Abstract
To date Luce Irigaray’s sexual difference theory has had very little impact on sport feminism studies. While sexual difference is still considered in some feminist circles as a regression to the old idea of anatomy as destiny, Irigaray’s sexual difference theory is more about criticizing the universal male subject and creating the possibility of female subjectivity. Irigaray’s work is focused on language and normative categories. Using Irigaray’s sexual difference theory to analyse and represent women’s rugby experiences allows us to go beyond the difference between biological sexes. It concentrates on difference amongst women and within a fragmented and contradictory female subject. To represent these experiences, a creative non-fictional personal narrative is used.
This article analyses women’s rugby experiences according to Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference. These experiences are represented through a creative non-fictional personal narrative. For Irigaray, philosophy, science, law, economics (and probably sport) have a tendency to represent a sex-neutral subject, which means they are based on sexual indifference (Deutscher, 2002). This is what Irigaray calls impossible sexual difference. The starting point of this article is to present rugby as a sexually indifferent environment where the feminine is absent because both genders are defined in male terms (Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b). The main goal of this article is to delve into Irigaray’s theory of power, language and subjectivity in order to explore the strategies she suggests to give life to female difference in rugby settings.
Egalitarian sport feminists are mainly concerned with achieving equal opportunities and equal access for women to all sports at all levels, thereby increasing the numbers and the fields in which women participate (Hargreaves, 1994). This achievement is based on the tangible rather than the symbolic. Irigaray and a number of French psychoanalyst feminists are more concerned with the power of language that produces and reproduces gendered subjectivities. Subjectivity, as the language that represents it, is neither universal nor neutral (Irigaray, 1985a, 1985b). Language sustains male subjectivity as the norm and the one to achieve. Irigaray’s long-term project is based on challenging gendered subject hierarchies. Additionally she seeks to undermine the prevalent use of the masculine to signify through language everything related to the feminine. In this article, I will contest the dichotomic logic, which defines and limits gender in rugby. Gender dichotomy grounds the feminine in opposition to the masculine, its absence and negation. I will suggest, through analysing Irigaray’s work, that representing difference within the feminine contributes to undermine the masculine norm. The main goal of Irigaray is to search and set some bases for feminine resistance without falling into the trap of representing the negative, the lack of the norm, the taken for granted. For this reason, Irigaray’s work is considered part of a trend called politics of affirmation (Braidotti, 2003), where positive feminine subjectivity is possible.
The ultimate aim of this article is to show, through Irigaray’s sexual difference theory, alternative ways of representing women’s rugby identities and experiences. Identities and experiences that are not limited by male definitions of rugby: neither hegemonic masculinity on the pitch, nor emphasized femininity off the pitch. The article is structured in four parts. First, the review of women’s rugby studies; second, the examination of Irigaray’s work; third, the what, why and how of personal narrative writing in this research; and lastly, the narrative entitled Conversations, which represents difference amongst and within women as a way to overcome gender dichotomies.
Women playing rugby: Liberating or limiting?
Women’s rugby studies are still a slow growing area in sport feminism and sociology research. The majority of the analyses in this field focus on detailing and making sense of women’s participation in rugby either through qualitative inquiry (Broad, 2001; Carle and Nauright, 1999; Chase, 2006; Gill, 2007; Wheatley, 1994) or through analysing media discourses in the printed press (Wright and Clarke, 1999).
The common starting point of these studies is to consider rugby as a ‘hyper-masculine sport’ (Carle and Nauright, 1999: 128). In other words, what Sheard and Dunning had already done in 1973, coined a male preserve, and all the consequences derived from defining and framing rugby as a ‘man’s game’ (Dunning, 1986). Traditionally rugby union has been, and in some environments still is, seen as a non-feminine sport (Carle and Nauright, 1999). The aim of the majority of women’s rugby studies is basically twofold. One, to describe in detail and understand why and what kind of women decide to play rugby when historical, social and physical elements are against it. Two, to analyse thoroughly and interpret the actions, behaviours and statements these women adopt in order to resist the fixed and constrained male gender order in rugby union.
In the interests of this article I will focus on the latter, which is also divided into two main aspects. First, the actions and statements that some female rugby players utilize in order to resist male power and challenge discrimination embedded in a physically intense high contact team sport. Second, the negotiation of the conflicting situations created for those women who do not embody emphasized femininity nor heterosexuality.
The majority of these studies analyse how women challenge emphasized images of femininity by playing rugby and empowering their bodies by becoming muscular (Chase, 2006), and aggressive, even violent (Gill, 2007). They also resist the gender order in rugby by displaying behaviours related to drinking wildly (Carle and Nauright, 1999), being unapologetic and outspoken (Broad, 2001) and being very explicit about their sexual practices and drives (Wheatley, 1994). All these researches take for granted that women, who participate in rugby, challenge the well-established male gender order and the heterosexual norm, and as such, liberate women. Conversely, any display related to the feminine stereotypes becomes limiting. Thus, it is assumed that in order to overcome discrimination, women in rugby settings need to challenge the hegemonic masculinity by mimicking it and denying any traces of femininity.
As a result, it is a common trait in feminist rugby studies to deal with paradoxical situations. While women are liberated and able to resist masculine hegemony and power through their aggressive participation on the rugby field, players are also forced (through ideology of masculinity) to embody stereotyped images of femininity mainly, off the field (Chase, 2006; Gill, 2007; Wright and Clarke, 1999). For instance, Chase (2006), following Foucault’s concept of docile bodies, emphasizes the importance of analysing the contradictory discourses of the images of ideal female bodies. On one side, these women are proud when their bodies are muscular and bruised because they represent a sign of strength and power. On the other, their bodies are submitted to processes of being subjected to discourses of normative femininity and docility.
Furthermore, Wheatley (1994) and Broad (2001) focus on analysing women’s sexualities in rugby as a site of resistance to the superior power of men and the limitation of the scope that ideal femininity and heterosexuality offer to represent women in an ultra-masculine sport. For instance, Wheatley considers that subverting the meanings of traditional misogynistic expressions and vilification of homosexuals in traditional rugby songs is an act of resistance, ‘the song might be interpreted as an articulation of women’s superior sexual powers in their capacity to experience multiple or frequent orgasms’ (p. 193). Broad’s (2001) main focus is to explore the strategies women employ in order to resist traditional expressions of femininity and heterosexuality in rugby. Her main findings are that women in rugby are confrontational – ‘in your face’ (p. 188). Overall, Broad states that she grounds her study in queer theory by affirming that framing female sexuality in fluid terms in the rugby settings has the potential to disrupt the hierarchical and limiting heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy. Furthermore, she supports the idea that women have the capacity to destabilize and transgress fixed and normative sexual identities by being fluid and multiple in their choices of sexual practices.
Gill (2007), following Foucault, considers the body as ‘cultural’ (p. 417) and as ‘a locus of control’ (p. 418). The body can be seen as a site of performing aggression and resisting male violence. Her central focus is to show how women engaging in rugby ‘are resisting the disciplining of their bodies as passive or gendered and performing a new version of femininity’ (p. 418, emphasis added).
This article argues that disrupting and transgressing gender and sexuality dichotomy is not enough to overcome them, it is also necessary to displace them. Gender and sexuality dichotomies structure our thinking and impose powerful and fixed models of representing realities, and they are, in themselves, a deadlock in representing women’s bodies and their subjectivity positively. Even though disrupting and displacing these male subject systems of thought seems an (im)possible task, Irigaray’s project is devoted to it.
Irigaray and sexual difference theory
Luce Irigaray was born in Belgium in the early 1930s and developed most of her intellectual career in France. She is recognized worldwide as an innovative and striking thinker of French feminism. Irigaray has a varied background in different fields: philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics.
Irigaray’s sexual difference work has gone through at least two phases since her first publication. There is a clear cut between the early Irigaray and the later Irigaray. The former work is based on dismantling the unitary vision of the male subject through criticizing philosophy and psychoanalytic theory in defining and excluding women from the production of meaning. The latter focuses on the importance of relationships between women and men in order to structure the social and public sphere (Braidotti, 2003). For the purposes of this research, I will exclusively focus on the early phase, which is based on how Irigaray begins formulating the steps of how to go from an impossible sexual difference to a possibility of recognizing female difference.
This phase is represented by two publications: Speculum of the Other Women (1974) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) (both translated into English in 1985). Both are part of Irigaray’s initial project to, first, criticize and to make evident the grounded absence of the feminine in two of the foundational discourses of Western rationality: philosophy and psychoanalysis (1985a). Second, to affirm female sexual difference through creating new language and concepts inspired in female sexuality (1985b), such as two lips: ‘for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact’ (p. 24), and mechanics of fluids: ‘that women diffuse themselves according to modalities scarcely compatible with the framework of the ruling symbolics’ (p. 106).
In the first publication, Irigaray denounces and criticizes the universal (masculine) subject, which pervades these two discourses (philosophy and psychoanalysis). In this text Irigaray sets the foundation to denounce Freud’s theory of how the little girl is defined according to a little boy without penis, and as a result, she can only ‘become a man minus certain attributes’ (1985a: 27). Furthermore, she underlines that ‘any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ‘‘masculine’” (1985a: 133). In other words, psychoanalysis and philosophy completely exclude any possible existence of the feminine in Western rationality. In addition, the absence of the feminine strengthens the presence and the universality of the masculine. Irigaray revisits what has been ‘implicit, hidden and unknown: the sexual indifference that underlies the truth of any science, the logic of every discourse’ (1985b: 69, italics in original). As a poststructuralist, Irigaray believes that meaning is constituted within language (Weedon, 1997). She criticizes the sexual indifference grounded in Western discourses by criticizing Lacan’s theory on the omnipresence of the phallus, which inevitably indicates that language is male-centred and male-privileged and so are all the representations it creates. To define the insidious masculine in language, Irigaray borrowed from Derrida the term phallocentrism. This term privileges the masculine in the production of meaning. In other words, no matter how much women try to represent themselves positively in this system they will always be relegated to represent the Other (negative or opposite) of the (masculine) One. This is what Irigaray calls impossible sexual difference. For Irigaray, women attempting to access the privileges of the One do not solve the riddle of the feminine (1985a).
In This Sex Which is not One, Irigaray creates and imagines strategies to represent the feminine in a genuine and affirmative difference, what she calls, providing for the existence of possible sexual difference. Irigaray struggles to create and develop language capable of providing ‘alternative female-defined femininity’ (Weedon, 1997: 61). For this purpose, Irigaray is concerned with coining new concepts, constituting a new language able to resist the pervading phallocentric system.
This language is well-known for finding its original inspiration in women’s sexuality, such as concepts of the ‘two lips’ or the ‘mechanics of fluids’. Central to this argument is that Irigaray is not trying to replace the phallus for any of women’s sexual organs, in order to create a woman’s centred language. Irigaray’s goal is ‘to (jam) the theoretical machinery itself’ (1985b: 78). This means that Irigaray’s sexual difference theory wants to, above all, displace the dichotomic system that grounds Western rationality by creating a new logic not grounded on negative and positive elements to define it. The Irigarayan definition of the two lips is a good example. With the two lips, Irigaray displaces instead of only reversing the meanings to no-One sexual organ (no-phallus) because ‘she is neither one nor two’ (1985b: 26). The two lips are constantly in touch, in companion, and one cannot distinguish what is touching from what is touched, as well as one cannot identify where one finishes and where the other starts, ‘she is definitely other in herself’ (p. 28). With this representation of the two lips Irigaray challenges the unitary univocal system. In this sense mechanics of fluids can be seen as what is in play between the two lips. It is also a starting point to avoid the economy of solids (1985b: 106), which means to think more in relational and polyvocal terms and trying to ‘(get) rid of words in order not to become fixed and congealed in them’ (p. 29).
Supporting Irigaray’s vision, several authors have asserted that sexual difference is about ‘signification and discursive effects’ (de Lauretis, 1987: 1); ‘construction of meaning’ (Cassey, 1999: 39); ‘a normative category’ (Inahara, 2009: 49); ‘a place of articulation’ (Colebrook, 2004: 86). Therefore, Irigaray’s sexual difference ‘is a question of discourse and representation, not of nature’ (Whitford, 1991: 105). Furthermore, sexual difference can be ‘a form of plurality which announces itself as overflow and threat of boundaries, a ‘‘more than one’” (Sjöholm, 2000: 93). This relates to the idea that a way to undermine the masculine norm is to frame female difference in terms of multiplicity and excess. Irigaray’s approach to sexual difference and most of the concepts she has developed based on female sexuality are related to opening up new systems of producing language, of creating and legitimating meanings from a female subjectivity. As Whitford (1991: 97) argues, tools to create an alternative system of representation in which women ‘could recognize themselves’ apart from objects also as subjects. Moreover, as Whitford (1991: 107) underlines, the body, according to Irigaray, represents ‘the source for extremely far-reaching cultural meanings which cannot be easily reduced to the traditional meanings of woman-for-man’. The stress on the ‘specificities and the plurality of sexual organs’ (Irigaray, 1985b: 28) represents a possible source for creating language able to resist phallocentrism. Irigaray constantly emphasizes throughout her work on female sexuality that creating a language based on female sexuality is not to fix women and the feminine to biological destiny, but rather to call for a ‘change of foundations in language’ (Olkowski, 2000: 77). This constitutes a pioneering strategy to explore possible new ways of creating positive and affirmative feminine subjectivity. For Irigaray expanding on the concepts that have defined female sexuality in order to create new language able to produce alternative meanings of women’s realities in Western discourse is a way to ensure that her project does not fall into the trap of ending up constituting a new version of femininity as another variation of masculinity (i.e. displacing the gender dichotomic hierarchical order rather than merely disrupting it).
Critiquing Irigaray
Creating a new language based on bodily experience is politically dangerous because it can ‘reduce women to a version of their sexuality’ and body (Weedon, 1997: 63). In this regard, Irigaray has created a major schism in feminist research.
Due to her work on female sexuality, Irigaray has often been accused of being essentialist (Fuss, 1992; Schor, 1994). For instance, Françoise Collin (2006), a postmodern French feminist, affirms that Irigaray’s feminism is more essentialist than postmodernist because her theory develops from the belief that ‘the feminine is inherently to women’ (p. 69) even though the feminine that Irigaray is suggesting has nothing to do with traditional femininity. Conversely, other continental feminists, like Braidotti (1991, 2003), define Irigaray’s work as a part of a poststructuralist philosophy strand. According to Braidotti, Irigaray’s work is an answer to some male thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Irigaray engages with these theorists and ‘adapts them to her project of expressing the positivity of sexual difference’ (1991: 248). As a result Irigaray’s work has been very controversial in feminism studies: how can a theory be essentialist and at same time be defiant with plurality and by definition anti-unitary? This is a paradox in itself, which also is a characteristic of Irigaray’s ideas and writing.
As a result, it is not a straightforward task to frame Irigaray’s work in feminist theory. For some, her work represents a ‘negative essentialist model’ that feminist research has fought so much to overcome, for others she is a positive model – based on poststructuralist principles of fragmentary, multilayered and non-unitary subject – to imitate, capable of representing difference positively beyond phallocentrism (Schwab, 2007: 29).
In order to be coherent with her search for new feminine identities that escape the male dominated language Irigaray uses a style known as ‘écriture féminine’, a writing strand that vividly represents female sexuality, rhythms, fluids and thresholds (Ives, 1996). This style has provoked a mixture of reactions in readers. Whilst this style helps to convey the need for changing language to represent the non-existence of the feminine in it, its abstractness makes it harder to believe that Irigaray is actually dealing with high academic and intellectual work and attempting to provide for political action (Schwab, 2007).
Even though the risk of essentialism is high in Irigaray’s work (Schor, 1994), I believe it is worth revisiting this theory to create chances to represent the feminine in a positive and affirmative fashion. I fully support Inahara’s statement, ‘it is the purpose of Irigaray to deconstruct this binary opposition by moving the feminine part of the binary opposition from a lack into an excess and multiplicity’ (2009: 49). Irigaray’s research, apart from representing differences between women and men, also brings to the fore differences amongst women, and lastly, differences within the single individual woman (Braidotti, 2003). It is this multiple and anti-unitary approach to difference that makes Irigaray’s work unique and valuable to apply to women’s rugby. How can differences beyond race, sexuality, religion, culture, etc., amongst women be represented in a rugby team? How can the differences, the contradictions, the fragmented female-self be represented in a rugby setting? These are some of the challenges the following creative non-fictional personal narrative tackles.
Methodology
Gathering data
The multiple qualitative methods used in this research are threefold. First, recollections of personal experiences of 18 years of a rugby career as a player. Markula and Denison (2005) emphasize the importance of personal experience in sport as a data collection method. Some of my personal recollections were written to describe the most important moments in my rugby career in order to be able to analyse the importance of them in women’s rugby representations. Other personal experiences were written to prompt players in the interviews and draw out more intimate and complex meanings of their experiences.
Second, I carried out active participant observation, especially during two seasons (2000–2002), in a southwest London rugby club.
Third, I collected information through in-depth interviews with the most significant players from the Barcelona and London rugby teams I had been part of. My starting point was Reinharz and Chase (2002) who also used conversational interviewing in feminist research. They claim that when women interview other women, conversational aspects are brought to interviewing’s structure.
The women’s rugby World Cup took place in May 2002 in Barcelona. It was an excellent opportunity to rejoin my old rugby friends some of whom represented Spain. I registered six in-depth and conversational interviews. In the autumn of the same year I contacted six players from the London teams I played for.
Intertwining these three methods I wrote several stories following the technique of creative non-fiction (Caulley, 2008; Gerard, 1996) in order to explore and represent the possible existence of fragmented, complex and non-linear female subjectivity in a rugby environment.
Representing data
As I locate myself within the poststructuralist paradigm, I do not claim to embody an objective position when interpreting and representing my interview data (Richardson, 2000). Like Clifford (1986), I acknowledge that all our truths are always necessarily partial truths as our research knowledge inevitably derives from the cultural context of the researcher and the researched.
Currently narrative writing has multiple meanings and a wide range of uses. However, there are two basic approaches: analysis of narratives and narrative analyses (Polkinghorne, 1995); or as Stanley and Temple (2008: 276) claim ‘narrative studies’ and ‘narrative inquiry’. The basic difference between the two approaches is that the former are the data, which the qualitative researcher analyses and the latter consists of writing narratives as a method of representing data. The following narrative is based on the second approach.
In 1997, Norman Denzin took for granted the unavoidable growth of the narrative turn in human disciplines. He had actively experimented with an extensive range of alternative texts representing data from qualitative inquiry (1994), ethnographic research (1997) and more lately performance studies (2003). Denzin wanted to set the bases for the narrative turn to develop, and all its epistemological and ontological consequences, to solidify the chance for a social researcher to represent their data for academic, as well as, non-academic audiences (1997). As Bochner (2001: 134–135) reminds us ‘The narrative turn moves from a singular, monolithic conception of social sciences toward a pluralism that promotes multiple forms of representation and research; [. . .] away from writing essays and towards telling stories.’
Using narratives in qualitative research as a representation is not just a question of semantics or aesthetics; it is also a contribution to our understanding of social life (Bochner, 2001; Denzin, 1997, 2003; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005; Ellis et al., 2008). Other authors have applied this idea to physical activity and sport (Denison and Rinehart, 2000; Markula and Denison, 2005; Smith and Sparkes, 2009; Sparkes, 2002). According to Denzin (1997: 207) the narrative text assumes the poststructuralist principle that language rather than depicting experiences creates them in all its possible forms. It also extends ‘the boundaries of the traditional ethnographic model of textuality’ by including many of the literature devices used by the new journalists, such as the use of scene setting, plot, dialogue, flashback and multiple points of view.
As Foucault (1998) reminds us the relationship between text and author is not so straightforward and writing texts about other’s people experience is not exempt from problems. Denzin (1997, 2003) draws on these ideas when he asserts that the language and discourses produced in qualitative reports can no longer be considered transparent or as a straightforward mirror of experiences, they need to be questioned and researchers need to be suspicious of their own writing practices (Richardson and St Pierre, 2005). Thus, writing does not just describe subjects, dynamics, beliefs, ways of doing and being; language also creates and fixes them but at the same time defers and continuously transforms them. This is what Foucault calls an ‘endless possibility of discourse’ (1998: 217).
The crisis of representation symbolizes a time in which some social researchers dared to experiment with new ways of writing and working towards creating new possibilities that might be closer to representing complex, layered lived experiences in writing (Flaherty et al., 2002; Richardson and St Pierre, 2005). A new movement started to be relevant in ethnography through the crisis of representation, a movement that also questions the legitimation of the researchers to represent the other (Flaherty et al., 2002).
Representing data in sports research
I have chosen a personal narrative to represent my data on women’s rugby because it takes on board the nature of language as a contested terrain in which plural identities are constructed and intertwined in complex, contradictory and fragmentary ways instead of expecting players to be linear and fixed regarding gender binaries.
Many authors have experimented with alternative ways of writing to represent social science data in sport research, for example, Bruce (2000), Denison (1996), Jones (2006), Markula (2003), Sparkes (2002, 2004) to name just a few. I have followed Markula and Denison’s (2005: 170) classification on sport narratives. The narrative in this article is a mix of ‘personal experience narrative’, my character leads the thread of the story, but I have also included ‘research stories’ (p. 176) to help me to represent the multiple meanings and voices embedded in women’s rugby experiences. With the help of intertwining all the qualitative methods used, the following narrative is a narrative of the self with creative nonfiction elements (Caulley, 2008; Gerard, 1996). I have bent reality by creating characters and conversations that are a mixture of my gathered data. I have also set specific scenes, which suit the purpose of making the situations more credible and engaging rather than being a plain depiction of experiences. I am aware that it is not a final result in itself, but a text, which contributes to the ongoing possible representations of female subjectivity beyond phallocentrism.
Conversations
‘Out! The ball is out! Come on quick out!’ I desperately cried under a mountain of flesh. Faces against hips, arms tighten up upper bodies, shoulders supporting arses, ears squashed; fingers whirl until the limit of insupportable pain … Protecting, being protected; smashing another body, being smashed by another body. From representing a gap, a hole, a lack … reaching the threshold of our bodies, half open, open onto beyond and the new but at the same time limiting the other, controlling and getting a subject position. This is my rugby! * * * On my way to the changing room, I keep a low profile trying to avoid everyone after last Sunday’s defeat and my confrontation with Denise. Out of nowhere Emily appears. ‘Hey Anna how are you? Denise was really upset by your comment the other day.’ ‘Wow that was straight to the point, no mincing your words!’ Emily takes a deep breath and continues, ‘Listen Anna, you’re doing a great job as captain. I couldn’t do it, going to club and Union meetings to raise awareness and fight for the team’s interests.’ She continues weighing her words carefully. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I think what Denise said was rude but in a sense quite interesting. How can I put it? Since we started playing in the premier league you’ve become increasingly obsessed with the need for all of us to make rugby our first, and almost only priority.’ Feeling my temper awakening, I say, ‘You know that rugby is a very special sport. A winning team does not only succeed due to their outstanding skills. We need to be best friends on and off the pitch. Don’t you get it?’ Before Emily can retort I jump in with, ‘this is why I’m trying so hard to get a cohesive group dynamic. And you are not helping much.’ Lowering my voice and my eyes, ‘You . . . you never stick around for the socializing afterwards . . . trying to convince the players of how important it is to come with the team after matches and seeing you leave, breaks my heart.’ ‘Hold on a moment! I’ve been coming to lots of dinners and going out. YOU have problems in understanding other ways of approaching, living rugby. I sometimes feel that you are just as discriminatory as the guys when you make your dismissive, ironic remarks about how some of us dress or wear make up. I would say it was very, very . . . sexist! What’s the difference between you and what the guys are doing to us by not letting us play on the immaculate first pitch and giving us the old and torn kit?’ A bit embarrassed, I retort, ‘I don’t understand what you mean. You love rugby, don’t you?’ ‘Of course I do, at the moment it is my biggest passion. At the beginning, though, it took me a bit of time to prove to you that rugby was very important in my life and I feel Denise is having the same problem. I don’t know if it is my long blond hair and that I love to wear fancy dresses. But I remember you in the first season talking to me as you are talking to Denise now when you see her flirting with the boys.’ I feel the blood rushing to my face. ‘No way! Denise flirts with the boys even when she is playing. Last Sunday she didn’t catch a crucial ball because she was more into what Steve and Mike were saying than in the kick coming towards her. That is unacceptable!’ With a resigned expression, Emily takes me by the hand, ‘Let’s go get changed, otherwise we’re going to be late and after the terrible defeat of the last match, I’m sure John is not going to be jumping for joy.’ *** After training Anna asks for a beer and notices that Denise and Emily are huddled in conversation. Denise spots Anna from the corner of her eye. She changes her expression and starts ranting. ‘I feel like I am being singled out by Anna. If I don’t want to get a bruise ’cause of my sister’s wedding then I am letting the side down but it’s ok for Jane not to want to get bruised before a job interview. It’s not fair!’ ‘Calm down! A job interview is very serious.’ Emily replies. ‘This is not the issue. I can understand that Anna does not give a shit about her physical appearance. We have daily proof of that. Have you seen her latest fashion statement that purple and black knitted jumper. Horrible!’ ‘Denise don’t be nasty.’ Lowering her voice, Denise utters ‘I think she can’t stand what we are doing because she thinks this is a way of us attempting to impress the men rather than us fighting against the system . . . you know the whole feminist malarkey . . .’ ‘Do you really believe she thinks like that?’ ‘Well she’s always commenting and complaining about inequalities in the club, in rugby as a whole. Do you remember at the beginning of the season when new rules were going to be applied and Anna wrote a manifesto that all South West teams signed in order to seek equality with men?’ ‘Yeah! But she was right, wasn’t she? Why shouldn’t we push in the scrums? Why should we play ten minutes less in each half than the guys? I read that manifesto and I fully supported it, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes of course, I supported it. We shouldn’t be less than men. But I’m telling you that Anna is becoming a kind of feminist, a bitter single woman.’ ‘Denise I think you are taking things too far. We need players like Anna who become ambassadors championing the cause of rugby becoming a serious sport for women.’ ‘I guess you’re right. I just don’t understand why to be a true rugbywoman in Anna’s eyes means to renounce any trace of femininity. Does she not see that by constraining us, she’s mimicking the men’s actions?’ ‘How funny! Just before training I had a conversation with Anna exactly about this.’ ‘Look! Who is that girl talking to Anna? She’s tiny! Hope she doesn’t want to play rugby. She doesn’t look very strong.’ ‘She’s a friend of a friend of Anna’s. She’s French. She has just started a Masters on women’s studies.’ *** Today is a very special day. It’s Françoise’s first match. She is one of the starting XV. This time we defeated the other side. Jane made a couple of outstanding moves working in unison with Emily. The team is happy, I’m happy, and Françoise is attending her first wild drinking session with the team after a game. ‘Did you enjoy the game?’ I ask, putting two pints on the table. She wrinkles her nose at the pints, ‘I enjoyed every minute of the game. I never thought playing rugby could be so intense, so much adrenaline pumping. I felt alive.’ Her accent and pronunciation make me smile. ‘You played really well’ I say while clinking my glass against hers. ‘Not for me.’ She slowly pushes the pint away, lowering her eyes. ‘How come?’ I ask puzzled. ‘I have very low tolerance for alcohol and when I drink on an empty stomach . . .’ ‘Oh come on, just one. Food is almost ready.’ I tease her thinking she is going to be an easy victim to convince. ‘No, really I prefer not to drink. At the moment, I’m quite happy with my coke.’ ‘Françoise,’ I say with an imposing tone, ‘in rugby there are three halves, two on the pitch, and one in the bar, the competition against the other team hasn’t finished yet. And soon we’re going to start the drinking games.’ ‘Listen Anna, my two brothers have always played rugby in my hometown, in the South of France. And sadly, seeing what you are doing here and what they we were doing there after games confirms that we are trying to imitate men’s rugby. We need to stop imitating men and take on board that at the end of the day we are women playing rugby.’ Feeling lost, I ask, ‘What do you mean?’ Françoise takes my chin and turns my face to the left. ‘Look at Emily, today she was the best player by far, she was decisive and physically very strong and at the same time she helped me and took care of me during the whole match. I felt her, her body, her encouragement, her passion!’ ‘Françoise! You’ve completely lost me! But hang on a second since you seem to know a lot about this sort of stuff . . . I was having a conversation with Emily the other day and she really upset me by saying that I was mimicking men by discouraging some of the players from wearing make-up, you know this kind of stuff.’ With a smile, Françoise says, ‘Interesting that you should bring that up! I bet that you believe that you are liberating your teammates by encouraging them to forget they are women and act like men, but have you thought for one minute that actually by doing that you are stifling them?’ ‘WHAT?’ I shout indignantly. ‘Hear me out,’ she continues, ‘we as women playing rugby need to create a niche for ourselves which does not necessarily mean that we should act like men nor behave in the way that men believe that we should behave, you know wearing short skirts and high heels. We need to represent ourselves as women who play rugby, whatever that means.’ ‘You’ve lost me completely!’ With an astute smile, she encourages me. ‘Come on Anna, drink your beer and think . . . how could we create a different female environment in rugby?’ I look at her with a hopeless expression . . . she enthusiastically continues, ‘Don’t worry Anna I don’t have the answers either . . . it is just something we have been bandying about in my Masters course . . . creating a new way of representing women.’ Emily and Denise who are coming towards us and heard the last sentence interject. ‘Wow are we creating a new image for women playing rugby? Can I wear my make-up after matches without feeling that I’m letting down the feminist cause?’ Denise says whilst winking at Emily. ‘As long as you catch all the balls and score,’ Emily says jokingly. ‘Very good start,’ Françoise exclaims. ‘The issue is not about wearing or not wearing make-up but rather how we can produce new meaning to our actions, to our thoughts, to our words . . .’ I can see that she has now completely lost us all but I feel that this is going to be an interesting beginning to (re)invent the team.
Conversations, a personal narrative to overcome the phallocentric feminine in women’s rugby
The main goal of Conversations is to show the differences amongst women and also within a woman. Conversations’ starting point is to show that different points of view, of understanding and living rugby cohabit in a rugby team. In other words, this narrative is grounded in the idea of women’s identities in their otherness. For instance, the central character Anna represents a player who believes that women should be the same as men in rugby and therefore she exerts her power as captain to encourage her team-mates to emulate men’s rugby in order to achieve true equality. However, Emily and Denise represent players that according to Anna embody the phallocentric femininity off the pitch. They offer a different view regarding Anna’s actions in the team. Women’s otherness, that is representing women as a non-homogeneous group is key in this representation.
Irigaray’s constant challenging of the already established language, which defines women according to phallocentric terms, gives me an opportunity to experiment with characters that represent the feminine as multiple and excessive.
Based on the notion of sexual indifference and the need to transform the symbolic, it could be argued that in rugby settings adopting traditional masculine features, such as muscularity, aggressiveness and toughness, do not challenge the hegemonic masculinity per se. Furthermore, according to Irigaray, any new definition of the feminine within the phallocentric system eventually colludes unintentionally with the system (1985b). This is why this narrative shows the contradictions in gender binary terms and struggles to create new ways of representing rugby in which women become the subject as well as the object of these representations. This is exemplified by Françoise’s character when she makes reference to the need of creating new meanings in women’s rugby actions.
Another goal of Conversations is to represent the difference within a female player. Drawing on Irigaray’s idea, Braidotti (1997: 303) asserts ‘Each woman is a multiplicity in herself: she is marked by a set of differences within the self, which turns her into a split, fractured, knotted entity, constructed over intersecting levels of experience.’ For instance, Anna’s character shows this process of ‘fracture’ when talking to Emily and Françoise, she is being told that what she believes liberates players can become another way of oppression. She represents this final split when she asks Françoise about it. Another example of a fractured entity is when Denise accuses Anna of being a bitter feminist but at the same time agrees with Emily that Anna is working on defending their rights as a women’s rugby team. As a result one could say that the four characters in this narrative work towards disrupting and at the same time displacing the dichotomic gender system because it is not only about showing multiple femininities but also about representing an anti-unitary female subject.
Concluding thoughts
Creating affirmative femininities in rugby should not just focus on trying to reverse the power of the male gender order. The focus should be more related to completely disrupting this phallocentric system by displacing it. Irigaray, through her sexual difference work, makes an attempt to displace this system by creating new language to define new realities. Her theory is not exempt of controversies, namely some have labelled her work as ‘essentialist’ and lacking in academic rigour. However, her supporters state that Irigaray’s use of female sexuality is merely a strategy to overcome the phallocentric system by creating a positive female subject rather than making female biology a destiny. I believe that this strategy can open the scope of looking at gender dichotomies in women’s rugby. Bringing language into the culture of rugby feminist studies might not be enough but it is certainly a first step and is needed for its evolution.
Nowadays, women have a significant presence in rugby clubs and rugby university teams. Women’s rugby has become a reality in most Western countries. In 1994 women’s rugby was accepted in the IRB (International Rugby Board), and since then women’s rugby World Cups have been held (McConnell, 2001). There have been four World Cups to date, which have been held in Amsterdam (1998); Barcelona (2002); Edmonton (2006) and London (2010). Twelve teams participate in each World Cup after having to classify in geographically oriented competitions. 1
Delving into sexual difference theory opens up new scopes to analyse women’s representations in rugby, a physically intense high contact team sport. By changing language we change reality and this is a very slow process. The changes to reality are hard to recognize and it is often only after many years that one notes the difference which has taken place over a course of time. Sexual difference concepts and premises contribute to frame female players’ experiences beyond gender and sexual dichotomies because it starts with the differences within a female subject.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Pirkko Markula, Deema Freij, Emma O’Sullivan and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on early versions of this article.