Guest Column:
Doug Hartmann:
Beijing 2008: Olympic Nationalism & the Role of Gender
Tucker Center Newsletter - 2008 Fall
I usually guard against chauvinism in the context of Olympic sports.
But I’ve lived in Minnesota long enough now that I couldn’t help but
feel a certain degree of Gopher Pride when athletes with connections to
our state and university had their moments on the global stage in
Beijing. The fact that so many of these athletes were women—Lindsey
Berg, Nicole Branagh, and Shani Marks among them—also got me thinking
about how gender plays into nationalism, human rights and globalization.
These are the issues I’ve been puzzling over since returning from the
second of my two recent trips to China.
Women (and gender) stood out at the Beijing Games in a variety of ways. For example, for the first time in Olympic history, American women won as many medals—53 according to the New York Times—as American men. (Four of the 110 U.S. medals were in mixed gender sports such as equestrian). Needless to say, these results underscore once again the success of Title IX and of the larger emphasis on girls and women in U.S. sport that has been championed so powerfully and consistently by folks in the Tucker Center over the past decade.
But before we pat ourselves on the back too much, it is worth noting that gender dynamics—and the consequences of international athletic competition—are quite different and even more striking in other parts of the world. In China, for instance, women accounted for 57 medals, some 15 more than Chinese men. This extends a pattern that has held since 1988. Indeed, when China first re-emerged on the international sports scene in the 1980s, it was their women’s volleyball team who led the way—defeating the Soviet Union, the United States, and, in the title match, Japan on their way to the 1981 World Cup championship and five consecutive world and Olympic titles.
There are many explanations for the success of Chinese women: A militarist-socialist system that treated them equally (if also harshly, by our standards); different conceptions of sex and gender; the existence of a cultural tradition, captured in the Disney movie Mulan, of women warriors who sacrifice themselves for the glory of the nation; and the fact that until recently, sport in China was a low-status activity that men didn’t feel compelled to dominate and control as they do in the West. But even today, as Susan Brownell pointed out in Beijing’s Games, many Chinese remember the 1981 women’s world volleyball championship as the turning point for national pride and patriotism not just in sport, but for the entire country, helping throw off the label of China as the “sick man” of East Asia.
The gender ironies here are delicious, and complicate our already complicated conceptions of China and its place in the new world order. But it is not just China we should be thinking about. Although we in the West often talk about nations and nationalism in abstract, gender-neutral terms, the distinctive roles of women and men in constituting nations and national identity are never far from the surface. What role do U.S. sportswomen play in the construction of our American national identity and pride? What role will women athletes around the world play as gender and national identities shift and change in an increasingly complex, global world? What role should they play? These are just a few of the ideas and questions we will be highlighting at the Tucker Center Distinguished Lecture on October 22. I hope you will join me and our three distinguished panelists that evening. We look forward to hearing your ideas and questions as well.
Doug Hartmann is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Tucker Center Affiliated Scholar. His research examines race and ethnicity; sports; popular culture; and contemporary theory.