Conclusiones

The second strand of feminism that I have chosen to investigate is feminist standpoint theory. But to understand the development of feminist standpoints, it is

important to recognise the historical background of radical feminism in that development. The second-wave radical feminists opposed the liberals’ claims about the neutrality of institutional structures and ideas in the modern state. These feminists claimed that the mere positioning of females into institutions and practices, which have been traditionally

occupied and controlled by males, would not, by itself, produce an authoritative female voice. The earliest radical feminists, such as Kate Millett (1969), claimed that the oppressed position of women in patriarchal society was due to the social construction of gender-appropriate behaviour which limited women’s access to positions of authority in that society. Women were trained to accept and value the virtues of passivity, nurturance, deference and care for others. These virtues were enacted in their roles as wife or lover, mother, homemaker or in the limited employment opportunities that women were deemed capable of filling. The response by these early radical feminists was to oppose these gender-roles and imagine a society where androgyny was a possibility.

One of the criticisms of the earliest radical feminists was that the language that they chose to use maintained the negative valuation of women’s roles and abilities that had been produced in patriarchal discourse. In contrast, anti-rationalist, radical theories of feminism oppose the denigration of the feminised nature that is contained in both the patriarchal and the liberal perspectives. This view celebrates the feminised ‘irrational’, as the alternative to, and not the female deficiency of, the supposedly gender neutral terms of rationalism and androgyny. It suggests that ‘intuition’, ‘nature’, ‘the body’ and ‘natural contingency’, all offer valid, but different, descriptions. In this school of feminism, the social order will better accommodate women “... in their feminized difference rather than as imperfect copies of the Everyman” (di Stefano, 1990, p. 67).

Anti-rationalists believe that the liberal discourses of ‘reason’, ‘freedom’, ‘human nature’ and ‘gender difference’ are historically and culturally specific and biased in favour of those people in power. In the modern state, and in sport, these people of power are males. Feminist anti-rationalism levels its criticism not at the fairness or unfairness of

current configurations of society, nor at understandings of gender labels in society, but at the legitimacy of the rational/masculine; irrational/feminine construct. Or, as McMillan suggests, the problem with the rationalist perspective is that it uncritically accepts the hierarchical division between femininity and masculinity. This acceptance is demonstrated by the attempts by liberal feminists, and some of the early radical feminists, to break the links between women, nature and irrationality, rather than to contest the dichotomous link in this construction (McMillan, 1982, pp. 55, 56), and the difference in value of the categories of people that result from it. Contemporary radical feminists hope to redescribe the elements of female consciousness and understanding in such a way that they are no longer denigrated. In order to achieve this, the radical feminists both break down or deconstruct the existing structures and ideas that maintain the priority of the rationalist patriarchal perspective, and also create new structures and ideas that produce new freedoms and opportunities for women from their own experiences.

Denise Thompson exemplifies this feminist standpoint position. For her,

Feminism is centrally concerned with questions of power, power in the sense of relations of domination/subordination, and power in the sense of ability, capacity and opportunity to control the conditions of one’s own existence.... (1994, p. 173)

Thompson goes on to suggest that “...the idea of male supremacy ...is that the male represents the ‘human’ norm at the expense of human status for women” (1994, p. 174). The interests, values, virtues and descriptions which men use are set up as human categories. At the same time, females are excluded from these categories and the production of discourse about these categories. As a result, the interests and values of women are ignored or trivialised, and the status of women exists in relation to their subservient role towards men. Thompson states that the status of women is “...at best, a second-rate ‘human’ status acquired through relations of subordination to men; at worst, women’s needs and interests are ignored, sometimes our very existence obliterated” (1994, p. 175).

But what is particularly disabling for women is that the male language includes women in compliant roles of support. It achieves this through a series of subtle

romantic love and marriage, the ‘goodness’ of female’s nurturing character and the ‘protection and comfort’ which comes from men controlling positions of power. So, these subtle mechanisms suggest ‘pleasures’ that the women gains in agreeing to consent to the descriptions provided for her by the dominant discourse, and consent is a more efficient and stronger form of ensuring compliance, than coercion. The ‘naturalness’ of both

heterosexual desire and woman’s nurturing role has had a particularly limiting effect on the type of sports in which women are seen to properly participate21, the intensity of that participation, the media coverage and administration of these sports and athletes, the authority of female athletes and the opportunities for females to redefine these limits.

In practical terms, this school of feminism looks to use difference as a power to oppose the hierarchy in society. Inclusion of females in the male-neutral institutions of law, education and sport will only perpetuate the myth of female as inferior or inadequate. Inclusion will, at some time, become necessary as a starting-point to enunciate these myths in a public forum. However, it is important that inclusion does not occur before females decide what alternatives they can offer to the current structures of society. Yet the production of alternative standpoints is only one step in a path to greater authority for females. Standpoint feminists hope to go further, and force their descriptions into the public forum for consideration by others. Rortian pragmatism may be useful in providing some tools with which the male supremacist community is ‘forced’ to listen to the

descriptions produced by feminists (Rorty, 1991a), and possibly take them up in the reformation of society, and of sport.

Chapter Five will both elaborate on this introduction to the feminist standpoint position, and apply discourses produced by this position to the situation of women in the sporting media. Whilst the investigation of females in the sports media abstracts one mechanism of female oppression from an interlocking system of that oppression which includes corporeal socialisation, control of sporting organisations and legislative bodies, sports typing and more, the point of this chapter is to demonstrate the opportunities for gaining epistemic authority for females in the media. Demonstrating how such authority may be gained in one abstracted area of the female sporting life may be indicative of how the dominance of males may be resisted through other areas of life.