The increasing popularity of sport for females has prompted much
interest in the last several decades, and the female athlete has been the
subject of many investigations by physiologists, historians, sociologists,
and psychologists. However, we know very little about what women have
written
about their own experiences and their views of the nature and significance
of sport. Sport literature, which had been written by women, offers new
insights into the female experience in sport and perhaps best reveals how
women actually perceive their own sporting experiences. And even though
there is a wealth of short stories, prose memoirs, novels, journalistic
accounts, and poetry which have been written by women from many countries,
the female voice in sporting literature has been ignored, marginalized,
and silenced by the dominant male voice. These creative works by women
have, for the most part, been excluded from anthologies of sport
literature
and anthologies of women’s writings. This paper will present an overview
of sporting literature which has been written by women from a variety of
cultures and will focus on the principal themes in this literature which
reveal womens’ impressions of their own experiences in sport. These themes
include: the quest for autonomous self-definition (for identity and
freedom),
the impact of exclusion from sport and the female reaction to this
exclusion,
the conflicts for female athletes, the centrality of the body in sport
and an intimate regard for the body, female passion and bodily desire,
the crucial connections which women seek with others and with the
activities
in which they engage, and female perspectives of the nature and
significance
of sport. When viewed from an historical perspective, this literature
reveals
the gradual evolution of women’s roles in sport from spectators to
recreational
athletes, and more recently as transnational heroes, "idols without
borders."
This literature reveals as well a parallel evolution in literature as
women’s
roles have changed from that of muse to chronicler and more recently to
that of author.
