Throwing like a girl!: Constituting citizenship for women and girls through the American pastime.
详细信息
文摘
In the United States, a fairly simple cultural story is told about baseball: boys and men play while girls and women cheer them on. The belief that baseball is a male-only enclave is ubiquitous in U.S. public culture, even though girls and women have played the game and affected its history in important ways. This dissertation contends that baseball operates with a quasi-official narrative in which women are limited to three roles as helpmates, seductresses, and tomboys. Their part in the game's history is thus typically represented as small and innocuous, treating them as aberrations, and never as trailblazers. This reinforces a hegemonic telling of the story of baseball as a game for men. While this quasi-official history of baseball treats the sport as a male-only activity, the contention here is that there is a different and more robust story lurking just beneath the surface and it is time for that story to be made more public and pronounced. This dissertation, then, explores the role that girls and women have played in baseball's history through three case studies that challenge the conventional assumption of baseball as an exclusively masculinist sport and illustrates a more inclusive, albeit limited, understanding of women as participants in the so-called "national pastime." In tracing the alternative narratives told about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League during the 1940s and 1950s, the legal battles over Little League Baseball's "boys-only" rule in the 1970s, and the U.S. Olympic softball teams in the 1990s and 2000s, the "feminine tomboy" emerges as a key figure in challenging the cultural presumption that baseball is or should be a male-only enclave. These case studies reveal the feminine tomboy as a compromising cultural figure who enables female athletes to perform masculinity and gain cultural citizenship in the United States.