Suchergebnisse

In August 2009, Caster Semenya won the women's 800 m event at the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships in Berlin. This victory became a global news story not because Semenya was a newcomer to athletics who had outperformed an established field but because of the fact that before the race she had been asked to undergo tests to determine whether or not she was a woman. This article uses a hermeneutics of suspicion to argue that the controversy surrounding Semenya was based on a set of assumptions that, although incorrect, drew on hegemonic understandings of sex and gender that dominate the discourse of sport, and were adopted by the media without question. As a consequence, Semenya became the victim of what Miranda Fricker has termed epistemic injustice a condition that arises when individuals or experiences are marginalized as a result of the absence of concepts and language that would enable us to articulate reality differently.

According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer exists when the constituent elements of anyone's gender or sexuality are not made (or cannot be made) to signify monolithically. By this definition Spike is the queerest character in the 'Buffyverse': both his gender and sexuality are fluid - neither is secure and both are based around excess. His gender switches from male to female and his sexuality from 'vanilla' to more varied and non-traditional forms of eroticism. The article argues that the character of Spike opens up opportunities for the resignification of what it means to be male or female, man or monster, dominant or submissive, 'vanilla' or an exponent of erotic variation - opportunities we need to seize if we are to challenge the all-pervasive binaries which govern our understanding of sex, gender and sexuality, and the interrelationship between these terms.