Abstract
This chapter explores the main contributions of the figurational sociological tradition to the study of sport and gender. It charts the development of figurational work on sport and gender since the publication of the pioneering text Quest for Excitement. Elias’ own elaborations on relations between the sexes are also reviewed. Building on this groundwork, the chapter offers an overview of some of the exchanges between feminists and “figurati”. Central in this connection are varied interpretations of the concept of involvement/detachment, critiques of the notion of scientific objectivity and varying approaches to the role of values in research. The chapter concludes with an Eliasian focus on more egalitarian forms of sex relations and the implications of this for future work on sport and gender.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Dunning and Hughes’s (2013) overview of Elias’s ‘Central Theory’.
- 2.
Tomlinson (2006), for example, includes two excerpts from Elias and Dunning’s Quest for Excitement (1986) in The Sports Studies Reader and Coakley and Pike (2009) make reference to figurational research on sport on theoretical and empirical grounds. Equally, the Handbook of Sports Studies (Coakley & Dunning, 2000) and Sport and Modern Social Theorists (Giulianotti, 2004) incorporate separate theoretical chapters on the figurational sociology of sport tradition.
- 3.
This is despite violence and aggression often being regarded incorrectly as (solely) synonymous with the figurational approach.
- 4.
A full manuscript was written in the 1940s but accidentally destroyed. Some of this was later reconstituted from memory and published posthumously in Volume 16 of the Collected Works of Elias.
- 5.
For most of his lifetime male homosexuality was illegal and Elias could have been imprisoned.
- 6.
Ketler, Loader, and Meja (2008) described a tradition in the pre-war Frankfurt circle around Karl Mannheim, of which Elias was a member, where women were equally ‘part of the scene’. Their text also includes chapters on Käthe Trohel, Natalie Halperin, Margarete Freudenthal and Nina Rubinstein, as well as some minor males such as Norbert Elias.
- 7.
See also for instance the section on ‘Social repression and psychological repression’, in the essay ‘Freud’s concept of society and beyond it’ (Elias, 2014, pp. 28–34).
- 8.
The 2008 edition also included a postscript by Dunning on gender (see chapter 11).
- 9.
Instead of using the terms sex and gender in dichotomous terms, as if biological and social explanations of such differences could be analysed separately, it would be in line with the Eliasian approach to talk of sex/gender . By doing that, the balance between nature and nurture, between biology and culture is stressed. This is because Elias’ intention was ‘to steer between the two extreme ideological positions which commonly permeate research on the animalic dimension of human beings. On the one hand lies the reductionist view of the ethologists and sociobiologists … which effectively says that we are basically apes. On the other hand is the philosophical-religious view that human beings constitute a complete break with the animal world, forming a level of soul or spirit’ (Kilminster, 1991, p. xiv).
- 10.
Feminist reflexivity may be expressed in two ways (Maynard, 1994). ‘It can mean reflecting upon, critically examining and exploring analytically the nature of the research process in an attempt to demonstrate the assumptions about gender (and increasing, race , disability and other oppressive) relations which are built into a specific project. It may also refer to understanding “the intellectual autobiography” of researchers’ (op.cit., p. 16).
- 11.
For example, “If one looks for explanations, therefore, it is better to cast aside wishes and values … and to content oneself with a simple discovery of what happened and why” (Elias, 2008, p. 257).
- 12.
See, for example, Mennell’s comments on the phases of more involvement and more detachment in his own work: (http://www.ucdpress.ie/PDFs/Stephen%20Mennell%20Elias%20Interview%2026-05-15.pdf), Velija’s (2011) application of established-outsiders to women’s involvement in cricket in England and Velija and Flynn’s (2010) analysis of female jockeys who remain outsiders within the racing figuration.
- 13.
The term andrarchy (andrarchally tilted) is preferred here to patriarchy . It means rule by men or male rule whereas patriarchy literally means a father’s rule or rule of the father (Dunning & Maguire, 1996). Gynarchy refers to rule by women (Langer, 2001) and differs from matriarchy or rule by mothers.
- 14.
See goo.gl/B0QRj3 for a summary of research on gender inequalities in sport and physical activity on the island of Ireland presented at the Knowledge Exchange Seminar Series 4, Stormont (Belfast), June 2015.
- 15.
Goudsblom (1977) coined the useful term hodiecentrism to describe the present- or today-centred thinking of so much of modern research in the social sciences.
- 16.
In it he raises the challenges of grappling with the ‘rational and emotional dimensions’ of his involvement with his wife and what he describes as ‘the painful realization that a substantial amount of exploitation and taking for granted of females has always undergirded male participation in sport’ (p. 258). So too is the short reflection about his socialization into the idea that men should not strike women.
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Liston, K. (2018). Norbert Elias, Figurational Sociology and Feminisms. In: Mansfield, L., Caudwell, J., Wheaton, B., Watson, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Feminism and Sport, Leisure and Physical Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53318-0_23
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