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It is no coincidence that a woman shaped like Barbie would not be a very successful participant in most current sporting events. (Lenskyj 171)
This paper investigates the negotiation and construction of gender identities in a women's intercollegiate basketball program.(1) The data upon which the findings are reported were drawn from participant observation and interviews conducted between September 2000 and April 2001. The particular focus of this paper is upon a period during observation when one of the players introduced to the team a Barbie doll which had been modified to emulate another team member who was often visibly injured. Their playful use of the Barbie doll, ironic and otherwise, is explored to excavate the meanings they make of their own feminine identities in the world of basketball and beyond.
As a powerful signifier of ultra-feminities, the presence of the Barbie doll provided a basis for observing how aspects of the players' feminine identities simultaneously coincided with and contradicted those of the doll. The findings below touch on femininities, the female body, consent, resistance, and the employment of the female athletic body as cultural capital. Athletic participation itself and the rituals/routines of intercollegiate basketball are explored as sites of resistance and the "doing of gender."
Basketball and the female body: Theoretical considerations
Perhaps more than ever before women and girls are less likely to feel compelled to offer the feminine apologetic with regards to their athleticism. To anticipate our findings below, there is reason to believe that, for some women at least, sport is a comfortable context within which they feel empowered by their physicality. Until relatively recently, girls and women were either routinely excluded from participation in sport or their performances were entirely trivialized and marginalized. While these processes remain common there has also been progress in opening up opportunities for women's involvement in sport and in winning greater media coverage of female athleticism; witness the start-up in 2001 of WTSN, a digital television station devoted solely to women's sport. Of late, there has been rapid growth in participation in women's sport, including sports such as hockey, wrestling, and rugby, all of which were previously exclusive male preserves. By successfully breaching these male domains, women are experiencing their bodies in more powerful, forceful ways...