Female Boarding Bodies: Betties, Babes, and Bad-Asses1. The labels sex, sex role, gender and gender role have differing meanings: • sex: dichotomous/anatomical distinctions between male and female based on genetically determined physiological characteristics. • sex role: public role, circumscribed by biology, anatomy, sexuality. • gender: psychological and cultural dimensions of masculine and feminine. • gender role: describes masculine or feminine attitudes and behavior as designated by a given society; specific, changing cultural context.1. Human culture channels innate sex differences into unique patterns of social functions. 2. For the most part, biologically influenced sex differences have historically been assumed to be universal, inevitable, and are used by cultures to justify social, economic, etc., inequality of sexes. 3. All societies in some fashion treat males and females differently; studies emphasize that socialization and enculturation structure gender roles from conception/birth onward.4. Great changes in human economic production, thought, and creativity have changed sex roles in societies.Canon/logic/hegemony • Canon: established body of literature or way of understanding; considered important, enduring, timeless. • Sports canon: fit, young, male, team, football, basketball, baseball. • Gender logic: Perspectives and ideas favored and promoted by dominant/powerful groups in society; seem to be natural or commonsense. • Hegemony: power or dominance of a value, belief, idea, norm, custom, etc.• “Unlike many modern and some alternative sports, women participated in early snowboarding” (Thorpe, p. 139). • Gendered habitus: “social construction of masculinity and femininity; defines how body is perceived. . . forms body’s habits, determines individual’s identity. . .” (p. 154). • Gender agency and reflexivityThorpe, Chap. 6 • Possibilities for Bourdieu to be used to study gender • Critique of Bourdieu’s understanding of gender in regard to habitus, field, capital • Specific mapping of females and gender in snowboardingBourdieu • Habitus: everyday practices (dispositions, appreciations, tastes) inculcate a specific orientation onto the body. (embodiment, embodied, internalized). Novice and core boarders; styles of participation; performativity • Capital • Field • These three generate practices (the cultural boarding body in action)• Capital: different forms of power held by people, institutions, agents. (examples) economic (wealth) cultural (artistic taste) linguistic (vocabulary and pronunciation) social (social connections) academic (degrees, qualifications) corporeal (physical attractiveness) symbolic; also called “distinction” (prestige)• Field: structured (but also highly fragmented) system of social systems and power relations. (“home, family, workplace, different sport cultures, ski resort, different countries, positions within fields [novice, weekend warrior, athlete, event organizer, film-maker”]) (Thorpe, p. 161). • Different tastes, distinctions about gender and femininity in fields• Practice: distinctions in the snowboarding body, including use of various kinds of capital • Small exercises of power that display femininity within the field (feminize style of clothing, performance, language) (p. 165) • Embodied practices involve investment and negotiation • Do these little acts “overthrow dominating social structures” (p. 165)?• Mapping • Critique • Social changeSochi Olympic Games 2014 • “many [snowboard] females wear their hair long as another subtle marker of femininity” (Thorpe, p. 165)Sochi 2014 Slopestyle “limitations aren’t put on women from the get-go,” Canadian snowboarder Spencer O’Brien told the Toronto Star. Olympic gold medal-winner Jamie Andersen told the Denver Post in an interview last year she didn’t want women to be relegated to a different course from the men in spite of difficult courses. I think it's pretty cool that we get to ride with the guys and that these jumps are doable for us"Sochi 2014 Slopestyle Athletic trainers and coaches say that by having men's and women's teams share the course, they can share information among teammates. “They do those training runs as a team, [and] often inspect the course as a team. Not just the men’s team and there’s a unique and specialized exchange of ideas”Michael Silk, Anthony Bush, David L. Andrews 2010 “the ‘physical’ is a complex multilayered site replete with numerous types of events that can and do ‘happen’– the product and producer of numerous overlapping systems and discourses (economic, political aesthetic, demographic, regulatory, spatial) that create a bewilderingly complex, and dynamic social totality. . . . The physical. . . is absolutely central–Silk, Bush, Andrews, continued it is the site, the event, the moment at which social divisions (i.e., those based on class, ethnic, gender, ability, generational, national, racial and/or sexual norms) are imposed, experienced, and at times contested. We are thus driven. . .to understand the complexities, experiences, and injustices of the physical cultural context engaged on and through the body (particularly with regard to the relations, operations, and effects of corporeal power).”“. . .sports is much more than facts; it is also an arena for establishing – or challenging – the meanings associated with . . . sex differences” (McDonagh & Pappano, 2008, Playing with the Boys, p.154) •• Imagine sport in a way that differences between male and female bodies/ sport styles no longer matter in a modernist binary sense -Or- • Emphasize and celebrate differences between male and female bodies in sport• Ideas about femininity are reproduced, challenged or disrupted through the body and sites like sport. • Unapologetic: claim space in masculine environment out rightly and without symbolic apology. • Subversive femininity: ignore conventional ways of doing gender, playfully and self-consciously being subversive and rebellious.Bourdieu’s ideas may seem deterministic concerning gender, but still his ideas have use and promise as shown by