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

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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.

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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).

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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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Appendix A: Homophobic and Transphobic Statements

Figure 1

Figure 2

51

Figure 3

Figure 4

52

Figure 5

53

Appendix B: Body­shaming

Figure 1

Figure 2

54

Figure 3

Figure 4

55

Appendix C: Sexism and Misogyny

Figure 1

Figure 2

56

Figure 3

Figure 4

57

Appendix D: Extreme Sexualization and Violence

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

58

Figure 4