International Review on Sport & Violence

International Review on Sport and Violence – 2014 | 9, Sport & Gender

International Review on Sport & Violence

Call for papers

This issue of IRSV is focused on publishing gender studies related to sport. This editorial decision does not correspond to a desire to update existing work on this subject considering the changes that have occurred in our society, but to a simple need to reaffirm its foundation on the problem of violence that addresses this journal.

Scientific contributions seek to avoid the obstacles that sometimes suffer gender studies.

Occasionally, they forget male dominance, especially in sports, considering it as constitutive of all social relationships and analyzing it separately from other factors such as social relations, age, ethnicity, class or even independently of contexts, especially socio- historical, in which it is established, naturalized and reproduced.

Consequently, this issue will focus around social science research while trying to analyze gender inequalities, their persistence and effects, particularly in terms of violence and discrimination, such as the analysis of its transformation, change or reduction bearing in mind possible progress on equality between women and men in sport.

We emphasize how gender relations remain structured in the process of socialization, but also at the center of interactions that occur in sports. However, under the pretext of an alleged axiological neutrality, to forget the influence of gender in research, particularly in sport, often leads to partial and biased studies to serve a "normal" (Chabaud-Rychter et al., 2010) and, therefore, androcentric point of view in sports. Without falling into a miserabilist approach that would mean to denounce incessantly womanhood to reproduce asymmetrically a certain contempt for man studies, the scientific reflections included in this issue will be devoted to the study of different genres.

If the articulation of the questions related to gender and sport shows, at first glance, complex, this is a real scientific challenge on many levels.

• First of all, sports, in which there are a gradual and late entry of women that would not have been possible without a fight (Terret, 2004), as it has been historically constructed, and still is today, as the bastion of hegemonic masculinity (Liotard and Terret, 2006).

• Then the body, both the means and the end of sports, it is mobilized in a preponderant way and stereotyped during sport socialization, reviving the naturalistic debate that traditionally confirms the asymmetric (re)definitions of feminine and masculine. The

International Review on Sport and Violence – 2014 | 9, Sport & Gender

body, its dispositions, representations and uses, but also the knowledge and the power it generates, are depositories of a hierarchical and binary view of a differentiated and distinctive sports world.

• Finally, the link between gender and sport carries a challenge in a scientific field where these two objects are, or have been, arbitrarily undervalued in the symbolic order of scientific practices and contributions. If the first has faced resistance from feminist movements that have developed it, the second object remains culturally judged as "low- end par excellence" (Erhenberg 1991). Therefore, studies on gender and sport, thus deprived of legitimacy, have suffered a lack of visibility, particularly in scientific field.

To perceive the relationships of power, domination, hierarchies and the inequalities between sexes in sports; to analyze the trajectories and mechanisms of socialization; to understand the formation and transformation of the sexual identity of the athletes, their managers; to objectify the stereotypes and representations that commonly surround social practices; to discover the forms of violence present in the sport in order to prevent them and many others; these are the scientific challenges that warrant the preparation of this special issue. These questions may contribute eventually to perceive, deconstruct and disclose new mechanisms to work in social relations between sexes and their complexity.

Meanwhile numerous studies have been dedicated to this subject, deserving certainly to enrich this journal, many paths remain unexplored and may be valued as research fields.

Some of these topics may be related to various disciplines, with approaches and issues drawn from other areas, with the methods used, with theoretical reflections that include concepts (starting with gender) but also epistemological issues about the positions and phenomena involved in these researches.

Refraining from giving a lesson, particularly in relation with sports, this issue proposes to use research more as weapon (Bourdieu, 1984) for reading, reflection, understanding and, therefore, for explanation of gender relations, always unequal and often discriminatory and violent, moreover insidious and therefore remaining ignored.

Papers to be submitted : 15th October 2013 Publication is planned for : Early/mid 2014

Contact : gaelle.sempe@univ-rennes2.fr ; sportsetviolences@club-internet.fr Guidelines may be obtained at (author instructions) : http://www.irsv.org/