Post on 31-Mar-2023
FOUCAULT GOES TO WIMBLEDON
By
KRISTEN COCHRANE
A research essay submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for COMM 4908 as credit towards
the degree of Bachelor of Arts, Communication Studies [Honours]
School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University
April 2015
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Foucault Goes to Wimbledon Kristen Cochrane Carleton University, Canada Abstract Since the early 20th century, tennis has been a sport in which gender (at least a binaryconforming gender) has been presented with relative parity. In other words, female tennis athletes arguably receive as much print space and broadcast time as male tennis athletes in professional tournaments. However, the discourses that have been used to talk about female tennis professionals has been a site of struggle and discussion. In the past five years, tennis players have faced criticism from the United States Tennis Association, a BBC presenter, and the general public. The criticism has ranged from problems of the body—requirements of losing weight, direct value judgments on the ‘looks’ of tennis players, and an alleged corporeal presentation that is not ‘appropriate’ for a female body. This has arguably been facilitated and exacerbated by social media. Academic inquiry on tennis in the postAnnaKournikova era has been scarce, and this project seeks to look at some of the case studies more profoundly. Thus, Foucault’s notions of discipline, control, and care of the self have been exercised in this essay in order to begin thinking about how, and if, female bodies are indeed subject to different affective experiences in comparison to male tennis professionals.
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Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………2 Part I: Foucault’s Groundstrokes
Epistemes and the Constitution of the Human Sciences in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences………………………………………………..….….5 Discipline, Control, and Judgment in Discipline and Power: The Birth of the Prison.......7 Hierarchical Observation………………………………………………………...….…...11 Normalizing Judgment………………………………………………………….….…….13 The Body in The History of Sexuality……………………………………........................15 The Relationship between Foucauldian Theories and Women’s Tennis…………….…..19
Part II: Foucault Goes to Wimbledon Foucault Goes to Wimbledon………………………………………………………..…..21 Social Sanctions and the Female Tennis Body……………………………………....…..25 On Unruly Bodies……………………………………………………………...………...29 Heteronormativity in Sport…………………………………………………………...….39
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...….41 References……………………………………………………………………………………….44 Appendices
Appendix A: Homophobic and Transphobic Statements………………………………..51 Appendix B: Bodyshaming……………………………………………………………..54 Appendix C: Sexism and Misogyny……………………………………………………..56 Appendix D: Extreme Sexualization and Violence……………………………………...58
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Introduction
As an athletic competition with significant renown on a worldwide scale, the Wimbledon
Championships in England have included female athletes since 1884. Since welcoming women
into the championships that began seven years earlier in 1877, numerous female tennis
professionals have competed and performed exceptionally well. However, female tennis
professionals have faced discourses that differ from those surrounding male tennis professionals.
Among these circumstances are discourses on the body, such as belittling nicknames, licentious
comments by hosts on air, and deluges of abuse from users on social media. Dominant
discourses on celebrities tends to privilege the idea that ignorance of these types of comments is
expected. However, many celebrities will quit social media, citing the impact that comments
have on mental health and happiness. Canadian tennis player Rebecca Marino retired at the age
of 22 in 2013 amid reports that cyberbullying led to Marino’s decision to retire (Girard, 2013). A
month after French tennis player Marion Bartoli’s 2013 champion title at Wimbledon, Bartoli
retired (Mitchell, 2013). During Bartoli’s final round against the German tennis professional
Sabine Lisicki, Bartoli was the subject of comments from the BBC’s John Inverdale, who
announced onair that Bartoli was not a ‘looker’ and must have faced hardship during her athletic
trajectory. The comments ignited several commentaries within the British media, which led to
profuse apologies by Inverdale. Despite the apologies, Inverdale claimed that hay fever led to his
gaffe (Sweney, 2014). A discussion on the inappropriate nature of Inverdale’s comments was not
addressed by Inverdale, nor was the pressure that female athletes face in tennis. Thus, this essay
seeks to remedy this gap. In particular, there is a palpable void in literature that reckons with
communication and gender in tennis. This void can be attributed to the backlash against
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feminism. Thus, the idea of postfeminism, otherwise known as the irrelevance of contemporary
feminism, is an important facet of this paper. I bring this up as a reminder how contemporary
ruminations on gender are often met with derision, as I will illustrate later in this paper. Angela
McRobbie argues that this derision is part of the problematic where activists and sociologists
‘succumb to the wider current of opinion which is that gender is no longer a ‘problem’ implying
that there is no particular need for a renewed feminist critique’ (2010: 62). This being said,
antifeminist and antigender critiques proliferate, as will be demonstrated in the second part of
this paper, with the insistence that there is no longer a need to discuss gender as has been done
before. But with the problematic of secondwave feminism and its prominent heterosexuality,
whiteness, and ongoing exclusion of various identities within feminism (e.g. the exclusion of
trans women and genderqueer individuals from feminist activism during the secondwave and
still in the thirdwave), is feminism truly in its ‘post’ epoch? Tennis, and particularly a
comparative analysis of men and women’s tennis, illustrates these kinds of limitations and
exclusions that prove to have material consequences such as withdrawal and retirement from the
sport. Retirement from tennis due to verbal attacks and bullying is an issue that will also be
addressed in the second component of this paper.
In order to unpack the contemporary issues surrounding women’s bodies in tennis,
several theories from French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault have been drawn upon.
To gesture towards Foucault, I have begun this essay with a chapter that deals with three of
Foucault’s works: The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences, Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and The History of Sexuality (all three volumes: An
Introduction, The Use of Pleasure, The Care of the Self). In doing so, I am applying Foucault’s
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genealogical method to assess the the contemporary values and discourses on the female body in
tennis. The relevance of Foucauldian theory in this paper is demonstrated by its ability to help us
think about disciplinary practices for women, and specifically, women in tennis. I thus begin
with the notion of epistemes and the outset of what Foucault calls the constitution of the human
sciences. Put differently, Foucault is referring to an empirical turn on epistemologies of the body,
where the human body was subjected to more rigorous scientific inquiry. I exemplify this with
the contemporary episteme and its productions such as the Body Mass Index (BMI) and critiques
of its scientific validity from medical researchers. Following these meditations on the epistemic
turn to a scientification of the body, I unpack some of the discursive formations of discipline,
control, examination, and hierarchies of value. However, the disciplinary notion of docile bodies
will be resisted and a more active, agential approach to the female tennis body will be taken. To
conclude the first chapter of this essay, theorizations on the body from Foucault’s three volume
work The History of Sexuality (1988; 1989) will be examined. Besides the evident link between
bodily epistemologies and The History of Sexuality, Foucault’s inferences in this work also
reckon with epistemes from The Order of Things (2002) and somatic restraint from Discipline
and Punish. Thus, body performativity, embodiment, and gender presentation will be addressed
in this section.
The second chapter of this essay ushers in the title, Foucault Goes to Wimbledon. In this
section, the central case study of French tennis professional Marion Bartoli’s 2013 Wimbledon
title will assessed. With Bartoli’s upset over the German tennis professional Sabine Lisicki came
a torrent of discourse on the body, gender presentation, and sexuality. The most public of the
discourses I will unpack are the onair utterances by BBC host John Inverdale, who spoke about
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the value of Bartoli’s appearance in a series of comments that garnered sufficient worldwide
media attention (Sweney, 2014). In addition to these comments, several online media outfits
pointed out a trend on social media platform Twitter where users tweeted various remarks which
I have categorized as the following: ‘homophobia and transphobia’, ‘bodyshaming’, ‘sexism
and misogyny’, and ‘extreme and violent sexualization’. These have been grouped into four
appendices, where screenshots of the tweets have been compiled as discursive evidence.
Applying Foucauldian theory to selected cases in women’s tennis is useful in understanding how
discourses about the body in this sport have developed, and why they continue. With Foucault’s
genealogical method that puts our contemporary values to historical scrutiny, a more helpful
assessment of discourses and ideologies of the body can be achieved.
Part I: Foucault’s Groundstrokes
Epistemes and the Constitution of the Human Sciences in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Foucault is widely cited by North American students and scholars who muse upon ideas
about the body and about identities with marginalizations. In other words, when we think about
individuals whose very Self and personhood faces oppression and resistance, Foucault’s prolific
corpus of work is often found as the base theoretical assumption for the study of material and
everyday realities. This being said, Foucault’s tenth chapter in The Order of Things: An
Archaelogy of the Human Sciences is irrevocably relevant to the argumentation I am proposing
in this essay. In this seminal work, Foucault reformulates Plato’s conception of the episteme in
an attempt to illustrate the theoretical assumptions that mark particular historical epochs by their
approach to knowledge. Episteme is a cognate, or a word with a similar linguistic structure, as
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epistemology, or the study of knowledge. Thus, Foucault is attempting to draw a map of the
ways in which people collectively find and constitute knowledge. The notion of the episteme is
arguably similar to JeanFrançois Lyotard’s ‘grand narrative’ or ‘metanarrative, which Lyotard
argued was the teleleological precursor to the postmodern episteme (1984).
Returning to Foucault, the tenth chapter of The Order of Things ruminates on the
invention of a positivist, scientific, and empiricist episteme in the 18th century that viewed the
body as something that could be measured, replicated, and validated in the methodical sense.
Before this epistemic turn, Foucault examines the Classical and Renaissanceera epistemes, but
for this project, I am solely focusing on the episteme of the era which saw the onset of ‘The
human sciences’. Tellingly, Foucault states that this shift adopted ‘man’ as its object of empirical
study. By ‘man’, Foucault is of course referring to human beings, gender or absence of gender
notwithstanding. The importance of this epistemological reformation, or perhaps more
appropriately an introduction of humans into a scientific framework, is what troubles Foucault
and compels him to write this particular section of The Order of Things. It is claimed by Foucault
that this temporal stage of recorded humanity was unprecedented (344). This is taken further,
where it is then stated that this shift ‘was itself produced in a general redistribution of the
episteme: when, abandoning spaces of representation, living beings took up their places in the
specific depths of life, wealth in the onward thrust of new forms of production, and words in the
development of languages’ (345). As discussed earlier in The Order of Things, representation
was the episteme in which knowledge was constituted. Now, in this new dawn of The Human
Sciences in which Foucault assesses, ‘empirical rationality’ becomes the driver of ‘scientific
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aims’ which are compelled to place the human being, and subsequently, the body, into ‘the same
origin as biology, economics, and philology’ (345).
Discipline, Control, and Judgment in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Unlike The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish is probably Foucault’s most popular
work in terms of the terms that have been borrowed through various disciplines. His reworked
notion of Jeremy Bentham’s hypothetical Panopticon prison is used in various disciplines in the
humanities and the social sciences to infer constant and insidious surveillance. It is also in
Discipline and Punish that the notion of ‘docile bodies’ is used. Foucault’s idea of docile bodies
refers to a body disciplined into submission through coercion. The docile body lacks agency and
is subject to societal disciplinary practices, such as the manipulation of time, space, action, and
gestures (1979:135169). While the idea of docile bodies could be useful or at least contentious
for my analysis of the female tennis body, I suggest that the empirical realities of what I’m
presenting do not correspond with the idea of docile bodies. In fact, and as I will elaborate upon
further in the second section, ‘Foucault Goes to Wimbledon’, the female tennis body resists
docile embodiment. While the power balance is arguably egalitarian between athlete and
television host, especially when considering highlypaid or acclaimed athletes, other factors or
variables are introduced. The positioning of the athlete is relevant, such as gender, class or
socioeconomic status, and ‘race’. If this idea seems too abstract, one can simply look at Canadian
tennis professional Eugenie Bouchard, who was asked during the 2015 Australian Open if she
could twirl for the camera. While Bouchard accepted this signal and took it in stride from a
viewer’s external perspective, other signals do not appear so innocent, as degrading as the twirl
may seem to many of us. When BBC television host John Inverdale made a series of bizarre and
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inappropriate comments on the shape and looks of French Wimbledon 2013 Marion Bartoli,
Bartoli rejected the comments with her own statements through many interviews with the media.
In ‘Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers’, Cressida J. Hayes also rejects the notion of
docile bodies in her participantobserver study and examination of Weight Watchers, where she
and other participants faced covert ideological techniques of persuasion that sought to disguise
their mechanisms of Foucauldian normalization. The processes of normalization, which I will
explicate later in this first section, were hidden by rhetoric of selfimprovement and an
introduction to new affective pleasures.
Normalization, or the ‘normalizing gaze’ as illustrated by Foucault, operates with
interdependent tools of discipline such as ceremonies of arrangement. Foucault illustrates the
ceremonies of arrangement with the following example:
The regulations for the Prussian infantry ordered that a soldier who had not correctly
learnt to handle his rifle should be treated with the ‘greatest severity’. Similarly, ‘when a
pupil has not retained the catechism from the previous day, he must be forced to learn it,
without making any mistake, and repeat it the following day; either he will be forced to
hear it standing or kneeling, his hands joined, or he will be given some other penance’
(1979: 179).
Through this method, individuals faced an objectified embodiment, or human subjectivity’s
somatic facets (1979: 177184). One can reflect upon the practices in parenting where a child is
placed into a sporting activity or hobby against their own will. A less conspicuous example is the
physician who diagnoses the patient, compelling the patient to comply with the physician’s
orders. The counsel, treatment, or lack thereof may incite further illness or discomfort in the
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patient. Despite the uncertainty of possibility, the patient will feel inclined to submit to the
physician’s recommendations, whose power is inextricably tied with the regime of power
conveyed by medical training and mere presence in the medical field, as a practitioner of
medicine.
The tennis athlete faces the examination more comprehensively through more institutions
such as the tennis coaching team, the physical trainers, the family, and most central to this
work’s contention, the scope of the media, from broadcast media to social media. Assessing
Foucault and his interpretations of the body, feminist philosopher Susan Bordo brings up
Foucault’s emphasis on practice rather than affect. Affect can encompass thoughts, emotions,
ideas, beliefs, or ideology. In contrast to Hayes’s rendering of Foucault and the female body,
however, Bordo operates with the belief that women’s bodies indeed become docile bodies:
Through the pursuit of an everchanging, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity—a
pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often
whimsical changes in fashion—female bodies become docile bodies—bodies whose
forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation,
‘improvement.’ Through the exacting and normalizing disciplines of diet, makeup, and
dress—central organizing principles of time and space in the day of many women—we
are rendered less socially oriented and more centripetally focused on selfmodification.
Through these disciplines, we continue to memorize on our bodies the feel and conviction
of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough (91).
The notion of docile bodies and the congregation of a shared affect (e.g. ‘of never being good
enough’) orients us to the feelings and experiences of female, femaleidentifying, or femme
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consciousness. Of course, bodily shame is not exclusively experienced by women, but women,
along with other marginalized identities, are disproportionately subject to mediatized critique,
examination, and observation. The media impact on Marion Bartoli’s ordeal with John Inverdale
illustrates the volatile discourse surrounding the female body. There is a frustrated and
embittered shared affect surrounding the ways in which women’s bodies are publicly examined,
and with the reactions from body acceptance movements come the positivist, scientific reactions,
where the claim that certain bodies are simply unhealthy, and should not be shown. The
Australian journalist Damian Woolbough (2011) argued that having ‘obese’ models on fashion
runways is socially irresponsible. It is worth noting that obesity, according to the Body Mass
Index (BMI), is a measurement of 30 or more, which is visually and statistically a troubled and
inconsistent method of verifying obesity. This contemporary example sheds light on Foucault’s
ruminations pertaining to discipline, which I will later unpack within Foucault’s framework of
‘The means of correct training’ (1979: 170194).
In this epistemic juncture, Foucault’s ceremonies of power chronicle the ‘domination’
and ‘disciplinary power’ exhibited by anatomies of institutions such as pedagogy, hospitals, and
the army (187189). Within these systems, strategies are imposed to promote order, hierarchies,
and meticulous accountability. With this broad framework in mind, it is useful to look at
Foucault’s articulations of of ‘hierarchical observation’ and ‘normalizing judgment’ as
instruments of discipline. The use of the word and signifier ceremony recalls the sociological
notion of rituals, or the acts that constitute particular social relations, such as television watching,
conditioning and socialization among a particular group of identities, or rituals of resistance,
such as consciousnessraising groups (e.g. feminist groups at universities) or even group therapy.
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Hierarchical Observation
For Foucault, hierarchical observation is a mechanism that leads to Othering. Put
differently, the strategy of hierarchical observation strengthens and reinforces the dichotomy
between the Self and the Other. For the purpose of my analysis on the female tennis body, a
banal yet relevant example is the dichotomy of Thin/Skinny and Fat. A similar dichotomy that I
argue is relevant to sporting practices is the trope and binary of healthy and unhealthy, which I
will later discuss in a brief illustration of American tennis player Taylor Townsend.
I am inclined to say that hierarchical observation is a method of constituting binary
oppositions, but the implications go further than that. Instead, individuals are classified in a more
sophisticated fashion. Foucault makes mention of the outcome of visibility that is realized when
individuals are placed in spaces that create hierarchical ordering. The examples of
‘workingclass housing estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons, and schools’ are thereby offered as
points of convergence for ‘hierarchized surveillance’ (1979: 171172). Inherent in the
architecture of these spaces is the objective of ‘[rendering] visible those who are inside it; in
more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it
shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it
possible to know them, to alter them’ (1979: 172). While it would not be difficult to offer
examples of how workingclass housing estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons, and schools engage
in these regimes of power, surveillance, and coercion, I will be focusing on how these regimes
are enacted in the sporting practices of tennis, specifically, the female body as an object to be
disseminated and broadcast in disparate mediated spheres (the newspaper, the Internet, social
media, and television, etc.)
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What I have discussed above holds a common theme, which is discipline.
MerriamWebster describes discipline as the following:
control that is gained by requiring that rules or orders be obeyed and punishing bad
behaviour; a way of behaving that shows a willingness to obey rules and orders;
behaviour that is judged by how well it follows a set of rules or orders.
In the second part of this essay, I will elaborate further on how the content of these three
definitions is explicit when discussing cases of the female body in tennis. However, I would like
to turn back to Foucault and his chapter on ‘The means of correct training’ (1979: 170194).
While many of the notions and metanarratives of Discipline and Punish could be extrapolated to
the female experience in the sport of tennis, I will be focusing on the nuances of what Foucault
viewed as mechanisms of discipline, or ways of reinforcing and reproducing disciplinary
practices. Someone who is new to Foucault may question how a book that focuses largely on
prisons and notions of penalization could help us think about tennis in the modern age. In many
cultures, whether at a macro or micro level, tennis is embedded in many cultures. It is especially
embedded in British identity, particularly when Britons are taken by Wimbledon fever for ten
days in late June. Wimbledon is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, and has been seen by
many tennis champions as the Holy Grail of tennis awards. The tournament officially began in
1877, and a mere seven years later, in 1884, women were able to play the tournament (Croucher,
1981). Its temporal position, as a traditional and lasting symbol for Britain and for tennis athletes
makes it an important competition. In his article on tennis etymology, linguist Alexander Tulloch
(2008) describes the excitement that Wimbledon creates:
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At the mere mention of summer most of us think only of one thing: Wimbledon. And at
the mere mention of Wimbledon everybody thinks of tennis. A summer without a
Wimbledon tennis tournament is just about as unthinkable as fish without chips, Romeo
without Juliet or the telly without Coronation Street. For two weeks at the height of
summer the nation will be gripped with tennis fever. Matches will be played and replayed
on our screens day and night and every volley, fault or service analysed by pundits and
experts who convince us they know what they are talking about (63).
Tulloch’s depiction of the British passion and fervour for the Wimbledon championship
emphasizes the importance of its presence as a space for examination, categorization, and
discipline. With all the eyes of the spectators, tennis elite, and aspiring athletes, a certain
conformity is expected. Conformity is manifested in obvious ways at Wimbledon, such as the
traditional ritual of eating strawberries and cream and the requirement that athletes’ outfits be
completely white, but there are more tacit and insidious mechanisms to produce conformity in
this case. Bodily and athletic conformity are invisible products of the tradition and rituals of
athleticism, and as I will argue further, female and feminine bodies have faced a disparity in
somatic correction and judgment. This is not to say that bodies besides female or feminine bodies
are free from the regimes of power and discipline in which Foucault describes. This being said,
the focus of this essay will be on European and American female tennis professionals.
Normalizing Judgment
In addition to ‘hierarchical observation’, the first substratum of Foucault’s elaboration on
‘The means of correct training’, the consideration on what Foucault calls ‘normalizing judgment’
will also be relevant to this essay’s analysis on the empirical phenomena of women’s tennis and
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the female tennis body. Foucault begins this section by using a real French orphanage to
exemplify the microlevel mechanisms that enforce discipline and tacitly channel power from
those who hold the power over those who do not. Upon reading the description of the smallscale
penalties Foucault describes, one could deem the penalties socially acceptable, such as ‘light
physical punishment to minor deprivations and petty humiliations’, especially in the context of
sorority or fraternity rushing, team sports, or dieting (1979: 178). However, these mechanisms
plague Foucault, and they likely plague the recipients of these activities. But, they are part of a
totalizing procedure:
Disciplinary punishment has the function of reducing gaps. It must therefore be
essentially corrective. In addition to punishments borrowed directly from the judicial
model (fines, flogging, solitary confinement), the disciplinary systems favour
punishments that are exercise – intensified, multiplied forms of training, several times
repeated [...] (179).
This description recalls athletic training, which is admittedly a predictable statement. However,
this kind of corrective, disciplinary punishment is covertly constituted in women’s tennis,
notably in a culture that often superficially claims to abide by respect for difference, whether that
is gendered, bodily, or sexual difference. Nonetheless, Foucault points out the peculiarity of ‘the
disciplinary penalty’, which functions by ‘nonobservance, that which does not measure up to the
rule, that departs from it’ (1979: 178). Put differently, athletic bodies that do not conform to the
standards of the contemporary episteme, such as scientific examinations that use positivism, are
then subject to punishment. In reality, a case in point for the contemporary episteme could be the
Body Mass Index (BMI) which is used to measure body fat based on height and weight.
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However, the BMI’s usefulness and accuracy has been the subject of debate (RomeroCorral et
al., 2008; Devlin, 2009; Lewis, 2013). Foucault describes ‘the art of punishing’ in conscientious
detail; the socalled ‘régime of disciplinary power’ functions through multiple nodes and
procedures, but it is not a visible or forthright series of punishments. In conjunction with the
scientific method and positivism, punishment
[...] measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the
level, the ‘nature’ of individuals. It introduces, through this ‘valuegiving’ measure, the
constraint of a conformity that must be achieved (183).
The word conformity is important in this excerpt, for it exposes the architecture of athleticism.
Bodies that seem unruly or out of control, presumably from a lack of restraint by overeating and
‘lazyness’ when it comes to exercise will be examined and conceived as embodying
abnormality. Often, abnormality is disguised as a concern for one’s health, as was stated by the
United States Tennis Association (USTA) when tennis professional Taylor Townsend’s funding
was removed by the USTA (Nguyen, 2012). In the forthcoming evaluation of ideas of
abnormality in The History of Sexuality, Foucault’s elaboration on what constitutes ‘normal’ will
be looked at in regards to the interconnectedness of the body, sexuality, and embodiment.
The Body in The History of Sexuality
In tandem with the constitution of epistemes and assumptions on the human body and
mind, Foucault outlines the practices that determine the body. From Ancient Greek culture, the
notion of pathos has been used to designate a concept that is nonnormative to a historical
moment’s reigning, hegemonic assumptions. According to Foucault, pathos is simultaneously a
passion, a physical illness, bodily distress, and passivity, among other physical and affective
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states (142). Thus, Foucault illustrates the nodes that form a network of the affective self and the
bodily self, which were conceived to require care. I raise these points due to their contemporary
relevance in the care of the body and the mind. Modern medicine and physical health practices
emphasize an inextricable link between psychology and physiology. When an individual is
considered fat, overweight, or obese, there is an assumed issue with the individual’s mind, that
led them to this nonnormative state that violates the episteme of its time.
There is an important component that ties epistemes, disciplinary practices, care, and
technologies of the self together. This component is repetition, or reiteration, and has been
meditated upon by different theorists in vastly different fields, such as sociology, gender theory,
and film studies. In sociology, Erving Goffman argued that reiterations of performances come
together to form ‘dramaturgy,’ or a presentation of the self that is invariably constructed and
reproduced. Before the onset of the explosion of queer theory in the 1990s, Judith Butler brought
up the implications of gender identities as not only constructed, but performed in theatrical
repetition. Thus, repetition and reiteration are two phenomena that cannot be neglected when
assessing the Foucauldian notions I have briefly unpacked above. Their relevance in explicating
the sociological and mediated trajectories of female tennis players is stark. While there are many
female tennis players whose stories and experiences could be elaborated upon in this paper,
Marion Bartoli will be the focus of this attempt at mapping out the links between some of
Foucault’s theoretical contemplation and the female body.
Although Foucault has been criticized for his exclusion of any meditations on women or
the feminine condition, he devotes the fourth part of The History of Sexuality to the body
(Greene, 1996: 12; Femenías, 2006: 133). While this chapter of his work chronicles historic
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conceptions and counsel for the body as a sexual entity, this idea proves useful in an assessment
of the female body as the object of presentation in tennis, from broadcast to print and otherwise.
Foucault’s foci in this chapter resides in Ancient Greek meditations that depicted the body as a
locus of production, where procreation is important, and anything that harms the body should be
avoided. This truism is topical today; most media outlets, from teenageoriented magazines to
daytime television will include components of how one can avoid a particular type of nefarious
sustenance. These messages tend to wax and wane between sugar, wheat, and gluten in
contemporary parlance. While exhibiting the ‘regimens of activity’ in historical ruminations on
the body, Foucault brings up the ‘dietary regimen’. It is stated that in the 5th century, the Greek
medical writer Oribasius wrote a series of medical texts in which four books exclusively delved
into the ‘qualities, disadvantages, dangers, and virtues of the different possible foods and to the
conditions in which one should and should not consume them’ (140141). In this section of The
History of Sexuality, Foucault makes a comparative analysis of nutritional and sexual regimes of
truth. This comparison depicts the similarities between the act of disciplining the body’s
activities in terms of sexuality and of nutritional intake.
Before I go further in this assessment of Foucault’s work and the body, it is important to
note how sexuality does not only pertain to one’s sexual proclivities or activities, or to whom one
desires. I will argue here that sexuality also refers to the presentation of the self, a reference I am
making to sociologist Erving Goffman, who considered the ways in which individuals perform in
the everyday. Judith Butler took Goffman’s approach further by claiming that gender and
sexuality is also a performance that is reiterated, and thus constitutes the individual’s identity. In
tennis, female sexuality is reiterated and performed on the court, which is then reaffirmed,
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reproduced, and disciplined in postbroadcast settings to determine whether there is ‘gender
trouble’, to borrow the term from Butler (2008).
With this in mind, I shall return to the consideration of the relationship of nutritional
regimes and sexuality. In an apt example, Foucault cites the banquet as ‘an occasion shared by
gluttony, drunkenness, and love,’ as a ‘direct testimony of this association [...]’ (141). Foucault
then moves forward with another contention; these medical regimes fundamentally connote a
‘pathologization of the sexual act’. Albeit, this pathologization during the GrecoRoman era is
one occurring before the epistemic shift centuries later where nonnormative sexuality began to
be scrutinized and empirically verified and accounted for. Specifically, I refer to when ‘the
homosexual’ became an entity, long before ‘the heterosexual’ even contained a meaning and
frame of reference. I raise the theme of the presentation of one’s ‘sexual aesthetics’ (Bridges,
2013) due to the uncanny number of tweets that were composed regarding Marion Bartoli during
the Wimbledon broadcast. The tweets were disturbing, and the media picked up on the social
phenomenon it caused—various users tweeted that Bartoli was a ‘dyke’, among other value
judgments on her appearance (Anon, 2014; Mccann, 2013). During the iteration of a derogatory 1
but now partially reclaimed term to refer to gay women, users are making several assessments.
Firstly, users are engaging in the aforementioned Foucauldian notion of a ‘pathologization of the
sexual act’. This is evident in the relationship between the negative signal that the users are
making and the use of a homophobic epithet, made explicit by its connotation. Secondly, the use
of an underprivileged sexual and gendered moniker is a tacit gesture to mark its ‘Otherness’. It is
a reproduction, and a reminder, that this is not an acceptable sexuality to embody. The use of the
1 See Appendices A, B, C, and D.
20
word ‘dyke’ in this context is also a stern reminder by users that certain bodies are not welcome
on the tennis court. Further extrapolation and material examples will be provided further in this
text, but I would like to emphasize Foucault’s contention in the first volume of The History of
Sexuality, where sexualities outside of marriage are deemed abnormal. Applying Foucauldian
paradigms to the use of Twitter, a very public social medium, in the discourses surrounding
women’s tennis provides a lens that is able to unpack the rhetorical vestiges that engage in a
processing of Othering sexualities that are not explicitly heterosexual or heteronormative in 2
aesthetics.
The Relationship between Foucauldian Theories and Women’s Tennis
To conclude the first part of this essay, it is my aim that the above theoretical
visualizations will lead to further pondering about how some historicallyverified assumptions
impact a female athlete’s experience as a tennis professional. The Order of Things’s introduction
of the notion of an episteme after Plato is a helpful practice in demonstrating the instability and
fluidity of forms of knowledge. In other words, knowledge is not static; it changes and goes out
of style. However, chaotic moments have often led to improvements in the happiness and
pleasure of human beings. This essay is concerned with critically questioning certain
phenomenological and experiential disparities in women’s tennis, especially in a mediated sphere
(e.g. with the advent of televisual broadcasting and social media).
The Foucauldian work which I suggested is the most famous of the three that I draw my
hypotheses from is Discipline and Punish, which draws from the conception of epistemes. For
2 I use the notion of the Other as a verb to illustrate the dichotomy of Self and Other, where the Other typically exemplifies the oppressed position, and is subject to undue examination, curiosity, exotification, fetishization, and pathologization. For meditations on the notion of the Other, see Edward Said’s (1994) Orientalism and bell hooks’ (2005) ‘Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance’.
21
this project, my interests lie within the themes of discipline, control, and judgment, which I aim
to elucidate in the second part of this essay with evidence from media publications, mediatized
controversies, and users’ statements on Marion Bartoli through Twitter.
The discussion is turned to the focal point of this project; the body. For individuals with
culturallyspecific marginalizations, the body is considered to be a site of political, social,
economic, and moral struggle. Artists such as Barbara Kruger have thought about the body
politically, particularly through works like ‘Who is born to lose? Who is free to choose?’ (1990),
a meditation on the debate over the right to abortion (Christie’s, 2005). Pertinent to this paper is
Foucault’s conception of the body as subject to ‘the means of correct training’ such as the gaze
that monitors, corrects, gazes, and disciplines (1979: 170194).
22
Barbara Kruger. (1990). Who is born to lose? Who is free to choose?. Gelatin silver prints in artist’s own frames, 99 x 81 in. Private collection.
Politically, certain bodies do not receive equal or similar political representation to the ‘normal’,
hegemonic body. Socially, some bodies receive harassment, harm, unwarranted surveillance and
penalization, and scrutiny. Economically, bodies can be materially affected by virtue of being
seen as abnormal or Other. And morally, bodies that do not adhere to the physical hegemonic
associations can be seen as capable of corruption and devoid of scruples.
Part II: Foucault Goes to Wimbledon
Having drawn on three seminal works by Foucault, it is evident that this essay is
concerned with the bodily imaginary, or the way the body is seen in this cultural epoch. Put
differently, a central sociological concern for women’s tennis is the way in which schemata
about the body are created and negotiated. Crucial to these schemata and identity constitution is
the supplemental appendage of broadcast media with its persistent gaze that disciplines and
produces judgment. The examinations involved in judgment occur implicitly and explicitly.
Foucault, with his ruminations on disciplinary practices in prisons, hospitals, and schools offers a
helpful framework in which we can look at the implicit practices at work in women’s tennis.
However, more concrete examples will be applied to this second chapter of the essay. To
illustrate these practices, I look at a specific case study, where a women’s tennis player faced
examination from disparate mediated sources. The case in point is that of Marion Bartoli,
Wimbledon’s 2013 champion. And while Bartoli dealt with a peculiar amount of scrutiny, she is
not alone as a female tennis professional. While I will not go into great detail about other cases,
23
the experiences of other female tennis professionals will be brought up to illustrate an ongoing
problematic facing athletes who have been faced with rhetoric that is beyond the boundaries of
sports commentary.
The evidence I have used to present the central case study of the rhetoric surrounding
Marion Bartoli at Wimbledon in 2013 is as follows: screenshots of published tweets by various
Twitter users, quotes by tennis players as cited in online newspaper articles and commentaries,
and a brief map of selected coverage of Bartoli’s circumstances from online components of
newspapers in various countries. I have organized the tweets in a way which reflects the sexism,
homophobia and bodyshaming practices that inspired this essay. I have categorized the Twitter
screenshots in appendices, which are categorized as homophobia and transphobia (Appendix A),
bodyshaming (Appendix B), and sexism and misogyny (Appendix C), and extreme
sexualization and violence, described as such due to its symbolically violent depiction of
Bartoli’s body (Appendix D). Many of the tweets overlap in the abovementioned content and can
be included in all appendices if the discourse fits the criteria of all three. However, Bartoli and
the tennis players I will refer to in this article are not victims lacking agency. They have
painstakingly refuted the judgment and discipline that has been enforced on their bodies and
personhood. It could be argued that rather than an explicit opposition to the disciplinary practices
of broadcast media and women’s tennis that many of these tennis players have simply
negotiated. Albeit, a concession or negotiation does not imply failure on the part of the tennis
player, but indicates a choice to take a path where less pressure and scrutiny will be the outcome.
While recently discussing this research paper with someone, I was then asked why women
choose to wear the tennis dresses? If female tennis players do not wish to be fetishized, then why
24
would the dress be worn? However, to wear something other than the tennis dress thus subjects
the athlete to a separate spectacle. The athlete then must choose to be gazed at as a woman
playing a sport; as a woman who is either attractive or unattractive. The body is deemed pleasant
or grotesque. However, if the athlete chooses to wear shorts, then it is seen as a political act.
Susan Hekman illustrates this quandary in a discussion on images of the female subject in the
cultural consciousness:
What image can women create that would call attention to the fact that she is not just
what society made her, while at the same time not create a psychological, economic, and
sexual ostracism within that very society in which she must compete, form relationships,
and find happiness? (2007: 148)
The ostracism mentioned in this excerpt is crucial to the experience of the female tennis player,
whose outfits receive attention when they trouble the sartorial expectation. Female tennis
professionals whose outfits connote difference from the status quo are invariably gazed upon by
different media lenses. Fashion is inarguably a method of selfexpression and creativity, and yet,
the female body is always already marked as attempting to attract male desire . This rhetoric is 3
seen in various social facets, from sexual trauma survivors who are questioned on whether they
made invitations to a sexual act (Sanghani, 2015; Valenti, 2013), to the belief that sex workers
cannot be sexually assaulted (Miller & Jayasundera, 2002: 64; Kingston, 2014: 63). In this vein,
Russian tennis professional Maria Sharapova’s decision to wear shorts and a tuxedostyle
sleeveless blouse to Wimbledon in 2008 was met with controversy (Neate, 2008). This illustrates
the paradox facing the female athlete, who must be coded as feminize to ‘neutralize the effect of
3 See Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990) for an elaboration on the constraints imposed on women, such as fear of aging, physical decay, and selfdisciplined aesthetic strategies such as wearing makeup, having an attractive body, and looking young.
25
the transgressive act’, the transgressive act being a woman in sport (Tuttle, 1998: 10, cited by
Hargreaves, 2000: 2).
These examples illustrate the way in which the female athlete, marginalized by the body,
negotiates and concedes in the interest of pursuing the sport rather than spending time engaging
in social justice or identity politics. The paradox of remaining silent or speaking out then
becomes significant; the female athlete must choose whether her very existence as an athlete
must be political or complicit in troubling narratives. In Feminist Interpretations of Michel
Foucault, Susan Hekman prefaces the chapter on body politics and the muscled woman with a
quote by Foucault: ‘One is not radical because one pronounces a few words; no, the essence of
being radical is physical’ (2007: 137). Although taken for granted due to the fact that women
have been publicly playing tennis since the 19th century and that there are known tennis athletes
to the cultural consciousness, women playing tennis and the broadcast of female tennis is still a
radical act. Women playing tennis as public professionals is radical when examining the
reactions it elicits, such as homophobia, transphobia, threats of violence, sexualization, and
bodyshaming. I bring up these common occurrences in light of professional tennis’s early
beginnings in the ltr 19th century, and the first broadcast of professional tennis during the
Interwar Period. Wimbledon was first broadcast on television in 1937 in black and white
(Wimbledon, n.d.). Today, Wimbledon is the largest broadcast worldwide, with its 100 cameras
and 120 available positions on Centre Court. It is curious, then, why female tennis athletes face
so much scrutiny, judgment, and observation on matters of the body? If they have been viewed
playing tennis for over a hundred years, and broadcast for over 70 years, then how do we account
26
for the treatment of female athletes as ‘ugly’ or generally repulsive (Hargreaves, 2000: 136;
Appendix B: Figure 1, 2, 3; Appendix C: Figure 1, 2, 3, 4)?
It goes without saying that broadcasting of sports is dominated by images of
hypermasculine male bodies. And yet, when a biologically female body displays mere allusions
to hypermasculine or even remotely masculine attributes, these unruly bodies are viewed as
undisciplined and out of control . It then becomes curious to find out how these bodies came to 4
be viewed in this way, and why the list of incendiary tweets over the masculinity of Marion
Bartoli’s breasts is written about on a public platform. Besides the tweets that sought to draw
attention to Bartoli’s body as a grotesque form, some of the tweets (at least the tweets that have
been recorded by screenshot) referred to Sabine Lisicki, who Bartoli defeated in the 2013
Wimbledon final round. Lisicki is described by users as ‘sexy’ and desirable, and thus deserving
to play the tournament and to win the tournament (Appendix A: Figure 1; Appendix D: Figure
3). A general trend in these tweets is that Bartoli is too unattractive to win Wimbledon
(Appendix A: Figure 1, 2, 3; Appendix B: Figure 1, 2, 3; Appendix C: Figure 1, 2, 3, 4). This
trend is what makes Foucault’s method of genealogy a useful tool for unpacking how the female
body is gazed upon and surveilled, even in settings where the body as a sexual object does not
seem appropriate or necessary.
Social Sanctions and the Female Tennis Body
The first chapter of this exercise in assessing rhetoric of the female tennis body
introduced Wimbledon as a historically significant setting. Its prestige is marked not only by its
claim to be the location of the first major tennis tournament, but of its willingness to accept
4 See Michael A. Messner (1986; 1988) for his meditations on the female body as ‘ideologically contested terrain’ (66).
27
female tennis players in 1884, seven years after its official inauguration. This year is significant
when comparing the beginning of the remaining three majors (the French Open or Roland
Garros, the US Open, and the Australian Open). The US Open, which began in 1881 as the U.S.
National Championship, opened the gates to women six years later in 1887 (US Open, n.d.). In
1891, the French Open was born, and women were also invited six years later. Despite the active
nature of female tennis players during this time, the Australian major did not see a similar
breakthrough. When the Australian Open began in 1906, women were only accepted 17 years
later in 1922. These dates serve to illustrate the way in which men and women have competed
alongside one another in acclaimed tennis tournaments. Despite this historicity, women’s tennis
often faces tangential coverage that has nothing to do with the sport itself. Canadian tennis
professional Eugenie Bouchard was reportedly incensed when coverage on ‘Twirlgate’ continued
beyond a reasonable time period. ‘Twirlgate’ is the media colloquialism for a January 2015 event
at the Australian open, where an Australian tennis commentator asked Bouchard to twirl on
camera. Visibly embarrassed and surprised, Bouchard twirled. Media commentaries were abuzz
with arguments for the degradation and sexism of this act. Writing in the Toronto Star, writer
Beverly Akerman claimed that women are socially conditioned to comply and submit to social
interactions, even when they are inappropriate:
We’re trained to be nice and agreeable, to ‘go along to get along,’ rather than to be
autonomous individuals with the right to draw lines in the sand, demur, and even retaliate
when reasonable boundaries are crossed (2014).
Akerman’s contention that women are compelled to respond politely rather than aggressively
recalls Michel Foucault’s ruminations on discipline and control. In the first chapter, I addressed
28
Foucault’s notion of normalizing judgment. In Bouchard’s case, normalizing judgment is
seamlessly demonstrated. For Foucault, one of discipline’s key strategies is to maintain similarity
and sameness. Similarity and sameness relies on tradition and structure, which therein relies on
binaries and dualism such as woman/man, self/other, or heterosexual/homosexual. To avoid a
troubling of gender, the gendered dichotomies of man and woman must be adhered to under what
bell hooks calls the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 2003: 179).
Within this dominant framework in which we live, deviations from foundational gender roles
such as modern femininity are part of a tacit contract that can incur social sanctions. The request
from the Australian tennis commentator served as a reminder of what constitutes femininity,
especially as female is seen as an alien concept in sport. A male athlete is expected, while a
female athlete is not. The reminder for Bouchard was that her role as a tennis professional is not
exclusively athletic; Bouchard must reproduce femininity in different ways. First, she must
comply with the interviewer or face embarrassment and social sanctions. To be resistant is to be
difficult, as many selfidentifying feminists face when proclaiming said feminism or stating an
interest in women’s rights advocacy under the moniker of ‘feminism’ (Anon, 2013; Lister, 2014;
McDonough, 2013). Second, Bouchard must do the twirl to illustrate that she is feminine enough
to play tennis. I will further argue in this essay how female tennis athletes face criticism for not
adhering to dominant femininities, as was shown by the central case study examining Marion
Bartoli and the 2013 Wimbledon championship. Ultimately, Bouchard and female tennis athletes
must maintain hegemonic gender presentation and performativity or face damaging social
sanctions.
29
This context provides ground for exploring Foucault’s interpretation of the semantics of
power and domination as separate ideas. Bouchard was not physically forced to twirl. Nor are
legislation and laws physically forced upon citizens of a nationstate. However, Bouchard
engaged in selfdiscipline, the driving force of a disciplinary society. To be physically forced
would imply a domination under the Foucauldian framework of discipline which Foucault
deliberated in Discipline and Punish. Power, on the other hand, is covert, implicit, and is
sustained by complicity of the subject, or individual. Susan Hekman offers a more optimistic
approach to power visàvis domination, in which resistance is feasible within the manifestations
of power:
Whereas ‘domination’ refers to a situation in which the subject is unable to overturn or
reverse the domination relation—a situation where resistance is impossible— ‘power’
refers to relations that are flexible, mutable, fluid, and even reversible (2007: 170).
Hekman’s elaboration on the the nuances of domination and power serve to illustrate the
intangibility of ideology, which ultimately produces materiality through social sanctions, shame,
humiliation, and embarrassment. These visceral responses, which professional athletes and
amateur athletes alike must efface is part of the immaterial labour involved in the
phenomenology of the sport. With the proliferation of the broadcast society and then the social
media society comes an emphasis on information and affect as a product to be sold. Bouchard
must focus on her affect as a public figure in order to contribute to what Hardt and Negri call the
‘informational economy’ (2000). With the shift of industrialization and modernization comes the
requirement of informational and affective labour within the parametres of social relations. For
many celebrities, affective labour is crucial. Publicity and public relations rely on affect that is
30
diplomatic, or that coincides with the schemata of the episteme of a temporal moment. In this
temporal moment, which arguably changed dramatically with the onset of what is called the Web
2.0, affect must be utilized effectively in order to avoid perturbing one’s social and economic
status. For marginalized identities, the precarity of one’s livelihood is often exacerbated due to
ideologicallydriven discrimination.
On Unruly Bodies
While Eugenie Bouchard faces a fetishization and sexualization of the body, other female
tennis professionals have recently faced more negative outcomes in light of their body. Thus, I
will now turn to the central case study of this essay, which will look at retired tennis professional
Marion Bartoli. Due to the scope of this paper, it would be impossible to cover the case studies
of the myriad female tennis athletes who routinely face degrading comments and nicknames that
negate athletic accomplishment. We can think about the American Gertrude ‘Gorgeous Gussie’
Moran, active in the 1950s, or the Canadian Carling BassettSeguso, active in the 1980s and also
known as ‘Darling Carling’ (Spencer, 2014). In 2014, disagreements arose over the use of
‘Canada’s Sweetheart’ to refer to Eugenie Bouchard. Writing in The Huffington Post, Mike
Reynolds claims that while in 2014, Canada has two successful tennis professionals, only one is
called a ‘sweetheart’. Eugenie Bouchard is the sweetheart, while the male Milos Raonic is not.
Reynolds laments the hegemonic discourses surrounding women in tennis:
It's a very real problem that when young women rise to fame they're labelled as
sweethearts or darlings and when the endless articles being written about her reference
her beauty and grace on the court. Her tennis game is beautiful, the rest is irrelevant. The
31
physical characteristics we should be focusing on include her court coverage, her
forehand, her footwork and her stamina, not her blonde hair.
This recurring cultural pattern of the female tennis body as spectacle has extended into darker
terrain. During the Wimbledon 2013 finals, French tennis professional Marion Bartoli was
competing against the German Sabine Lisicki. Bartoli was defeating Lisicki in straight sets. It
was even reported that Bartoli did not lose a set during the entire tournament (Ballard, 2013).
Meanwhile, two disparate events were occurring in conjunction with this final match. I raise
these two events as illustrative of false empowerment in this contemporary moment. At a more
broadcast level, BBC host John Inverdale made the following comments about Marion Bartoli
during the live broadcast:
I just wonder if her dad, because he has obviously been the most influential person in her
life, did say to her when she was 12, 13, 14 maybe, ‘listen, you are never going to be, you
know, a looker. You are never going to be somebody like Sharapova, you’re never going
to be five feet eleven, you’re never going to be somebody with long legs, so you have to
compensate for that (Wyatt, 2013).
The BBC subsequently apologized, stating that John Inverdale had also apologized and had
written a personal apology to Bartoli. While this incident can be seen as a human error, a second
event was occurring on a different medium. On Twitter, various online facets of newspapers and
blogs such as The Independent, The Daily Mail, and a seemingly fringe blog on Tumblr called
Public Shaming released screenshots of Tweets from users who were offering their own
commentaries on the final Wimbledon 2013 match between Bartoli and Lisicki (Public 5
5 The Independent is a national British newspaper published daily. The Daily Mail is a national British newspaper published daily, albeit considered a tabloid.
32
Shaming, n.d.). As previously mentioned in the introductory section of this second chapter, I
have arranged a series of tweets taken from the above publications’ online platforms. Among
these tweets was a contribution by Australian footballer Gavin Brown, who tweeted that he
‘[r]eally hate that Bartoli, would love to smash the wee cow!! Irritating me!!’ (Appendix D,
Figure 2). Similarly disturbing tweets were iterated during the match, which often referred to a
perceived masculinity of Bartoli’s body. This led to some users tweeting that Bartoli’s genitalia
should be verified to prove that she was indeed a woman. These tweets, which appear to be an
attempt to incite humour, are forms of discourse which seek to ensure a stable representation of
what a woman should physically embody. Although the Tweets I have added to the appendices
overlap in their content, homophobia, transphobia, and appearanceshaming rhetoric is salient. In
one tweet by user ‘claire grey (@clairegrey95)’, Bartoli is described as an ‘arragant disrespectful
masculine whore’ (Appendix A: Figure 4).
33
Appendix A: Figure 4
In another Tweet by ‘Damian Ristovic (@LadiesLove_BigD)’, the user states that ‘Female tennis
is useless , I’ve never seen a disgusting champion like Bartoli’. Other Tweets include nuanced
judgments of both Sabine Lisicki and Bartoli, such as ‘Jay (@JayH_96)’ who wrote ‘I want
Lisicki to win because she is really fit. Bartoli wouldn’t even get raped let alone fucked’
(Appendix D: Figure 3).
Appendix D: Figure 3
34
In line with Foucault’s notion of hierarchical observation, the tennis tournament and its
appendages constituted by mass broadcasting result in a network that allows the normalizing
gaze of the spectator to reconstitute power through the maintenance of knowledge (1979:
170184). Hegemonic or dominant knowledge deems a body such as Bartoli’s as abnormal.
Despite the assumption that athletes have muscles, too much muscle on the female body is seen
as pathological. Large chest muscles must not be seen, but breasts that are surrounded by adipose
tissue, or what is seen as general fat tissue, is within the boundaries of what the female body can
contain. Knowledge in the case of the female tennis body can be mapped to the epistemic shift
from premodernity to the Enlightenment which witnessed a turn from worship of the divine to
the scientific:
As well as the increasing number of medical books detailing anatomical differences
between women and men, politicians and social critics wrote treatises that emphasized
‘sexual difference.’ For instance, Jean JacquesRousseau’s famous novel Emile sought to
ground his arguments about the incommensurability of women and men through
biological difference. Indeed, Rousseau maintained that ‘a perfect woman and a perfect
man ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks’ (Hird, 2004 citing
Schiebinger, 1993: 226).
The shift to a new way of thinking about knowledge occurred in the 20th century, which one can
claim began with Mikhail Bahktin in the 1920s. Bahktin forged a new literary theory based on
the works of Dostoevsky, but others will urge that postmodernity took hold in the 1960s (Bahktin
et al., 1984). However, the epistemic turn to postmodernity does not negate the vestiges and links
of the Enlightenment. The scientific classification of the body continues today, with the
35
insistence on the Body Mass Index (BMI) in the medical field. The BMI operates on inclusion
and exclusion par excellence. Having a BMI that deviates from its normal, purportedly healthy
range leads to a refusal of medical services such as birth control and fertility treatment, among
other things (Pandey et al., 2010). Central to this paper is the exclusion from athletic
competitions, as happened with former world number one junior tennis professional Taylor
Townsend. In 2012, Townsend was already the recipient of both the junior singles and doubles
titles at the Australian Open in January that year. Later that year, Townsend received the doubles
title at Wimbledon in July. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Tom Perotta argues that body size
has not prevented other tennis professionals from athletic success:
A quick glance around the U.S. Open reveals a fair number of less chiseled players, such
as Marion Bartoli and Stanislas Wawrinka, who both reached the tournament’s second
week. On the women’s side, former U.S. star Lindsay Davenport became No. 1 while
ranking among the largest players on the women’s tour at 6foot2 and about 175 pounds.
And in 2007, Serena Williams won the Australian Open singles title while being in what
many experts consider the worst shape of her career (2012).
In tennis discourse, many will argue that tennis is a largely mental game (Gould et al., 1999;
Richardson et al., 1988). The affect and emotion that must be managed and grappled with is
arguably more important than physical shape. Ironically, the United States Tennis Association,
which removed Townsend’s funding in 2012, discusses this critical factor of tennis on their
website (USTA, n.d.). The abovementioned cases on Bartoli and Townsend reflect Foucault’s
notion of the means of correct training as explained in the first chapter of this paper. This is
where Foucault encapsulates hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination.
36
These three practices are explicitly in operation in the cases of Bartoli and Townsend. In
Townsend’s case, a more official disciplinary action was enacted by the USTA. Foucault argues
that the ability to be seen initiates the conditions of possibility for discipline. Disciplinary
regimes such as tennis and the USTA hold players in a covert position of objectification. The
spectacle of tennis, as a significant media event, enables the power of the spectator to engage in
hierarchical observation, normalized gazing, and examination. Within the paradigm of media
events, Katz and Dayan deliberate upon the multiplicity of spectatorship, space, and time. The
paradigm of the media event includes the live audience and the audience who view the the
spectacle in its mediated format (61). The multiplicity of those who gaze upon the gaze
reinforces the immaterial power which then becomes material. This materiality is emphasized by
Taylor Townsend’s elimination of funding, Marion Bartoli’s social sanctions through BBC host
John Inverdale and his embodiment of substantial social capital. A materiality such as this one is
also augmented by the social sanctions of social media harassment and denigration. While
Bartoli famously responded that Inverdale’s critical remarks of her body did not impact her and
that her and Inverdale are ‘family’ (Bose, 2014), other tennis professionals are not so fortunate.
In 2013, Canadian tennis professional Rebecca Marino retired from tennis and subsequently
closed her Twitter and Facebook accounts. In The Toronto Star, Damien Cox wrote that ‘[...]
threats and ugly messages from gamblers [are] a much greater problem for pro tennis players
than most people believe [...]’ (2013). And indeed, this growing conduit of power from the
advent of social media has allowed users to contact public figures without any legislation that
protects victims of such abuse.
Tweets that Matter
37
I was compelled to organize the tweets I chose into four appendices. The breadth of the tweets
was shocking when I initially read them, and they remain shocking, as I read them two years
later after the events that unfolded in the summer of 2013. When I have shown the tweets to
others, reactions vary. Some will react with disgust, but will iterate that these kinds of public
utterances are normal, even natural, when considering the setting of the internet. Discussions
about obscene comments and posts on the internet will also lead to assumptions such as ‘that’s
just the way it is’. This kind of reflection is significant for it is analogous with Michel Foucault’s
contemplation on the embeddedness of power in everyday life. Foucault claims that while the
individual has been constituted as a component within the ideological constraints of society, such
as gender norms, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism, we must not forget the central function of
discipline. Discipline creates the reality in which we live. Our reality is contingent on what
Foucault calls régimes of truth, which provide the framework for how we produce assumptions
about bodies and tweets that matter (194).
Although some legislative bodies have begun to recognize the harm that social media
harassment entails, addressing the issue must go deeper. Writing on Foucault and the politics of
the body, Susan Bordo reminds us that Foucault’s conceptualization of power is not one that
represses, prohibits, or excludes, but that produces the somatic form, bodies, materiality, and
pleasures. To illustrate this more precisely, Bordo cites feminist thinker Andrea Dworkin:
Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have
to her own body. They prescribe her motility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which
she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And
38
of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development,
intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one (1993: 247).
It is bizarre that one even needs to think about standards of beauty when considering an athletic
feat, an athletic competition, or an athlete themselves. Judith Butler tackles this communication
through the discursive limits of the socially imagined notion of ‘sex’, arguing that the ‘sex’ of a
body is a discursive formation. Despite these abstract theorizations, the body as a site of
invention and construction then has material conditions of possibility:
If the materiality of sex is demarcated in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a
domain of excluded and delegitimated ‘sex’. Hence, it will be as important to think about
how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to
what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to
materialize provide the necessary ‘outside’, if not the necessary support, for the bodies
which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter (1993: 243).
Tennis history has shown that the bodies that matter are the bodies whose athleticism is the
primary discussion in a sporting competition. When an identity is marginalized for the meanings
that are embedded within a sexuality, gender, ‘race’, (dis)ability, or otherwise, discourses tend to
privilege the aesthetics (e.g. Eugenie Bouchard’s alleged beauty). Thus, the immaterial becomes
the material.
Heteronormativity in Sport
39
Assessing the Tweets that discussed Marion Bartoli’s body as a lesbian, as the homophobic slur
dyke , and as embodying masculine features draws our attention to homophobia and transphobia 6
that routinely occur in tennis and society. Sport in particular illuminates the institutionalized
discrimination against lesbians and women who are perceived to be lesbians, such as Marion
Bartoli (Hargreaves, 2000: 137). In Appendix A, I illustrate the homophobia, transphobia, and
fear of the nonheterosexual or cisgender body. Users published Tweets that asked whether
Bartoli had a penis, and others published Tweets that directly named Bartoli as a dyke and as a
lesbian. According to Hargreaves, sporting banter, not unlike the language used in the
abovementioned Tweets, is not an innocent or harmless discourse, but is a way to pathologize
women in sport. Resultingly, ‘it puts pressure on heterosexual women to disclaim such labels and
send out heterosexual signals’ (2000: 137). For sportswomen, there are material consequences to
homophobia. Hargreaves claims that ‘heterosexual athletes are known to dissociate themselves
from lesbian teammates and to end long friendships with them’ (2000: 137). Besides the effects
on the interpersonal relationships of female athletes who are either lesbians or labelled as
lesbians, female participation in sport is mocked, especially when their gender presentation does
not adhere to the contemporary parameters:
The public image of female athletes is defined to a large degree by the media. It appears
that in order to gain coverage a woman must fit the accepted female persona. Female
athletes have come to realize that they must emphasise their femininity, especially if they
wish to gain sponsorship. Women who do not conform to these unwritten rules are often
6 The term dyke has been reclaimed in recent decades as a term of empowerment amongst gay women and lesbians, but the term continues to be used derisively (Brontsema, 2004).
40
ridiculed and both their gender and their sexual orientation may be questioned (George et
al., 2001: 99).
The ridicule and rhetoric around Marion Bartoli exemplifies the media’s dominance over images
and the schemata that are referred to when imagining a particular idea. When considering the
idea of a tennis player, images of Anna Kournikova are often evoked, whose reported beauty
captured the media’s attention following Kournikova’s entry into the professional tennis realm.
As Maureen Dowd (2000) reported in The New York Times, Kournikova was, at the time, the
highestpaid female tennis professional. It was also reported that Kournikova earned more than
most male tennis professionals at this time. In a study that examined the gendered nature of the
English tabloid press, it was argued that Kournikova was one of the seldom cases of a female
athlete with significant media coverage. The reasons for her coverage were ‘her long blonde hair,
tanned complexion and lithe body [that adhered] to the hegemonic idealization, which associates
women with sensuality and fragility’. Tellingly, Kournikova exemplified and reproduced the
‘myth of female inferiority, and [constructed] a notion of women as unnatural athletes’ (Harris
and Clayton, 2002: 406). This is not to blame Anna Kournikova for being considered beautiful,
but rather, this is to highlight the relevance of discussing the social phenomena that arises from
gendered prejudice and stereotypes in sport.
Conclusion
In recognition of Foucault, this paper has drawn upon case studies to demonstrate the ways in
which the female tennis body is disciplined, monitored, and controlled in this cultural era of
tennis. The paradox of rhetoric surrounding women’s tennis is that despite of its parity of
broadcast time and attention that is paid to women’s tennis, the attitudes towards women in
41
tennis remains problematic and controversial. The female tennis body, it seems, is fetishized
when it is able to fit into the epistemic norm of its time period, while bodies considered unruly
are subjected to harassment and social sanctions. In the first chapter of this essay, I explicate
broad themes from three of Foucault’s major works: The Order of Things: An Archeology of the
Human Sciences, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and The History of Sexuality
(all three volumes; The Will to Knowledge, The Use of Pleasure, and The Care of the Self).
In The Order of Things, Foucault concentrates on the epistemic shifts of Western society
which led to changes in how we determine what we take as knowledge. This work contains a
significant magnitude on the instability of epistemologies, and therefore, my focus is on the
constitution of the human as a scientific object of study. I raise this particular questioning due to
its relevance in looking at how the female tennis body is scrutinized with scientific methods and
reductionist practices such as the Body Mass Index (BMI), which influences how we consider
some people as fat and others as healthy. According to Foucault, the epistemes that decide what
is abnormal and what is not have been in flux. Thus, this raises optimism for the future of how
the body is talked about, particularly bodies that are marginalized through reiterative discourses
that shame and disempower the constructed Other, such as women, people of colour, and
sexualities that fall outside of heterosexuality and heteronormativity.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is illustrative of the shift from the
explicitly physical or material way of punishing, such as public beheadings, to the onset of more
covert, ideological practices of this contemporary moment. However, ideology has invariably an
impact on the material. I use this text to unpack what Judith Butler refers to as social sanctions,
or punishment for deviation from a normative discursive formation or social framework.
42
Specifically, I focus on Foucault’s chapter on discipline, which Foucault calls ‘the means of
correct training’ (1979: 170194). For Foucault, there are three critical concepts that comprise
discipline: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination (ibid). If these
are taken concretely, it would understandably seem absurd to apply these practices to a
sociological study of Wimbledon. However, with the constant mediated gaze of different media
outfits and the ubiquitous presence of social media, these ideas dovetail with the tennis
tournament and the female tennis body. Through the gaze that judges and strives to maintain
hierarchies of value, female tennis players whose bodies are deemed unruly or abnormal are
rejected from the hierarchy. Often, they are disciplined, as was discussed in the section titled ‘On
Unruly Bodies’. This section draws upon Foucault’s threevolume The History of Sexuality,
where a brief case study on a historiography of the body is evidentiary of the fluidity of
narratives used to create knowledge about the body.
The case studies of athletes such as Marion Bartoli, Taylor Townsend, Rebecca Marino,
and others highlight the contemporary relevance of Foucault’s work. The disciplinary practices
in tennis are farreaching; not only are disciplinary tactics interpersonal, such as the remarks
made on Twitter and by BBC host John Inverdale, but they are intrapersonal. Discipline is
intrapersonal when it affects athletes and subjects at a level that concretely impacts their game
and athleticism. However, discipline is not linear and straightforward, but insidious and
genealogical, with many branches and ligatures that constitute disciplinary methods. Thus, it is
important to reckon with Foucault’s paradigms to unpack the epistemologies of the body in
tennis, and how discipline is enacted upon the body in this contemporary moment.
43
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