As stated in my introduction blog, I myself have had the experience of playing with a female teammate on an all boys softball team. This to me at the time was a very new concept because I was not used to having a female teammate. Our first thought of our female teammate was the same thought any young boy will have. “Can she even play baseball?” We were very happy and relieved that she played like an all-star. She didn’t throw like a girl, she didn’t hit like a girl, and actually she didn’t play like a girl at all. She played like one of the guys. Because of her great ability to play baseball, the thought of her being a female quickly fled from our minds. She was our teammate, our shortstop; she was “one of the guys”.
There is one concept that closely relate to the ever growing movement of women going away from the perception of Barbie dolls and makeup to baseball glove, football helmets, and soccer cleats. That concept is “Gender as Body Performance”. More and more women are showing that they can be equals with men, but there is still some resistance to the idea of women being able to compete on the same level as men.
Boy won't wrestle girl: MyFoxBOSTON.com
There was a huge national uproar towards the young man’s decision to not wrestle the girl due to his “religious beliefs”. To some this was a justified decision as you can easy see as an example in the above video. But many believe it was because of the sole fact that she was a female that the young boy decided not to wrestle her. “When people internalize social expectations about gender/sex and the body, it becomes difficult for them to determine whether they construct their gender identities or whether gender/sex expectations begin to construct them”
The boy’s decision also goes along with the concept of religion as a social institution. "Joel believes based on his conscience and his faith, that girls should be treated with dignity and respect,"
There are some who have taken the “attractiveness” portion of the “Gender as Body performance” concept and created a all women football league. I first heard about this league a few months ago, but it has been around for 3 years now. It is known as the lingerie football league. Yes it is geared towards male audiences, and it is easy to tell by the league’s tag line. “True Fantasy Football”. I thought it would just be models in lingerie attempting to play football. I am happy to say I was wrong. Yes these women are in lingerie, which I believe is stupid, but they play like any other professional football player. They hit hard, run fast, and are very aggressive. As you will see from the highlights in this video; Spoiler Alert! The fight breaks out at 3:55.
“Beauty can be a positive human aesthetic. However, cultural norms defining bodily beauty tend to have narrow, shifting boundaries that make them virtually unattainable.”
With that in mind, I leave you with this video of a 9 year old girl who is not in the lingerie league, but in a all boys football league. She doesn’t need fewer clothes to grab the attention of those around her. Her skills on the football field speak for themselves.
Work Cited
DeFrancisco, V. P., & Palczewski, C. H. (2007). Communicating Gender Diversity. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Football, L. (2011, January 7). Game 16: THE STORY - Miami Caliente at Tampa Breeze - LFL Lingerie Football. Retrieved March 1, 2012, from YouTube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e5TWUHEW2I&feature=related
Fox25. (2011, Feburary 18). MyFox Boston. Retrieved 04 01, 2012, from Boy won't wrestle girl: http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/national/boy-wont-wrestle-girl-20110218
Maynard, M. (2011, October 8). The New York Times. Retrieved 3 1, 2012, from Even in a Locker Room Apart, an Undeniable Leap of Progress: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sports/female-football-player-represents-remarkable-progress-for-women.html?pagewanted=all
Looking forward to reading the results of your data collection process in next blog. To process that information you will want to gather up all of your data (interview transcripts, observations, field notes, journal, etc) into one large pile of written data. Read through all of the information from start to finish once. Then go back and start to highlight statements that you think are intriguing. Try to group likeminded things together. You will do this several times. What you want to do is start to develop categories related to your concept. You’ve picked gender as performance so you might want to start by organizing things around into categories using the central definition of gender performance. Then you’ll think about how you can connect these categories to bigger picture themes. What does a discussion of female masculinity tell us about gender as a communicative phenomenon? Try to develop 3 major take aways from your project that can inform us regarding the female masculinity.
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