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Andrew Esiebo’s “Grannys”

January 30, 2014 by

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Nigerian artist Andrew Esiebo’s diptych series, Alter Gogo (2010) juxtaposes portraits of women standing on their home ground in their team uniform with portraits of the same women surrounded by their grandchildren.  The Los Angeles County Musem of Art just opened a show celebrating contemporary art about “the beautiful game” – but women’s football is intensely marginalized in the exhibition. I’ve been cruising the interwebs looking for work centered on women’s relationship to this sport, and was reminded of Esiebo’s work as I was looking up work from “Beyond Football – shifting interests and identity,” an exhibition that was on view in Berlin (at Savvy Contemporary) during the 2011 Women’s World Cup; the exhibition was also staged in Lagos through the Goethe Institute there.

From the artist’s website:

“Alter Gogo” is a diptych portrait series featuring a group of grandmothers who are members of the Gogo Getters Football Club in Orange Farm, South Africa. For them, playing football is more than a recreational activity; it’s also had a profound social and physical impact on their lives. In a community plagued with social and physiological problems like high unemployment, crime, alcoholism, diabetes and high-blood pressure, football serves as a salve. And all too often in collective imaginary, African women are located in the sphere of tradition and oppression, especially when they reach old age. With the grandmothers’ regalia and their proud postures both on the pitch and at home, “Alter Gogo” creates a powerful socio-cultural scenario in which soccer is the means and expression of a new gender and generation identity.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Mamela Nyamza’s Interventionist Performances

January 30, 2014 by

Mamela Nyamza’s Shift thinks with, moves with the experiences of black women athletes in the public sphere, especially those athletes “accused” of having masculine appearance and comportment  – e.g. Caster Semenya, Eudy Simelane (the South African national team player raped and murdered in 2008), the Williams Sisters.

For more on Shift, see this review by Robyn Sassen.

In 2012, Nyamza (who is based in South Africa) and the multi-disciplinary writer/actor/performer Mojisola Adebayo (based in Lonson) collaborated on “I Stand Corrected” – check out this interview about the show.

Filed Under: Art, Queer Sport Spectacles

Olympic Blatter: boycott on the brain

January 18, 2014 by

Sepp Blatter is going to Sochi. So the FIFA president declares in a recent issue of FIFA Weekly. The magazine includes a two-page selective history of boycott movements. In his “presidential notes” accompanying this weird article, Blatter characterizes the boycotter as “running away” from the problem rather than confronting it. He makes a vague gesture towards FIFA’s even more vague stand against the unpleasantness of “discrimination.”

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He can’t bring himself to write words like “homophobia,” or “gay.” It’s OK to acknowledge that racism is bad. But sexism and homophobia? Not fit for print. He says that he is an advocate for social inclusion and participation, but that commitment does not extend to the words one uses in such a “conversation” about said advocacy.

There is no reference in this FIFA Weekly article to Russia’s psychotic anti-gay laws, not one use of a word associated with homosexuality (e.g. “gay,” “anti-gay”) in the FIFA Weekly story on boycotts and the Olympics. Not one. Furthermore, in this piece of half-hearted propaganda, FIFA editors almost exclusively reference the US/Soviet Olympic boycotts as evidence of how boycotts don’t work. There is not one mention of the most famous boycott movement of the twentieth century, one which had a big impact on both the Olympics and the World Cup – and, indeed, the make-up of FIFA: the boycott and divestment movement against apartheid South Africa. Members of the Confederation of African Football and the Asian Football Federation boycotted the 1966 World Cup in response to FIFA’s aggressively colonialist policies limiting African and Asian participation in the tournament; CAF nations in particular also linked their boycott to FIFA’s apologist behavior toward South Africa and Rhodesia. (See, for example, Two Hundred Percent‘s overview of this period.)

That boycott moved African and Asian participation in the tournament forward, and it brought about the end of apartheid South Africa’s recognition by FIFA. This movement was led not by government leaders, but by the people – by students and activists all over the world. South Africa’s invitation to participate in the 1968 Olympics was one of the platforms for the Olympic Project for Human Rights (and that invitation was revoked, in response to political pressure). That movement led to one of the most enduring images in all of sports history (the raised fists and bowed heads of Tommie Smith, John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics). Black athletes in 1968 were fighting for human rights – boycotting events in South Africa, and divesting from South African institutions and companies was a major part of that.

How anyone could have a conversation about boycotts and not mention South Africa is beyond me. That Blatter would describe boycott movements as cowardly (as “running away from the problem”) is despicable. Read that “presidential note” if you want a refresher course on why, whenever Blatter appears in a tournament stadium, crowds unite in a chorus of jeers.

Filed Under: FIFA, Olympics, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

They Should At Least Be Topless

January 15, 2014 by

“If I’m going to pay $60 for a pay-per-view to watch women fight, they should at least be topless.”

UFC fighter Matt Brown made this remark on the inaugural episode of what was meant to be a regular podcast (Legit Man Shit, which is back on-line but is, I think, edited). That one sentence – as banal as it is – captures a lot. The sexualization of the woman athlete; the straightening out of women’s athleticism into an acceptable, non-threatening product; a resistance to the idea that women athletes be paid; the positioning of women’s athleticism in direct conflict with their sex appeal – it’s all there.

UFC issued a boilerplate apology on behalf of Brown – something about UFC’s conduct policy, the practice of inclusion and a non-discriminatory workplace. The hullabaloo has provoked a familiar conversation. The remarks are disavowed, there’s discussion of a fine etc, but, as Aurora Ford reminds us in her opinion piece for Fightland, this attitude is absolutely common – it has more stamina than it should. Brown is not an outlier.

Women athletes are routinely told to be feminine, pretty – to “sell” the game. The language that manages their appearance is only slightly more refined than Brown’s comment. It is packaged as some sort of service to the marketing and development of the women’s game. If women athletes are told to grow their hair long, to wear dresses to awards ceremonies, if they are given makeovers as publicity stunts or asked to pose nude to advertise an international tournament, it’s because sports officials and corporate executives still believe that people want to see in women a sexual spectacle – and that any other narrative frame for the female body is a turn-off.

It’s important to signal that the sexual spectacle invoked in remarks like Brown’s tends to be very specific: it conjures the “hot girl” imagined by a very vanilla straight guy. A “pretty” girl with long hair, curves. Feminine, straight. White. Fit, athletic – but not muscular. More graceful than strong. People like Sepp Blatter think like this. Ronda Rousey was marketed this way – think of that ESPN Body Issue which pictured her as a sex-kitten in pastels. Which is a riot when one thinks about what Rousey’s personality is actually like. (I’m trying to picture Johny Hendricks in his gloves, naked and with this come-hither sex face.)

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The uptightness of attitudes about women athletes, about women’s athleticism should be read as not only sexist but as homophobic – it supports gender policing as women are “dolled up” to reassure the spectator that they are “really” women. And it is a displacement of the panic the homophobic spectator feels when asked to consider the amount of attention and energy he spends thinking about, talking about, and playing with other guys.

Ideologies of sex, sexuality and gender shape our ideas about what a sport spectacle is; they shape how we experience those spectacles. They in fact shape how we experience the sports we practice.

Embedded in Brown’s remark is the resistance to the professionalization of women’s sports (“If I’m going to pay…”). The sports world is one arena in which men do not have to compete directly against women and much of the rhetorical shit that gets thrown around on the boringness of women’s sports reinforces this segregation as somehow “right” and “natural.”

Brown’s remark may in fact express professional worry about having to compete against women – for audience, for prize money and sponsorship dollars. Most pro male athletes do not have to live in the same economy  as women athletes – UFC is the one popular professional sport where women participate in the main event. Where a fight between women might be named the fight of the night (e.g. UFC 168, Rousey v. Tate), where men can lose a huge financial bonus ($75,000 for each fighter) to women because the women put on a better show. This is one thing that keeps me glued to UFC: I’m curious to see how all this plays out – because there is no ignoring the fact that the fights between women have the capacity to upstage fights between men.

Matt Brown’s remark was dumb, but like a lot of sports fans I don’t like singling him out – or even censoring him. Because as long as the only issue of Sports Illustrated dominated by women is the issue in which they wear bathing suits and do nothing (for example), the true sports fan knows that the opinion expressed by Matt Brown is, in fact, an opinion endorsed at every turn by sports media and its attendant commercial monsters.

Filed Under: Media, MMA, Sexism, Uncategorized

scene of a crime (football stadium)

January 5, 2014 by

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This weekend The Independent published a story about black lesbians in South Africa who have been raped, gang raped, murdered by men who claim this violence as a means for making women “straight.” Sexual violence is often presented as some kind of “punishment.” In these cases, the “punishment” takes the form and intensity of a lynching. Football often appears in these news stories, as gender non-normative women are found on the pitch, coming home from training, or in the stands – and assaulted. (See, for example, this 2009 Guardian story.) The above image is a photograph of the football stadium in Gauteng where Mvulina Fana was “left for dead” by her attackers. It is part of the artist Claire Carter’s series documenting the community targeted in these assaults. (The artist Zanele Muholi has produced a large and very moving body of work on this subject; there is, South Africa, an community of artists responding to this terrible crisis.)

The opening of “Crisis in South Africa”:

Mvuleni Fana was walking down a quiet alleyway in Springs – 30 miles east of Johannesburg – on her way home from football practice one evening when four men surrounded her and dragged her back to the football stadium. She recognised her attackers. One by one, the men raped her, beating her unconscious and leaving her for dead.

The next morning, Mvuleni came round, bleeding, battered, in shock, and taunted by one overriding memory – the last thing they said to her before she passed out: “After everything we’re going to do to you, you’re going to be a real woman, and you’re never going to act like this again”. (Patrick Strudwick, “Crisis in South Africa“)

To learn more, see, for example, Inkanyiso.org, a blog established by Zanele Muholi as a platform for people affected by this violence.

Filed Under: Art, Football, Sexism Tagged With: , ,

raising a fist at the fix

January 4, 2014 by

“Since the time of Jesse Owens it has been presumed that any poor but rugged youngster who was able to jump racial fences into a college haven was happy all day long.” So wrote Harry Edwards in The Revolt of the Black Athlete (p. 75). The observation describes the ruling common sense, which is to say, a ruling ideology – in which an education is a blue ribbon or trophy (something you win, rather than earn); a college campus is “a haven” and the black male athlete is imagined as the eternal supplicant, “happy all day long” because he has been saved (from what? himself? his world? his color?). Any poor but rugged youngster – any “Jesse Owens” – must be running with joy, he must run as a means of joyful escape – running isn’t his job; it isn’t his work. If he’s happy all day long, it is because this discipline is his pleasure.  This is perhaps, more true today than it was in 1969, the year Edwards published his account of the radicalization of the black athlete, of the movement that led to one of the most enduring images in sports history – Tommie Smith and John Carlos, on the Olympic medal stand, heads bowed and fists raised.

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Tommie Smith (the gold medalist) has a dim view of college athletics (even as he has a real love for his sport). Smith is one of the greatest sprinters to have ever taken to the track – he was, of course, a stand-out at San José State, then known as “speed city” for its sprinting program. Smith’s memoir, Silent Gesture, is remarkable for many reasons – he is an incredible person – but many would likely find his lack of nostalgia for his college years bracing. Smith describes his relationship to his alma mater as a big fat blank. Recalling a trip to San José State to participate in events honoring Smith and Carlos’s shared legacy, he writes,

I didn’t feel anything from the faculty and the administration when I was a student, I didn’t feel anything after I graduated and I didn’t feel anything that night [when he and John Carlos were honored] or since.

Smith is clear in his memoir: college sports is a fraud. Black athletes playing big-time sports then and now are ruthlessly exploited; they are treated as frauds (as undeserving), they are abandoned to a world of lowered expectations, used until they are used up. Smith doesn’t think that much has changed since the late 1960s, neither does Edwards.

The myth of the grateful black athlete puts a gloss on the collusion between universities, the NCAA, media and sports corporations – systems that bank on the spectator’s investment in the idea that this athlete is, indeed, “happy all day long” because the world is doing him one favor after another. That spectator’s pleasure is easily purchased, but the cost for the athlete is high. 

Fraud charges were filed last month against a former professor at UNC Chapel Hill, the latest plot twist in an old fashioned college sports scandal that’s been at a gentle boil for over three years. (See The Daily Tar Heel’s “Tracking a Sports Scandal”) It’s a particularly depressing story. 

Professor Julius Nyang’oro (who retired in 2012) chaired the African and Afro-American Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for 20 years.  Today, he stands accused of defrauding UNC by accepting pay for a 2011 course that he basically didn’t teach. That summer course, according to the Raleigh News and Observer

is one of more than 200 such lecture-style classes dating back to the mid-1990s that show little or no evidence of any instruction. These classes included roughly 500 grade changes that are either confirmed to be or suspected of being unauthorized. (See Dan Kane, “Former UNC Official Nyang’oro will fight felony charge”)

The  course in question had enrolled only current and former athletes, and athletes in the school’s football and basketball programs dominate the roster for the other classes. It seems pretty clear from media reports that this faculty member, with the support of administrative staff, helped athletes out by giving them course credit for courses that were barely taught. An NCAA investigation was conducted, and UNC responded with a report. Some tutors and  coaching staff were fired; an athletic director retired. A host of athletes were benched, declared ineligible, dropped and disciplined. And yet it seems the professor stands relatively alone in criminal court. It would be nice for UNC if it could wind this story up by claiming the campus was defrauded by a rogue faculty member – but it defies belief that the situation described in the press could have been conducted without – at the very least – an intense and deliberate blindness. It defies belief that the level of fraud implied here could flourish in the African and Afro-American Studies department without the collusion of the university administration – a New York Times journalist reports:
People in the department described it as balkanized — professors stuck to their own courses and research — and said that Mr. Nyang’oro was an inattentive administrator who was often out of the country, even when he was supposed to be teaching. They said that his continual reappointment as the department chairman, a job most professors hold for 10 years at most, reflected the university’s indifference to what was going on there. (Sarah Lyall, A’s for Athletes)
It’s a Philip Roth novel: by which I mean, it’s a white supremacist fantasy – the corrupt black studies professor as the instrument of a corrupt athletic department, affirming the “common sense” that the black athlete has no real place at all in the classroom – the student is a fraud and so is the black professor. It’s a terrible story – one that reminds us of Edwards’s strident calls for deep reform:
Like a piece of equipment, the black athlete is used. The old cliché ‘You give us your athletic ability, we give you a free education’ is a bare-faced lie, concocted by the white sports establishment to hoodwink athletes, white as well as black.
First of all, there is no such thing as a ‘free’ ride. A black athlete pays dearly with his blood, sweat, tears, and ultimately with some portion of his manhood, for the questionable right to represent his school on the athletic field. Second the white athletic establishments on the various college campuses frequently fail to live up to even the most rudimentary responsibilities implied in their half of the agreement. (Edwards, 16)
In the UNC report regarding the empty credits awarded to student athletes, we see that if anything has changed, it’s the complexity of the system. It’s a miserable story; here I’ve outlined just one or two aspects of its ugliness.
Filed Under: Media, Politics Tagged With: , ,