Exercise Two: Unembed
There’s a short story in the 1994 anthology Sportsdykes called “Diamonds, Dykes, and Double Plays” that shows, through affectionate satire, how a different mindset can unsettle embedded conventions in sport. Written by Pat Griffin, later a big mover in trans inclusion work (for example Griffin and Carroll 2010), it concerns a lesbian gym teacher who moves from Maryland to Northampton, Massachusetts. On the run from a nasty break-up, she’s been lured by the town’s reputation—being spread in real life at the time by lesbians, tabloids, and the mainstream press—for being “Lesbianville USA.” But the town is nothing like she expected. Despite being “surrounded by dykes,” she’s “a stranger in a strange land” looking in vain for other “beer-drinking, sports-minded dykes” (Griffin 1994, 191–92). Instead, she finds ads for one potluck after another, a detail likely to get a nod of recognition from readers familiar with the subcultures she encounters that some might label “crunchy” or “PC.”
When her roommate invites her to join a softball team, she thinks she’ll finally find her community, until she makes one gaffe after another at the first team meeting (a potluck of course). After watching her future teammates avoid the hamburger casserole she brought—“Here’s a tip: never bring . . . anything that used to breathe” (192)—she generates a big thudding silence by asking who had won the championship last season. Finally, someone explains that her new team, “Amazon Vision,” belongs to a “noncompetitive league” because “the obsession with winning is a vestige of the patriarchy” (193). What’s more, once practices start, the gym teacher discovers that the league’s politics upend all sorts of common sports terms (“we call it ‘second basewomon,’” 195) and traditions. Yelling “I’ve got it” when you can catch a ball in the outfield: too territorial and capitalist. Sitting apart from your opponents: too unsisterly and objectifying. Having a designated coach: too hierarchical. Instead, teammates should take turns coaching and decide what to do by consensus.
As the season progresses, one of the gym teacher’s biggest delights relates to something I discussed earlier: discovering that attitudes about competition are not always as pure as people say they are. When the Amazons, aided by her subtle coaching, find themselves in a game they might actually win, some players display the very competitive spirit that they had forsworn. One slides dramatically into home plate trying to end a last-minute tie. Another quietly celebrates a victory that, in truth, the last play had left in dispute. On a schedule affixed to the refrigerator, she writes: “3–2, us” (201). I love all of that, too.
What I love even more is the players’ desire to identify and unembed big systemic forms of oppression that infiltrate sport. Sure, their ideas may seem grandiose or silly. But think about it. Coaches aren’t inevitably agents of hierarchical dominance, but what if we started from the premise that they should actively avoid being so? In the podcast I mentioned earlier about the book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, participants argued that encouraging young athletes to recognize themselves as people who own and understand their own bodies was one key to combatting physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as (other) common athletic practices like directives to compete while injured (34:22–35:38. For related evidence in gymnastics, read Jennifer Doyle’s compelling 2024 account of how Larry Nassar, former doctor for USA Gymnastics, could continue the sexual abuse of gymnasts for years, due partly to presumptions that accusers who came forward first did not understand what had happened to them).
What other practices do hierarchical presumptions engrain, of bigger or smaller consequence? I think about that a lot these days as I turn over to my college students partial syllabus design, listen less suspiciously when they describe obstacles to completing assignments, ask my skating students more often what they’d like to work on in class, and attend to clues that some guidance I had learned to deliver in skating might support one student but harm another.
For example, a few years into coaching adult beginner classes, I thought I had noticed a pattern that I knew one of my students well enough to ask about. “Hey,” I ventured, to paraphrase a long-ago conversation, “You seem to get grumpy when we work on forward crossovers.” (Crossovers are a common method of directing your skating on a curve with the potential to develop great power and speed.) “Is that because the way I ask you to extend your arms feels like how someone would display pretty, manicured nails? Does it feel like a feminine gesture that clashes with your butch soul?” Yes! I could address her discomfort partly by explaining the functional versus gendered or aesthetic reasons for learning crossovers with extended arms, which aids balance and body placement. I could also demonstrate other ways to accomplish those goals, and what skaters with more proficiency can do instead.
That interaction taught me to be more attentive to the variety of gendered (and otherwise complicated) identities that people bring to movement. I’m not advocating that we scrutinize or label people. That’s invasive; I wouldn’t have asked that student I mentioned if we hadn’t already bonded about being queer in what was then a pretty straight setting. Plus, we can’t read gender identity from what (we think) someone is presenting. Why do I wear black skates, in contrast to the huge percentage of female- and/or feminine-identified people who wear white? While you might imagine that I’m signaling a masculine or antibinary identity, for me it’s really about a particular feminine style and some personal connections you couldn’t know until I told you about them.
What we can know, for sure, is that people show up with wide-ranging relations to their bodies. A skater’s hunched shoulders could be random slouching, a strategy to conceal chest protrusions they wish they didn’t have, or the residue of childhood lessons that girls shouldn’t take up space. What kind of guidance can take those possibilities into account? “Shoulders down” might work better than “shoulders back.” What about alternatives to “tuck your tailbone,” which I had internalized from various types of movement instruction over the years? It can be traded in for others that don’t support a certain model of skinniness and racialized white ideals.