This is the second part of our discussion with Dr. Anna Kavoura on how gender informs meaning in sport. In the first part, we explored Anna’s work on intersecting identities in women’s martial arts, as well as her current research project titled "Transforming Gender Boundaries in Sport: An Ethnographic and Participatory Action Research Study in Trans-Inclusive Sport Contexts”.
This episode continues our discussion exploring the dominant gender discourses in sports context and what can be done to challenge them. We also discuss the dilemma of women-only training groups in martial arts. While these groups can be useful for attracting more women to male-dominated martial arts gyms, there are some possible problems with them such as reinforcing the gender binary and hierarchical understandings of gender. What are the ways we can use this strategy well?
Dr. Anna Kavoura has completed several interesting research projects on gender in sports. She completed her PhD in Sport Sciences at the Univerity of Jyväskylä in Finland, which focused on understanding women’s identity negotiations in competitive judo cultures in Greece and Finland. After defending her PhD, she continued working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä in the PREACT project which focuses on tackling discrimination against gender and sexual minorities in sport and physical education contexts (PI: Dr Marja Kokkonen). She then moved to the School of Sport and Service Management at the University of Brighton and works as a postdoctoral researcher in the "Transforming Gender Boundaries in Sport" project which is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
This is the Physical Activity Researcher Podcast, a podcast for researchers of sedentary behavior, physical activity, and sports. Join for a relaxed dialogue about research design, practicalities, and well, anything related to research. Learn from your fellow researchers useful and relevant information that does not fit into formal content and limited space of scientific publications. And here is your host. Welcome everyone, this is the Meaningful Sport Podcast, and I am your host, Nora Rongheinen. Meaningful Sport is a series of discussions on the why and how involvement in sport and physical activity can be an important part of a life worth living. If you are interested in the theme, you might also want to check out MeaningfulSport.com. There you can find podcast show notes, read a blog, and access many resources for further explorations of Meaningful Sport. Today's episode is the second part of our discussion with Dr. Anakavora on how gender informs meaning in sport. In the first part, we explored Anakavora's work on intersecting identities in women's martial arts, as well as her current project titled "Transforming Gender Boundaries in Sport" and ethnographic and participatory action research study in trans-inclusive sport contexts. In today's discussion, we continue exploring the dominant gender discourses in sport contexts and what can be done to challenge them. We also discussed the dilemma of women's only training groups in martial arts. While these groups can be useful for attracting more women to male-dominated martial art gyms, there are some possible problems with them, such as reinforcing the gender binary and hierarchical understandings of gender. What are the ways we can use this strategy well? Dr. Anakavora has completed several interesting research projects on gender in sport. She completed her PhD in sport sciences at the University of Uvascular in Finland with her research focusing on understanding women's identity negotiations in competitive judo cultures in Greece and Finland. After defending her PhD, she continued working as a postdoc researcher at the University of Uvascular in a project that focused on tackling discrimination against gender and sexual minorities in sport and physical education contexts. She then moved to the School of Sport and Service Management at the University of Brighton and currently worked as a postdoc researcher in the Transforming Gender Boundaries in Sport Project, which is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. I hope you enjoy today's episode. If we started going towards your more recent work, which is about challenging the gender binary and thinking of alternatives, maybe we move a step back towards looking at sport culture, looking at how masculinity and how femininity has been constructed. I think what you already said earlier was about identities of fluid and from this discursive perspective, we are accessing different discourses in our culture and we have to negotiate them and identity is not something that is staying the same. There is always this fluidity, but at the same time, I think we can also argue that if we think about the cultural world of sport, there are some very enduring and very dominant discourses that have stayed with us for decades and even with these attempts by scholars and people in the field destabilized these discourses. These would be some, they still have an enduring impact on our sport and how we imagine and practice sport. So maybe we can first explore a little bit about what is this dominant discursive or narrative landscape of sport and how that is shaped by masculinity. First of all, I think that sport is not the only one of the very few cultural systems right now that is still organized based on gender. So we separate people in categories based on their gender, so we don't do that in many other spheres of life anymore. And in addition to that, we still see that certain values that are often labeled as masculine, like for example, muscular strength, like competitiveness, aggressiveness and so on. They are more valued than more valued in sport than other kind of characteristics that are often labeled as feminine. So this kind of like essentially understanding creates like first separates people in categories and then creates hierarchies with these categories. So and like since we already said that the masculine is like more valued, we have this how to say like we have this like continues like male dominance I think in most sport cultures. It's like understanding that sport is naturally or men are naturally better in certain sports. I think an interesting question in terms of your martial artist and I've been doing also why tie for the past, I guess five years and some of the things you see in martial art cultures is that some gyms are creating these training groups for women only and you have been coaching a lot in the women's training group in Finland as well. And so I think those are quite contested in certain ways that it could be creating spaces for women where they feel that it's maybe easier to get into the gym and what you talked about in your PhD research. So the start of these women's training groups is often linked to creating these spaces that women feel more welcome and maybe less intimidated by that environment. But on the other hand, there are also these dangers that it just kind of reinforces the gender binary. So what are your thoughts on that? Exactly, yes, so like I think in many things like are very complex and there is not one solution fits all. Like when many people ask me this question and I always say that it really depends on the culture of the gym and depending on how you organize these women classes, you might have different results. So I have seen them working really nicely. When they work as a first step, let's say like to make women feel safer to come into this male domain. Because sometimes it's not you don't feel very comfortable as a beginner woman to step into a gym that when you see they're like 20 men and no other women or just one other woman and so on. And you feel that you don't know them moves and you feel that maybe people are watching you and also like in a sport that requires contact. And you know like there you have other issues going on with gender and contact and consent and so on. So this I have seen these groups working really nicely in gyms that they didn't have that many women. They had a problem with a gender balance ratio, let's say, and they used these courses as a kind of step to as a first step to help women feel safer and come to try the sport. But then the end goal is of course the mixed gender practice. So the goal is not to keep the group separate but the goal is to make the first step easier to make them feel more comfortable and then you know like the end goal is that we should that the end achieve a gender balance ratio in the gym. The same number of men and women are about the same numbers that train there and that we all train together. So I see it like working really nicely there but then I have seen also like you know this kind of separation practices that all we are having you know like competition training for men and competition training for women. Sometimes this is you know like it's rain forces they believe that you know women cannot cope in them that you know like men's competition training is harder and women cannot cope and we should have them in a separate group. And then this kind of rain forces stereotype so it has the opposite effect. So it depends how you use this strategy but I have seen it working really nicely if it is used like correctly and you know if it is needed in there because I mean if you are in a gym but the gender ratio is like fine almost 50/50 then you don't need this. Yeah I don't think you need this but I haven't been in many such teams. Most teams have a problem with a gender balance ratio and they are thinking you know like what can they do to bring more women so this is one strategy that can help if it is used like thoughtfully. But of course then we also like create like even if it is used properly it still creates certain problems like for example like it is not very inclusive with like non-binary people. So like yeah absolutely yeah when you call it like women's only class or something it might feel many people feel excluded. So there are still problems but I have seen it working nicely sometimes and so on. Like yeah the goal is always to achieve a kind of like nice gender balance and also like diversity in the gym. I think you know like if you have this kind of like if you find this like diverse like group of people it always means that there is something really good going on in the space I mean that there is a healthy environment for everybody to grow and so on. So this is like the in my opinion what we should try to achieve in our gyms like diversity and gender ratio balance and training altogether and this kind of like this kind of like mixed training can tackle gender stereotypes. Because then you come to kind of revisit what you thought that certain bodies can't do and cannot do and so on. Yeah I think when we talk about when I asked about this women only training groups for example what I saw in one of the gyms where I trained for a while and they had the women's training group which was not framed as a beginner's group so it was just a women's group in general. But at least some women who had been training for a longer time they would not go to women's training group because they felt that it's like too much just like you know chatting and socializing and the intensity was not as high and you wouldn't get a good sweat in the training. So that the kind of the women's group was probably organized in a very gender stereotypical way that women want to have fun and socialize whereas the tougher training is the men's training or the mixed training. So I think in that place it didn't work very well in a way that also women started to discriminate the women's group in the same way as we talked earlier that and that because they are not like the stereotypical women so they would go to the mixed training group instead. Yeah exactly thank you for this example this is another you know way that this can go wrong and that you meet this like frequently so it is like based on what ideas you have organized your let's say women only training. So if it is organized based on gender stereotypes then it is not going to help much to tackle this kind of the qualities and stereotypes the contrary it end up reproducing them so many people are thinking like why women are not coming and what can we do to bring here more and so on. And then like if you think stereotypically you think oh they are not coming because women like my nature they don't want to train hard or they don't want to like to really fight they want to do some fitness boxing for example and so on. And then you end up like organizing a class that even you don't want to join and you see these classes like lasting for three months and then you know like they are like done. Because they are like based on stereotypes so sometimes when women when women ask me women martial artists ask me all like we are just two and we want to do something in our class how how do you think we should like organize the women's class or something. And then you say that you should think how would you how you would like to train what would be don't try to think like what women want. Because like you end up thinking like with stereotypes what other women want like I mean you are you are a woman think what would be the ideal you know training environment for you what do you want from the training. Of course we are different and we all want different things from the training that's that's for sure but I think it is a better you know like point to start to start from your experience than to start from you know just just some assumptions of what all their like a coach you know their women want. So like I think it's safer to start from your own experience than from assumptions so think what would be the ideal you know like if you could if you could make the ideal training environment for you what would you do. Yeah you want to sweat you don't want to have this sexist language you know like there is a good chance that you would you know other women can also find this environment nice and they can come to train and enjoy the class. Yeah we we are ending up in like very difficult situations in the way that we earlier talked about how many of the elite athletes who you interviewed in your PhD how they were very much drawing on some of these very masculine discourses and they were then in a way separating themselves from the other women and we have been talking about the need to disrupt some of the masculine discourses and the meanings of sport that you have to be tough and aggressive and strong and resilient and never give up and and how these need to be destabilized but at the same time the other danger is that we end up drawing on this very stereotypical feminine discourses and that these training spaces need to be organized in a completely different way so it's difficult to start challenging these masculine discourses without then essentializing gender and ending up stereotyping in a different way I think it's difficult I agree with you but I think it's difficult to start challenging these discourses if we cannot recognize them. For me that's the first step like many times we are not very conscious of the ways that we are thinking and feeling or why we feel this way, why we think this way about women we are not very conscious of what kind of discourses we are reproducing with our practices, who benefits from those, who is suppressed, who is excluded from these kind of practices and so on so I think we need to start by learning to recognize those because the same, exactly the same act in my opinion can have totally different results if it is done kind of strategically and consciously or if it is done unconsciously for example, I like using the example with a color pink that it is like employed by many women's teams as a color for the logo or color for their clothes and so on so this, the use of this kind of color that is sometimes stereotypical like feminine girl color sometimes if it is done unconsciously, for example you are thinking like "oh I need to bring more women and girls in my team" you know, how should I advertise a team or what kind of logo and clothes we should have, "oh let's make them gels like pink, so let's make them pink" so this is a stereotypical way of thinking and you only end up reproducing this like stereotype but if you say that we are a martial arts club and pink is always stereotypically associated with femininity and girlhood and being fragile and being a girl and so on but let's take the color pink and let's use it in a way that we change this understanding and we show that for example I like this like work like this article by Alex Chanel like pink gloves still give them black eyes so let's take these you know understandings around the color pink and you know like change them so the same act using the color pink for a logo of a woman's team can have different effects if it is used like unconsciously based on stereotypical thinking or if it is used like consciously and strategically in order to you know like reverse destabilize certain stereotypes so for me the difference is whether you are reflecting on you know like what kind of like these courses you are reproducing with you all the ways you talk and the practices that you participate and who benefits from those yeah I think that's a very nice example with the pink gloves or the use of the color pink we always have the challenge that of course people who see these advertisements they don't see the intentions of the person who has designed them so the way that they are interpreted for example this new women's group which is using the color pink in the advertisement then people who see this advertisement will always bring different different meanings to that or how they interpret the message yeah of course it is always like a subject of interpretation yeah yeah but and I think you know like it is not again it is not women to blame for not being always you know like consciously or you know like seeing always behind things who is you know like oppressed and who is benefits from this so it's not women to blame for not being always you know conscious of these things because we it is not in our education we don't we don't learn to think of these things hmm so like I think like first there's to be some you know like educational opportunities for all those involved in sports you know learning learning to recognize like this kind of gender dynamics how the gender stereotypes are reproduced this you know like these courses and how those are resisted and how they are you know like reproducing so on learning to recognize these things like like being educated on that as the first step so that we can make conscious choices because many times like most of the times we all have very good intentions you know we want to have like an inclusive you know like Jim but we don't know how to do it and we often you know like employ the wrong strategies yeah I think what we already discussed about women's training groups like sometimes they will there are good intentions behind that to have more women involved but sometimes they work to actually reinforce the stereotypes and make it more difficult for for women to probably feel accepted in in the martial arts culture as well hmm exactly so what are your thoughts on in terms of also discursive interventions that that would be one approach how we how we could start trying to make a practical difference and a difference in in real world and we talked about these different discourses and how they impact how we construct our identities in sports so what are your thoughts what kind of things could be helpful we can talk about martial arts as that's that's the context that you are mostly researching that's a that's a difficult question but I think that I think that for example this like using as an example using the color pink in a way that that receives the stereotype and attempts to change the meaning around pink femininity girlhood and so on so this is a discursive like a discursive intervention right or using the world girl in a different because you know like there are the world girl is often like used to minimize you know like women at least so when we talk about men in sport elite you know male athletes we talk about men and so on we talk about boys but often when we refer to women we talk about girls and so on so one could could argue against you know calling women girls but you know there are other athletes that they like the world girl and they you know like they have used this conscious strategies to try to switch the meaning of the world and I mean the same is with the world queer for example the the world queer has a history of you know it was used as a negative term for LGBT people and then it was adopted for the from the community in order to switch the meaning but also like to keep this history of oppression and marginalization so I think these are kind of like discursive interventions in a way that have been used from the members of the community themselves from people from women in the sports clubs from members of the from the LGBT community and so on so they are community based kind of discursive interventions so if we think from the other direction I don't know what else to say to say like except from you know like education like including these kind of like courses in the gender courses in the education for coaches and for all people involved all people involved in sport or for you know like the media this is very important and I will forget to mention that the way that athletes are represented that talked about in the media or the ways that we write and we use our social media as sports people yeah so you could kind of use this means strategically in order to like stabilize the dominant discourses yeah just like you said the first step probably in striving towards this is also to become just to become aware how much significance the types of words we use are going to have and how many of us when having good intentions and we are hoping to do a good thing in terms of inclusivity and challenging this binary thinking as well but often we lack awareness of certain things that the way that we talk about things and write about things that they can actually be reproducing this binary as well as the hierarchical gender order in sport so I think that's a very important message for all of us and of course we need protective policies let's not forget that not all countries have those in place yet but those are not alone or not enough so we need also like you know to make the effort to change the cultural to make those cultural changes that we talked about some of the things we are now working together on doing this review on martial arts and we are looking at spirituality and meaningful experiences and one of the ideas that we had was to also look into who has access to this meaningful experiences in sport and I had this podcast with the meaningful physical education research group Deirdre and Necronin and Tim Fletcher and they were pointing out these certain things about physical education so for example those who have higher levels of skills and who are doing well and succeeding they are more likely to have these meaningful experiences whereas those who might be lacking those skills might not have as physical as meaningful experience maybe they don't want to do anything after finishing PE and then when they don't have to they wouldn't engage with any of that so maybe just some of your thoughts about all this what we discussed about gender and the complexity of gender what are your thoughts on how gender influences who has access to meaningful experiences in sport and physical culture yeah I think it definitely plays a role because like as we said that the gender is one of the few institutions that are still organized based on gender so we have all these kind of gender stereotypes that are very like powerful like in the like the ways that we practice sport and I had many like many of the people that I interviewed like like for example like they searched stories about you know their early experiences in physical education in school and how they felt very alienated especially like young LGBT people like how they felt very alienated by this culture they felt like it was like a class that you were like it was almost teaching you how to be a man or how to be a woman or all it was like in the same time it was like like like one of my participants like was describing it was always like organized based on you know like very militarized or policed kind of way of you know instructing things and also like focusing on performance and competition and so on and these elements were kind of like alienating people that were you know not interested or rejecting these ideas yeah the gender binary for example like or you know gender roles you know like becoming a man or a woman this kind of like rigid gender roles about masculinity and femininity or you know like the competition and performance in the the alleged sport system so so like back to the question so who has access to these experiences so I think many people feel alienated in this like binary sport system and in that sense they are having they are like they feel alienated and they are having like they in a way they are denied you know like access to meaningful experiences in sport because they don't fit this logic binary logic of thinking yeah exactly exactly or if we think about women you know like mothers for example or you know like women that are not anymore 20 years old or something so for women many many studies have pointed out that this you know cultural understandings that we have for women who there is a stricter timeline of you know when when you can do things and to what our meaningful pursuits like according to your age like as a woman or something yeah so like can you be an elite athlete when you are a woman at here for this with two kids or does it even make sense you know to spend so much time to do exercise and sport instead of you know like doing other things for your family yeah yeah absolutely so I think that gender or gender other settings like definitely overlap with like meaning systems in in sport and with also like how we feel and think about our experiences and how we construct meaning and whether you know we find the activity meaningful or not like for example I felt like for many years I like I admit that I have been like very performance and competition oriented for many years but when I you know at some point the growing order and working more and having less time to train and more injuries and so on I couldn't anymore like you know like achieve this kind of elite performances and then like I started having this like a crisis of meaning like is it you know like why am I doing sport now is it still meaningful and you know like I was having this crisis for like two years or something like I was really struggling with my emotions about sport and my you know what I what am I doing and now here and this was because I was like so much so much embedded in this kind of like performance orientated these courses and I was like having trouble to you know like enjoy sport out outside of of those yeah yeah in in this elite sport performance oriented discourse if you are no longer reaching a new level of performance and achievement unless you're able to do it seriously and and keep progressing then it seems that there is like little point to be doing that yeah I think those are very important messages for for us to be thinking about further and I'm all certain we will be writing about these things together as well and you already pointed out well it's gender is of course one thing age is another thing that you very clearly brought up in terms of who has access to meaningful experience is also bound to age and how sport is thought to be this project of youth and when you get older then it's time to stop spending so much time on sport and it's time for you to do something more serious and more responsible and those kind of things yeah I have very much enjoyed our talk and and it has really been wonderful can you maybe come up with a couple of few closing words for our listeners so if you hope that they will remember one or two things from our talk what what could they be closing thoughts let's see yeah well I think if I want you know like people to remember one sentence out of this it would be like try to be mindful of the of the effects that what you say what you do and the practices that you participate have like if we if we try to to reflect and think more of you know where does this come from you know the way that I am thinking and the way that I am talking where does it come from what is the history behind of that and how do we exclude this way you know then we might end up you know like doing things differently because like as we discussed you know many times the intentions are good but just there is no you know like conscious thinking behind it or the ability to you know like to observe this dynamics yeah thank you again for this this wonderful discussion I really enjoyed it and I think we are addressing some very very important questions for all of us interested in sport exercise and movement culture to think about so yeah thank you thank you for again for having me all right was a pleasure discussing with you thanks for joining us this week on physical activity research through podcast if you like the show makes you never miss an episode by subscribing or following the show on Twitter this podcast is made possible by listeners like you thank you for your support if you found value in the show we would really appreciate rating on Apple podcast or whichever app you use or if you would in real old school way simply tell a friend about the show it would be a great help for us we have a fantastic lineup of guests for forthcoming episodes so be sure to tune in thank you all for your support and have a great day
