1 Chapter One: Sports Feminism
Section One: The Fundamentals
A) What do we know about sport? What are common assumptions we make about sport and society?
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Sports can be a great way to implement key character skills for youth, that can transcend into adulthood, with good values. Starting a group or solo sport at a young age can offer many benefits of learning confidence, teamwork, or respect, and many more traits that build character. But these all depend on the upbringing of how children get put into these sports, if a parent is pressuring their child to play a sport they do not want to play, that can end in a lack of confidence, and could spiral into being a traumatic experience that causes children to lash out and cause many other mental health issues in the future. Suppose sports is not something a kid enjoys and pressure from parents or potential bullying from other kids or coaches. In that case, this will cause sports to have no positive outcome in building character in a child, most likely will diminish their character development to a negative outcome. |
Exercise 3: Notebook prompt
What are some other metanarratives about sport that you are familiar with? Find an image or video clip or draw something yourself that captures this idea…
So what? Why does any of this matter? Does it matter? As something we grow up with – live with – play through – we don’t often interrogate the meanings of sport, and perhaps we don’t want to.
But being aware of these assumptions and metanarratives is especially important, I would argue, because of the centrality of sport to our everyday lives, the role that sport plays in shaping our childhood and worldviews and….. [finish that thought]
Understanding that everyone has their own opinion on sports. One metanarrative that I am familiar with is the national pride in living in sports. The Olympics is the biggest example of that metanarrative because it involves all countries around the world, competing in many different sports to show the strength of your country, show the support coming from your country, and represent unity. On the other hand, it shows how some countries do not have all the same training facilities, so if everyone can’t train the same and have the same resources, how is it fair to celebrate the accomplishment? It is also controversial since sports is not something everyone participates in or is passionate about, and asking a whole country to show their enthusiasm or support is not what every person wants to do or feel comfortable but it has created a norm around why wouldn’t you celebrate your country, this is where you live you should be proud and cheer these athletes on but not everyone feels that way.
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B) What is social justice?
Exercise 4: Padlet Prompt
Think back to the last section and try to look at some of the ideas we discussed differently. How might sport and social justice actually co-exist?
Record any images, video clips, or gifs you added to the padlet and identify a point of intersection between sport and social justice (can be an issue or a barrier or a debate or something you would like to explore in more depth in this course) . Screenshot or paste in your response below.
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Access and Opportunity fall hand in hand with sports and social justice. Many people do not have the opportunity to have access to certain sports due to many different factors including money, gender, race, and many more. For instance, sports can be very expensive and if you do not have enough money, then the opportunity to play a sport is not something that might be possible. The same goes for people with disabilities, many sports do not have options to make it accessible for people with disabilities to play the sport and that is singling out certain people of society therefore sports are not always something that is accessible for different types of people.
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C) Social Justice Reading
(note: this activity is optional!)
D) KINESIOLOGY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Exercise 5:
Exercise 6:
What are the implications of bodies-at-risk discourse and the refusal to understand the health gap from a social justice perspective, according to the authors of this article?
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Bodies-at-risk from the author’s perspective refers to exactly what is being said, people’s bodies are at risk with the lack of knowledge and the avoidance of addressing the real reason behind it which is the social injustice going on, and that causes other factors. Blaming people’s bodies for poor health, and ignoring the surroundings of how this came to be, causing unjust and racist stereotypes. The authors have mentioned that the health boards need to think and recognize more social justice and fair responsibility in taking these issues more seriously and just.
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Section Two: Sport Feminism
Exercise 7: Notebook Prompt
What is feminism? What does it mean to you? Choose one of the images below and explain how it captures your understanding of feminism (or find one that does speak to you and paste this into your pressbook with an explanation of why it matters to you.
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This image for me is a great example of feminism. I have seen it almost every time I have a class that speaks about feminism. Feminism is all about gender equality, and that is why this image is perfect. This image shows a woman wearing not typical woman’s clothing, flexing her muscles, and saying “We can do it”. Everything about this image shows perfectly that we can do it, this woman shows that we do not need to wear dresses all the time to look beautiful, we can wear what men wear, we can do the jobs that men do, or we can be visibly strong, we can do it all. There are so many ways to interpret this image but truly all around it is to be an image representing women to show that we can do it, we can do anything we want and our gender is not to be defined to specific stereotyped things.
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Exercise 8: Notes Prompt (optional)
NB: Cornell notes is a great resource that teaches effective notetaking. Unfortunately, our system can’t save notes taken in the H5P app, so this is fully optional.
Exercise 9: Crossword Activity
Exercise 10: Padlet Prompt
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In sports, women have been directed to choosing, a “feminine” sport, but liberal feminism in sports opens the doors and opportunities to believe in themselves and embrace being a woman who can play any sport they would like or be involved in the stereotypical masculine sports. A great example of this in real time is Jessica Campbell who is the first female NHL coach, representing liberal feminism in sports showing women everywhere that there is opportunity in male-dominated sports.
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I think that in just recent years women’s sports have grown a significant amount of attention. Personally, some could say I am a part of the cause, but we all just watch the sports we are interested in, I do not like to watch basketball but I am a hockey player and with PWHL starting last year, I have been keeping up and watching lots of games. There has been in the past year the PWHL started a significant amount of growth in views and people who attend games, it took a long time for women’s hockey to be represented properly and this is a huge start, and people are now realizing how talented these women are and starting to grow more viewers.
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