Jaime Schultz

Reading the Catsuit Serena Williams and the Production of Blackness at the 2002 U.S. Open

During the 2002 U.S. Open, Serena Williams received a great deal of attention for wearing an outfit described as ”a body-clinging, faux leather, black cat-suit.” It was not necessarily the catsuit itself that the popular media found especially controversial but rather the visibility of her physique the outfit provided. The ways in which Serena Williams, the outfit, and her body were discussed offers a particular site at which to interrogate the production of blackness in 21st-century, U.S. society. This article argues that the processes of differentiation the popular media used to characterize her are located within racialized discourse. By representing Williams through oppositional rhetorics, that is, setting her multiple identities in contradistinction to other women on the tour, accounts concerning her appearance in the catsuit reproduce the hegemonic racialized order in women’s tennis.

Caster Semenya and the “Question of Too”: Sex Testing in Elite Women's Sport and the Issue of Advantage

In 2009, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) forced Caster Semenya, the womens 800-meter champion from South Africa, to submit to “gender verification tests.” It took eleven months for officials to review the results of those tests and, ultimately, permit her compete again. Sports organizations, including the IAAF and the International Olympic Committee, have implemented sex testing since the 1960s, but Semenyas story reinvigorated debates about how to determine sex and whether sex testing is necessary in sport. However, I argue that there is another issue at which researchers should direct energies. That is, instead of asking whether an athlete “counts as” a woman, kinesiologists and those in affiliated fields might better concentrate their efforts on discerning which conditions, naturally occurring or otherwise, constitute unfair advantages.

From Mice to Men: Miracle, Mythology & the Magic Kingdom

Within this essay we address sport film as particularly lustrous, affective and sensuous mediums onto which various socio-political trajectories become mapped and within which popular forms of culture are appropriated. Focusing on the 2004 Disney release of Miracle, we propose that the film is an emplotment of the past – a sanitized reconfiguration of history – that can best be understood through reference to the geo-political realities of the present: one in which the spectres of the Cold War are being rolled out in multiple popular cultural forms as part of the United States response to the events of September 11 2001. We argue the events of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games US ice hockey semi-final victory by the US over the USSR were detached from their historical moorings in the soft/ideological battles of the Cold War. Instead, as part of the commercially bastardized, insipid, yet seductively effervescent filmic popular, this ‘great moment in sport history’ re-emerged in our present, or more accurately, was narrated or retold, as a ‘sanctioned’ sporting discourse that mobilizes the affective orientation of popular-commodity-signs in the substantiation and appropriation of US corporo-political needs through a myopic expression of American jingoism, militarism and geo-political domination.

Contesting the Master Narrative: The Arthur Ashe Statue and Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia

Located at the heart of what was once the capital of the Confederate States of America, Monument Avenue is ‘Virginias place to be recognized by Virginians’. For over a century the Richmond streets commemorative art paid homage to those labelled ‘heroes’ of the Confederacy, normalising and sanctioning a white, masculine, martial dominance that became increasingly incongruous with the citys demographics. In 1996, the hotly contested addition of a statue of native Richmonder Arthur Ashe, an African American tennis champion, challenged the avenues master narrative. This project addresses the micro-geographies involved in the debate over where and how to site the Ashe statue and its perceived effects on Richmonds commodifiable sense of self.

‘Stuff from which legends are made’: Jack Trice Stadium and the politics of memory

This paper considers the politics involved in naming Iowa State Universitys football stadium after Jack Trice, the schools first African American athlete and its only athlete to die from injuries sustained in competition. This decision took place in the mid- to late-1990s, at nearly the same time administrators dedicated another site of memory on Iowa States campus – Carrie Chapman Catt Hall. Catt, an esteemed alumna of the school, was an important lobbyist for womens rights in the early twentieth century who made several racist, classist and xenophobic remarks in her campaigns. By locating these two memorial efforts within the larger context of racialized relations in the US, this essay argues that the university memorialized Jack Trice in order to assert itself as a racially inclusive space during a moment that threatened to brand the institution deficient when it came to minority students and affairs.

Preface: American National Pastimes

The place where we work, Pen nsylvania State University, has a solid reputation as an academic institution. The Times of London’s most recent (2013) rankings of global higher education placed Penn State in a grouping of the 51st to 60th most reputable academic institutions in the world, labelling it a ‘Public Ivy’ that supposedly jostles with Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elite institutions at the top of the US educational establishment heap. In spite of our not insignificant standing among the world’s leading universities, many in the USA and around the globe know Penn State’s sporting reputation much better than its academic profile. That happens when your football stadium seats 106,572 spectators, a few more than the roughly 100,000 persons counted by the most recent census in the towns that make-up the mini-metropolitan area the edifice inhabits. Penn State has for decades maintained an enormous and successful intercollegiate sporting programme, enjoying fame and fortune on American football gridirons and in other athletic venues. Penn State also ‘enjoys’ sporting infamy – its recent scandal related to the football team garnered intense global attention and it will tarnish our image for years to come. The world knows Penn State as much for its ‘pastimes’ as its academic innovations, often to the chagrin of our faculty. Our famous ‘We Are!’ chant echoes in venues around the world, especially at athletic events. We are, however, not just a sports-saturated campus. We are the institution that granted the nation’s first degrees in agriculture and industrial engineering; we are the place where researchers first ‘saw’ the atom with an ion electron microscope; we are the site where scientists produced the first measurable batch of deuterium, a key hydrogen isotope necessary in the manufacture of the ‘heavy water’ that made splitting the atom possible. Penn State also stands as the professorial battleground where American higher education first ploughed ‘post-colonial’ furrows in literary studies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Penn State’s English department started a literary revolution when it made American literature into its own vibrant canon and not the minor sub-discipline of British literature which had traditionally been in colleges and universities in the USA. A historic marker on campus now eulogises Penn State’s innovation. Fred Lewis Pattee, the Penn State scholar who devoted his career to American literature and served as the ‘George Washington’, of the bookish insurrection – though perhaps Thomas Jefferson is a better metaphor for a literary warrior – and his followers changed the course of the study of ‘letters’ in American academia. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have been fortunate to be among an informal coalition of faculty

The accidental celebritisation of Caster Semenya

In 2009, South African athletics star Caster Semenya won the 800-metre womens title at the track and field World Championships in Berlin. Shortly before the final heat of that event, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) confirmed reports that she had been subjected to a process of ‘gender verification’. This essay examines the ways in which the international media produced Semenyas accidental celebrity using Entmans (1993) notion of framing which ‘essentially involves selection and salience’.

The Physical Activism of Billie Jean King

Even the most cursory glance at the accolades awarded to Billie Jean King over the years demonstrates that this is a woman who deserves a prominent place in the pantheon of sporting greats. In a tennis career spanning four decades, she amassed 39 Grand Slam titles, including 20 Wimbledon and 13 US Open crowns. Yet, her legacy transcends the sports world. ‘Very likely,’ mused venerated sportswriter Frank Deford in 1975, she ‘will go down in history as the most significant athlete of this century. That is not said lightly. But then few athletes ever reach beyond their games to exert any dominion over the rest of society.’1 Indeed, a recent spate of tributes indicates the depth and breadth of her influence. Of the 100 Most Important Americans of the Twentieth Century, for instance, Life magazine included just four athletes: Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and King. In 2006, the United States Tennis Association rededicated its National Tennis facility as the Billie Jean King National Tennis Centre. Host to the US Open, the New York site is the largest and most eminent sports venue named for a woman. Three years later, President Obama decorated King with the Medal of Freedom, ‘America’s highest civilian honor … awarded to individuals who make an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.’2