The Offside Rule: womens bodies in masculinized spaces

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The Off-side Rule womens bodies in masculinized
spaces

• Margot Rubin
• Centre for Urban and Built Environment Studies

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Structure of the Presentation

• The paper essentially looks at what it means when
  women enter into mens spaces, what that means
  and what actually happens. The case study that is
  used is the institution of soccer and the FIFA
  World Cup. It must be noted that this is a very
  exploratory paper!
• Relationship between sport and gender
• Soccer and masculinity
• What is a masculinized space?
• Examining 2002 and 2006 World Cup as spaces of
  transgression
• What does this mean for women at the 2010?

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A Short History of Constructing Gender

• There is the commonly accepted idea that a person
  is either male or female and this based on their
  biological features. The features give rise to
  certain characteristics so that men are a certain
  way and women are a certain way because of the
  nature of their bodies. The physical features are
  then ascribed with meaning.
• Men larger stronger dominant, active,
  aggressive, competitive, rational and dominant

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• Women smaller weaker subordinate and
  passive because of their reproductive capacity
  they are naturally caring, nurturing, gentle
  and more based in their bodies therefore they are
  less rational and logical.
• These ideas are naturalized and normalized so
  that the biological determinism becomes
  completely acceptable and accepted i.e. hegemonic

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Gender production and practices

• How men and women come to accept these norms
  becomes the subject of debate, but at its most
  simplistic level, boys and girls are faced with a
  range of activities and social practices which
  ensure that they become men and women.
• These practices which ensure that the correct set
  of actions and attributes is attached to the
  correct come through a whole range of social
  practices
• The Family daughters emulating mothers and
  their behaviour
• School subject teaching
• Sport/leisure activities the appropriateness of
  certain activities for certain bodies.

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Sport and Gender

• Sport is highly effective in helping to mould
  people into the appropriate image
• Logic underlying it is twofold
• Boys must learn the lessons of the game such as
  competitiveness, stoicism, team work etc. Girls
  should learn to be attractive and pretty.
• While doing the sport the body also needs to look
  in place must consistently represent those
  characteristics whilst learning the traits i.e.
  boys must be active and competitive and girls
  must not.

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Bodies, Sport, and Gender become one

• women should once again be prohibited from
  sport they are the true defenders of the
  humanist values that emanate from the household,
  the values of tenderness, nurture and compassion,
  and this most important role must not be confused
  by the military and political values inherent in
  sport. Likewise sport should not be muzzled by
  humanist values it is the living arena for the
  great virtue of manliness.
• (Carrol, 1996)

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Soccer the maker of men, the undoing of women

• There is a great deal of significance attached to
  soccer, it is seen as a game that typifies
  masculine values and entrenches the right kind
  of masculinity.
• In fact western culture points to soccer as an
  integral part in the development of a boy
  becoming a man.
• Such an association means that women cannot be
  part of it because inherently they do not have
  the necessary biological or psychological
  features. Women do not need to learn these
  lessons, and in point of fact they should not
  learn these lessons because that would be
  unnatural and wrong.

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Soccer the maker of men, the undoing of women

• All types of sport which go beyond a womens
  natural strength, like wrestling, boxing or
  football, are unsuitable, furthermore they look
  unaesthetic and unnatural. (Willy Vierath, 1930)
• Football as a game is first and foremost a
  demonstration of masculinity as we understand it
  from our traditional view of things and as
  produced in part by our physical constitution
  (through hormonal irritation). No one has ever
  been successful in getting women to play
  footballKicking is thus presumably a
  specifically male activity whether being kicked
  is consequently female that is something I will
  leave the reader to answer. (FJJ Buytendijk,
  1953).

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• I find women kicking the ball to be utterly
  unaesthtic. Womens football is distasteful.
  (Paul Breitner, German National soccer player,
  1981)
• A women can be so wonderful in bed but on the
  pitch she will always look terrible to me. (Rudi
  Gutendorf, German Coach, 1982)

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Women in the House of Soccer

• The idea then of soccer is that of a male
  institution valued by men glorified by men and
  watched and played by men so that the
  correct/real form of masculinity can be
  reproduced.
• Women in such a place is unthinkable and totally
  transgressive either as fans or as players. In
  short they are the wrong kinds of bodies for that
  space.
• The question is what happens when the inevitably
  do enter these spaces?
• The example of the FIFA World Cup is used as a
  lens to analyse female transgression into male
  spaces.

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2002 The Feminized World Cup

• 2002 co-hosted by Korea and Japan was termed the
  feminized world cup by writers on the topic.
  This was due to the fact that one half to two
  thirds of fans on the streets and in the stadia
  were women. The reasons that were given were that
  it was the first time Korean women were able to
  express their sexuality.
• Such an interpretation meant that Korean women
  could not be real fans as their motives for
  watching the sport was not pure but was tainted
  by their sexual admiration of the players. It is
  interesting that womens fandom was so easily
  dismissed as being of a sexual and therefore
  different nature to mens and therefore not as
  valuable. This was stated in the face of the fact
  that female fans behaved in entirely similar
  manner as their male counterparts.

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• Clearly womens fandom was so threatening to the
  gender order, as it inverted the natural way of
  things, whereby women are the object of the gaze
  and men are the active observers, that it had to
  nullified ir neutralized in some way and that was
  through disregarding the actual value of the
  observers.

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Myth of the Puckbunny

• The other point that needs to be considered was
  how sexual were these fans or was it another
  Myth of the Puck Bunny.
• Buys into the idea that women are somehow
  incapable of really understanding the sport as
  that is the male preserve, therefore there must
  be some other reason why they watch it.

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Media collusion

• The media at the 2002 colluded with traditional
  notions of femininity
• The shots (television and print media) focusing
  on the womens bodies are almost exclusively the
  ones that highlight the bare skin of their
  breast, groin, hip, and legs. Compared with the
  actual fashion of women in the stadium, which
  colorfully varies, the representation of the
  female fans in the newspaper and on television is
  the surprisingly and uniformly similar clothing
  of exposing fashions. (Tanaka, 2004 57)
• Women are, of course, sexual objects
• Their rights to the space are only because men
  find them worth looking at
• Ordinary women were ignored

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2006 Any better?

• The 2006 World Cup was fascinating, either women
  were WAGs or prostitutes but as fans were
  ignored.
• Huge media hype around invasion of prostitutes
• The 50 of supporters who attended the event were
  constructed as Wives and Girlfriends rather than
  fans in their own right
• The 39 of television viewers were ignored by the
  media and marketing machine, as this was a male
  world cup.
• Advertising only constructed women as the
  opposite of fans

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• Even those ads that target women during the
  World Cup appealed to them as sufferers rather
  than fans. Easyjet, low-cost airline, advertised
  female-only getaways and the Swiss Tourist
  Boards print and televised media campaign
  featuring attractive men in seductive poses, with
  the tag line, Dear Girls, why not escape this
  summers World Cup to a country where men spend
  less time on football, and more time on you?.

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2010 what happens next?

• The question is then what will the next World Cup
  be like?
• Two important factors to consider
• In South Africa research indicates that forms of
  male domination exist among all ethnic groups.
  Women as a social group suffer from
  powerlessness, marginalization, exploitation, and
  systematic violence. (Richardson, 1999, 3).
• soccer should be feminized. Fan Hong argues
  that this means, that not only are more female
  spectators, but also more feminine players are
  required.

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Conclusion

• Soccer is an institution of hegemonic gender
  relations
• Women in these spaces either reinforce these
  stereotypes or face being discounted, disregarded
  and dismissed as strategies which defend this
  institution
• Women could leave it as a bastion of masculinity
• The results would filter through society
• Need to reconstruct the meaning of soccer and
  ensure that it supports rather than negates a
  range of genders and sexualities so that everyone
  is equally valued within the House of Soccer and
  no one is off-side just for looking or being
  different