I really started to enjoy basketball and it's like the number one thing. That's the reason why I just fell in love with sports. Running track-just anything that came towards me, I did it. Jasmine, basketball and track Adrenalin rush. I just love it. Now practicing is not always so much fun, but when you're on the court and you have the clock up and the score and you're playing against people you've never played, it's just so much fun. It just brings joy to my life. Kerry, basketball player With the exception of the military, sports is the most masculine, male-identified institution in the United States, and from its inception, it has been a closely cultivated arena for males to demonstrate their privilege and power. Unsurprisingly, the entrance of women into this sacred sphere has been carefully monitored and regulated (Cahn 1994; Griffin 1992; Park 1987; Sage 1990). While individual women have continuously contested their exclusion from or limited entry into the sports arena, feminists and advocates of women's rights have expressed ambivalent feelings about women's entrance into the world of sports. This ambivalence was evident in the early deliberations of many female physical educators who, on the one hand, pushed for women to be physically active and, on the other hand, sought to remake sports into a more feminine sphere by downplaying the competitive and aggressive aspects of sports (Cahn 1994; Nelson 1994). However, by the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s, the prevailing discussion among feminists in regard to sports was how to increase women's participation in sports so they could enjoy the same rights, privileges, and benefits of male athletes. Sports was seen as a critical arena for women to contest stereotypical images of the docile, passive, inert, incapable female body, thus challenging the patriarchal control and regulation of the female body. The feminist hope, as culminated in the passage of Title IX in 1972, was that if women could crack the world of sports, then patriarchy, which manifests both literally and symbolically in the sporting institution, could be dented. Dena, Jasmine, and Kerry, the high school athletes quoted earlier, can be viewed as evidence of the challenging of this masculine stronghold.i These girls have been playing sports since they were very young, and being an athlete is central to their identity. They are quite comfortable in their athletic skins, taking pride in their sporting accomplishments and boasting of their desires to get physical, knock opponents down, and win at all costs. Perhaps this isn't surprising since these are post-Title IX girls who have grown up with the WNBA, Mia Hamm, the Williams sisters, and the 1999 U.S. women's soccer team World Cup win. Indeed, since the passage of Title IX in 1972, girls' participation in sports has increased more than 800%, and athletic high school girls are the recipients of a form of power, prestige, and status once relegated solely to cheerleaders and majorettes. Yet, how these girls talked about themselves as female athletes and about their experiences playing sports suggests that cracking patriarchy may involve more than simply allowing girls to enter the playing field. As we listened closely to female high school athletes' stories about athleticism, power, strength, and competition, we also heard traditional feminine narratives about being attractive and exhibiting heterosexual appeal. Numerous feminist sports scholars (Krane 2001; Veri 1999) have documented how adult female athletes negotiate an athletic terrain that requires them to be "heterosexy" athletes (Griffin 1992), but as Shakib and Dunbar (2002) point out, little research has focused on "the contemporary meanings adolescents make of gender and athleticism" (354). …