Brittney Griner, Women Athletes and the Erotic Gaze
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
With the 40th anniversary of the Title IX, and the recent announcement that for the first time in history American female athletes will outnumber their male teammates at the Olympics, it would be easy to claim victory in the fight against sexism within the world of sports. Dave Zirin, in a recent column about Title IX and Serena Williams, reflected on the importance of this legislation:
There is arguably no piece of progressive legislation that’s touched more people’s lives than Title IX, which allowed young women equal opportunity in education and sports. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation, one in thirty-five high school girls played sports forty years ago; one in three do today. Before Title IX, fewer than 16,000 women participated in college sports; today that number exceeds 200,000. All stereotypes about women being too “emotional” to handle sports were answered when the gyms were unlocked, and they arrived in droves. It is a reform that has improved the quality of life for tens of millions of women around the country.
While certainly a landmark piece of legislation that literally and symbolically transformed sporting landscapes throughout the United States (more so in the suburbs), Zirin also elucidates the persistence of sexism within sports culture, evident in inequity in pay, coaching disparities, differential treatment from the press, and the intransigent power of stereotypes. Recognizing an incomplete transformation and the need for persistent agitation as to fully realize justice and equality, Zirin depicts sports as a place where dreams remained deferred.
The reasons for Zirin’s muted or skeptical celebration have been on full display this evening with the treatment of Brittney Griner by “sports fans” on Twitter. Illustrating the ways that race, gender, and sexuality constrain and contain, the ways that racism, sexism, and homophobia exists as prism/prison of sporting consumption, and the ways that new media operates as a technology of surveillance and demonization, the treatment of Griner highlights the dreams yet fulfilled in Title IX. What should have been a celebration of her greatness and that of other female athletes is yet another moment of rampant sexism, homophobia and racism. Here are but a few of the tweets that echoed within the twitter world during the ESPYS:
· Brittney Griner should have won best male athlete...
· If Brittney Griner's straight then I'm an Angels fan.
· Watchin the #espys......ummmmm Brittney Griner sounds like a man......wow!!
· The Heat win "BestTeam" category really? They should sign Britney Griner then they'd really be a scary team
· Brittney Griner is a man
· The ESPYs made me cry tonight. Not because of Eric LeGrand or Pat Summit. But because of Brittney Griner. That woman frightens me endlessly.
· Brittney griner screaming like a dude lol
· Brittney Griner has to be a dude
· Brittney Griner is a Dude her voice deeper than mine
· Brittney griner looks and sounds like a dude #BestMaleAthlete
· I would rather have Brittney Griner win best male athlete than Lebron. Because she's WAY more of a man than he will ever be
· Brittney griner... Do your balls grow hair? #nodoubt
· Cup check in britney griner please
· I wonder if Brittney griner is packing more downstairs than the #bieledong @BeingBielema
· No one on this planet can tell me that Brittney Griner is not a homosexual male. I won't believe it. #ESPYS
· Brittney Griner's voice scares me
· Brittney Griner...you just won best FEMALE college athlete, at least go to the ESPY'S dressed like a GIRL! Smh.
· Are we sure that Brittney Griner is really a girl??
· If Brittney Griner wins female athlete of the year at the Espys tonight I'm gonna throw a fit. She's not even a female
Clearly, the 2012 ESPYS were another moment to mock and ridicule and to otherwise dehumanize Brittney Griner. Demonizing her as “unattractive,” questioning her worthiness or the appropriateness of her receiving an award for “best female athlete,” and imaging her as a scary and disgusting Other, the Tweets are yet another reminder of how sports culture remains a space hostile to women, especially those who don’t fulfill male sexual fantasies. In an effort to fully contextualize these tweets, I thought I would repost piece I wrote for Slam earlier in the year.
Averaging 22.7 points/game – Check
60% from field and over 80% from line – Check
Almost 10 rebounds each night – Check
155 blocks after 30 games in season – Check
Team undefeated and ranked #1 – Check
Outscoring opponents by 30+ points/game - Check
With numbers like this, and the level of dominance seen throughout their career, you would think that this player would be the talk of the town, with magazine covers, lengthy biographic pieces on ESPN and a theme of celebration. Yet, these numbers and success hasn’t translated into Britsanity, all of which reflects the power of race, gender, and sexuality within sport culture. Unable to transform the narrative, in spite of her amazing (revolutionizing) play, Brittney Griner remains an afterthought within the basketball world. Unable to embody the traditional feminine aesthetic and beauty, yet fulfilling the stereotypes usually afforded to black male ballers, there is little use for Griner within the national imagination. Her greatness is relatively invisible (outside of hardcore sports fans) because she simultaneously fits and repels our expectations for female athletes.
When Brittney Griner emerged on the national scene three years ago (and even before while still in high school), the media focus wasn’t solely on her game, but instead positioned her as a player who was challenging the expectations of female athletes. Unlike the vast majority of celebrated female athletes, she was, according to the narrative, a less feminine “androgynous female” who challenged the “rigidity of sex roles.” Often comparing her to males, the media narrative consistently imagined her as a “freak” and as an aberration, contributing to a story of shock, amazement and wonderment whether Griner was indeed a woman. According to Lyndsey D'Arcangelo, “The world of women’s basketball has never seen a player like this before. Griner has the athletic skills and build of any budding male college basketball star, which has brought her ‘gender; into question.”
In “Brittney Griner, Basketball Star, Helps Redefine Beauty,” Guy Trebay highlights the ways in which the dominant narrative of Griner imagine her as not baller, as not student-athlete, but as signifier of gender and sexuality.
Feminine beauty ideals have shifted with amazing velocity over the last several decades, in no realm more starkly than sports. Muscular athleticism of a sort that once raised eyebrows is now commonplace. Partly this can be credited to the presence on the sports scene of Amazonian wonders like the Williams sisters, statuesque goddesses like Maria Sharapova, Misty May Treanor and Kerri Walsh, sinewy running machines like Paula Radcliffe or thick-thighed soccer dynamos like Mia Hamm.
While celebrating her for offering an alternative feminine and aesthetic, the media narrative of course represented her in ways limited to female athletes – she was confined by the stereotype of women athletes. Focusing on her body, and how she meshes with today’s beauty stands, all while defining her “as a tomboy” the public inscription of Grinner did little to challenge the image of female athletes. In purportedly breaking down the feminine box that female athletes are confined to within sports cultures, Griner provided an opportunity, yet as we see the opportunity is still defined through feminine ideals and sexual appeal to men.
The limited national attention afforded to Griner irrespective of her dominance and her team’s success reflects the profound ways that her emergence has not ushered in a new moment for women’s sports. Unable to appeal to male viewers, to fulfill the expectations of femininity and sexuality, Griner has remained on outside the already infrequent media narrative of women’s sports. Even though there are multiple networks dedicated to sport, even though there are magazines, countless websites, and a host of other forms of social networking dedicated to sports, there are few places for female athletes, much less black female athletes. Studies have demonstrated that less than 10% (3-8%) of all sports coverage within national and local highlight packages focuses on women’s sports.
Substantive coverage and national attention so often comes through sex and sex appeal, where female athletes who are successful at sport (less important) and eliciting pleasure from male viewers garner the vast majority of sport. Matthew Syed (2008) argues that, “There has always been a soft-porn dimension to women’s tennis, but with the progression of Maria Sharapova, Ana Ivanovic, Jelena Jankovic and Daniela Hantuchova to the semi-finals of the Australian Open, this has been into the realms of adolescent (and non-adolescent) male fantasy.”
Attempting to elevate women’s sports by telling readers that it is OK to view female athletes as sexual objects, he laments how western culture has not “reached a place where heterosexual men can acknowledge the occasionally erotic dimension of watching women’s sport without being dismissed as deviant.” This sort of logic contributes to the relative invisibility of Griner on the national landscape.
The lack of national attention illustrates that because Griner has not fulfilled this erotic dimension she has found limited use within the national imagination. One has to look no farther than YouTube comments to see the interconnection between the perceived masculinity of Griner, the lack of desire for her as sexual object, and her erasure from the sporting landscape. Unable to fill the role prescribed to female athletes within American sports culture, she is either dismissed as a “male” or a “freak” or used to normalize the Anna Kournakova, Allison Stokke and Candace Parkers’ of the world, who fulfill male expectations.
Reflecting the values of patriarchal society, female athletes who can appear on ESPN and Girls Gone Wild, who can win sport’s title and wet t-shirt contests, receive accolades and celebration. Notwithstanding the initial efforts to elevate Griner to the status of “game changer,” as someone who would redefine gendered expectations of sports, her outsider status highlights the difficulty of this process.
Griner inability to crossover to secure mass appeal isn’t purely about gender and sexuality, about dominant expectations of female athletes, but also the ways that her blackness restricts and confines her. Described as tough, masculine, and as physical, much of which comes from a 2010 incident where she hit an opponent, Griner has faced the burden of race, gender, and sexuality. The history of “white newspapers” is one where the media has “trivialized African-American women’s participation in sport, either by failing to cover the accomplishments of the athletes or by framing the athletes as masculine” (Cookey, Wachs, Messner and Dworkin 2010, p. 142). The efforts to describe, contain, and represent Griner through both racial and gendered language is illustrative of a larger history of black female athletes. Those who are able to fulfill the dominant white imagination regarding female athletes (to mimic a white aesthetic; to fulfill white sexual fantasies, such as Candace Parker) enters into the public sphere as sexual objects, yet those athletes like Griner, who don’t embody the sexualized aesthetics of white male pleasure, find themselves on the outside looking in at the few opportunities afforded to female athletes. It is no wonder that she hasn’t taken the nation by storm because clear her game is all that.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.
