Paper Presentation X:
Gender and Participation in Sport
Monday, April 12, 10.00–13.00

Anna Kavoura & Tatiana V. Ryba
Department of Sport Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

In recent years, there has been a steady increase in women’s participation in martial arts (Hargreaves, 1997; Thomas, 2008). This trend stamps a new character on combat sports, which traditionally have been a male preserve. Despite changing dynamics around women in sports, female martial artists still find themselves seriously constrained by the dominant cultural ethos of combat sports (Hargreaves, 1997; Noad & James, 2003). In this presentation, we problematize sport psychological research on female martial arts and offer some suggestions for advancing our knowledge in this area of research and practice. First, we provide a critical feminist analysis of the existing psychological research on female martial arts. The following questions guide our analysis: What research questions do sport psychologists tend to investigate? What theories inform their research on gender? How gender differences are explained? What are the implications of psychological research for how female athletes are constituted? Second, we discuss our ongoing ethnographic research on women in judo and Brazilian jiu jitsu. In cultural sport psychology, ethnography has been advanced as a research approach to enhance our understanding of meanings for psychological concepts from the perspective of cultural members (see Ryba & Wright, 2005; Thorpe, 2010). Kraine and Baird (2005) argued, for example, that ethnography holds the potential for sport psychology to gain insights into the behaviors, values, emotions, and mental states of disenfranchised athletes, whose psyches might differ significantly from the naturalized white, middle-class, North American ones. Our study is grounded in a “cultural praxis” discursive framework (Ryba & Wright, 2005, 2010) to examine how everyday practices of martial arts are implicated in the ways female athletes experience themselves. Our specific focus is on adaptation strategies that competitive female athletes employ to succeed in male domain of sports. Understanding these strategies will enable us to unravel the underlying gendered relations of power that attempt to fix female subjectivity into particular expressions of gender. Empirical data from a pilot study will be discussed.

REFERENCES

• Hargreavers, J (1997). Women’s boxing and related activities: introducing images and meanings. Body and society, 3, 33. Downloaded from http://bod.sagepub.com on April 1, 2009.
• Kraine, V., & Baird, S. M. (2005). Using ethnography in applied sport psychology. Journal of applied sport psychology, 17, 87-107.
• Noad, K., & James, K. (2003). Samurai of gentle power: an exploration of Aikido in the lives of women aikidoka. Annals of leisure research, 6, 134-152.
• Ryba, T.V. (2009). Understanding your role in cultural sport psychology. In Schinke, R. J., & Hanrahan, S. J. (Eds.) Cultural sport psychology. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
• Ryba, T.V., & Wright, H.K. (2005). From mental game to cultural praxis: A cultural studies model’s implications for the future of sport psychology. Quest, 57, 192–212.
• Ryba, T.V., & Wright, H.K. (2010). Sport psychology and the cultural turn: Notes toward cultural praxis. In Tatiana V. Ryba, Schinke, R. J., & Tenenbaum, G. (Eds.) The cultural turn in sport psychology. Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology.
• Thomas, K. (2008, May 27). Women want to wrestle; small colleges oblige. The New York Times.
• Thorpe, H. (2010). The psychology of extreme sports. In Tatiana V. Ryba, Schinke, R. J., & Tenenbaum, G. (Eds.) The cultural turn in sport psychology. Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology.