Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

Michel Foucault (1978), one of the most influential historians of sexuality, argued that sex and sexuality became a pivot for the organization and control of life in the modern world, and that sex and sexuality are increasingly central to human affairs to the extent that much of contemporary life has been organized around these concepts.Although the relation between sexuality and sport serves as a central structure for body/identity/gender meanings, sexuality was a neglected area of inquiry in sports studies until the mid-1990s. Sport has long been a site for the reproduction of difference, particularly the naturalization of sexual differences, but sexuality occupied a somewhat “absent presence” in sport sociological research until the late 1980s, when sports sociologists explicitly addressed this topic. Since that time, scholars in the sociology of sport have figured prominently in the critique of historical and cultural forms of sexuality and the ways that sport serves as a site for constructing and policing sexualities and both reproducing and resisting heterosexism and the heterosexualization of sport-related forms (Birrell & Cole 1994).Although there are many sexual orientations (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, queer, etc.), the study of sexuality in physical education and sport has been characterized by the assumption that “sexuality” is ... log in or subscribe to read full text