The Athletic Issue

In this special issue, queer studies scholars consider the athletic. The essays are based on the authors’ intimate experiences with the disciplining structures of sports and with physical practice as a site of performing as well as undoing gender and sexuality. The contributors address the relationship between discourses about sports and the regulation of gender; discourses about gender and authenticity as refracted through race and class; queer feminist engagements with physical culture; and affect and the disorienting animality of the gendered, athletic body.

 

Contributors look at figure skater Johnny Weir and transgendered college basketball player Kye Allums; at how extreme fitness programs like CrossFit can operate as performance sites for self-realization as well as self-objectification; and at the special role of sport in how twentieth-century psychologists interpreted effeminacy in boys.

 

The issue also includes a collection of queer film manifestos.