The phantom category of ‘Intersex’ in elite sports: knowledge about ‘Disturbing’ female bodies and athletic performances

In this thesis I contribute to the discourse on disturbing bodies and athletic performances in female sports through the phantom category of ‘intersex’. As ‘Intersex’ is disputed as an identity and represents a wide range of anatomic makeups, Iain Morland designates it as a phantom category. I adopt this usage as it problematises the category and trouble the logic of ‘intersexphobia’ that circulates around the female body and athletic performance ideals in elite sports. This research contributes new understandings of the phantom category of intersex because it is the first study to bring together in a dialogue IOC/IAAF medical representatives involved in the management/treatment of athletes with intersex variations, intersex organisation representatives and female athletes. By juxtaposing their voices I have complicated the ways in which it is possible to understand members of each group and elucidated strategies and relations of power which structure the discourses related to the phantom category of intersex in elite sport. This study has a strong archival element, drawing on pertinent material from the Olympic Museum in Switzerland. This archival research extends understanding of the history of medical testing of ‘unreal women’ and underscores the influence of Avery Brundage, a central figure in the development, standardisation and implementation of the femininity tests, both nationally and internationally. This archival research has also enabled me to contribute to an understanding of how sport medical experts have vigorously questioned the IOC’s insistence upon defining femininity through testing since the 1970s. It also afforded access to and analysis of a previously unreported IOC survey directed towards women athletes at the Lillehammer Games (1994) on the subject of gender verification. To make sense of this historically layered and diverse data, covering material from 1928 to 2012, this study employs several analytic strategies. I consider Foucauldian genealogical strategies when analysing continuing and discontinuing concepts of knowledges and truths which mark and regulate particular bodies and athletic performances as normal versus abnormal. Expanding on frameworks of biopower and biopedagogy I also scrutinise whose truths and knowledges are privileged and therefore who is seen as more competent than others to tell the truth about these issues. By also attending to Foucauldian concepts of “subjugated knowledges” and their “insurrection”, this study conceptualises the understandings and subjective experiences of female athletes who have been tried and tested and of intersex organisations. This thesis also draws on Morland’s idea of “one’s embodied cultural location”, Nikki Sullivan’s concept of somatechnologies and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Together these frameworks form critical components when considering how structuring structures and subjective experiences inform how participants justify or contest the employment of particular somatechnologies to conceptualise and limit corporeality and athletic performances in female sports. In bringing all these voices into dialogue and by uncovering new material at the Olympic Archives, I have opened up new ways of thinking about how bodies and athletic performances are marked and regulated. I have also developed understandings of how ongoing practices of the regulation of female athletic bodies are justified, continued and discontinued.