This research considers the limitations of sex in sports and the potential of contributing to sexual diversity through a reading of Robert Gugutzer’s Body Politics.
Gugutzer is a German sports sociologist. His Body Politics, which attempts to decipher the power relationships that affect agency in terms of discourse and representation of the body, is rooted in the philosophical theory of the body as espoused by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Foucault’s theory of the body is noted for how it analyzes discourses related to the body, and genealogically extracts the power actions associated with the materialization and socialization of these discourses. Butler focuses on “gender trouble,” which has both limitations and possibilities, while deploying this method of Foucault, to extract heteronormative discourses that operate to maintain gender order, and at the same time, discusses the potential of a parody-like physical performance that becomes an opportunity to reflect the norms and arbitrariness of those discourses.
Gugutzer applies this theory of the body to the analysis of sports: on the one hand, he identifies the characteristics of heterosexual norms in sports through the debate over gender and the body of female athletes, recognizing the strengthening of heteronormativity in the market strategy of the Bundesliga（German football league）as it attempts to depict the body of female soccer players as “feminine bodies,” while also looking at the potentials for parody, in Butler’s use of the term, in the presentation performance of female soccer players copying the physical actions of male players.