Isha Malhotra1& Raj Thakur2
1Assistant Professor and Head in the School of Languages and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, UT of J&K, India. Email: isha.malhotra@smvdu.ac.in
2Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Central University of Jammu, UT of J&K, India. Email: raj.eng@cujammu.ac.in
Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.41
Abstract
The paper outlines the politics of gendered athleticism appropriated and instrumentalised through the medico-juridical apparatus of the sports governing bodies. The biomedical discourse governing the atypical athletic body and the embodied nature of its pathologised deviancy is drawn through the critical reflection of athletic regulatory bodies’ testing regimes and policies. It is through the detailed analysis of the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand’s case that one of many confounding disqualification charges and trials of hyperandrogenism against athletes with differences of sex development (DSD’s) is foregrounded. Drawing on the critical scholarship of gender theorists and activists, the legitimacy of the stipulated biological mechanism of testosterone as a regulatory performance index in female elite sport is contested and problematized. Pertinent here is Dutee Chand’s narrative of trial and triumph that destabilises the reductive embodiments of sex institutionalised in and beyond the sporting track. Significantly, the paper also delineates the premises of the constitutive exclusionary and arbitrary regulatory regimes propounded by the athletic governing bodies like the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). These concerns border on the geopolitics of race and nation framing the normative, prescriptive and reserved rights of femininity, able-bodiedness and heteronormativity in international women’s elite sport.
Keywords: DSDs, sport, gender, medicine, sex testing, regulation, heteronormativity