Man rennt ja nicht mit dem Penis

Eine Analyse medizinisch vergeschlechtlichter Frauenkörper im Sport

Abstract

English Abstract: Even if women historically have increasingly entered into the maledominated sphere of, the strict gender segregation remains unquestioned. Gender appears to be 'natural' due to the lower performance of the female body. The question to which category an athlete belongs to is not always easy to answer though and criteria to determine the sex of an athlete must be found. The so-called 'sex tests' often concern persons with intersex conditions or "differences of sexual development (DSD) syndromes". In this article I will examine, from different theoretical perspectives, how women's bodies are negotiated in sports. I outline how a woman's body in sports generally questions femininity and heteronormativity and how gender segregation reproduces certain norms. It is the field of medicine, as will be shown, which transforms the sports body (which simply has a gender) into a 'sex body ' (which is a gender itself).