| Abstrakt: |
"Which one is she?" As transgendered athletes enter the sporting arena they are met by an audience that is both curious and suspicious. While the transgendered body has the potential to subvert notions of femininity and masculinity, the ways in which it is policed and regulated demonstrate both the psychic anxieties about gender and the desire to maintain rigid boundaries, as well as the fragility of those boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to explore a transgendered athlete?s experience in women?s hockey and to analyze the structural constraints of mainstream sport. Her case is highlighted by her ultimate disqualification as female by USA Hockey, demonstrating the closed corridor of publicly controlled gender in women?s sport. It is this very categorization that is the social normalization of a demonstrated comprehension of gender. We confront these normalized messages and enter into a transition of play and display, mirroring the social fabric of categorical gender construction. The constitution and understanding of gender from a psychoanalytic, existentialist, and postmodern perspective will be used in our analysis of the policing and regulation of gender and sex by USA Hockey drawing from the works of Butler, Foucault, Sartre, Lacan, Kristeva and Grosz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
