M6 Power, Control, and Systems of Gender and Sexuality in SPort

Brian Pronger

Brian Pronger examined sexuality, homophobia, masculinity, and desire in sport

• He was a professor and scholar at the faculty of KPE, a founding member of the Mark S. Bonham Center for Sexual Diversity Studies, and the instructor’s PhD supervisor

Brian Pronger’s Work

HIs work includes “The Arena of Masculinity, Body Fascism: Salvation in the Technology of Physical Fitness”, and the article '“Outta My End Zone: Sport and the Territorial Anus”

Pronger’s Argument

Pronger argued that sport is shaped by patriarchal structures, including women’s sport, and that competitive sport can constrain people’s capacity to live full lives

• His work focuses particularly on sexuality and gender; a possible limitation is that it does not fully address intersectionality

Key Question

Pronger asks

• “What limits are operative? How can they be justified, and where and how might it be wise to dismantle them?”

Question Significance

This invites questions about how society limits people’s bodies, desires, hopes, and possibilities—and which contexts are safe or appropriate for challenging those limits

• Resistance can carry risks, including violence, social consequences, or discomfort

• For example:

  • Fictional works such as Heated Rivalry can represent queer relationships in sport without identifying real athletes, potentially challenging assumptions while limiting direct exposure to harm

  • Such representations can question the belief that homosexuality or queer desire is incompatible with hypermasculine sports

Phallocentrism

Refers to a system of power centered on male anatomy and symbolism

Phallocentrism and the Competitive-Sport Economy

Pronger describes competitive sport as a phallocentric libidinal economy (a structure organized around masculine desire for dominance and the conquest of an opponent)

• In this framework, winning involves taking or controlling the opponent’s space while protecting one’s own

• The language and rituals of high-performance often reinforce this structure:

  • Athletes are urged to dominate and avoid vulnerability

  • Defeat may be treated as humiliation or submission

  • Coaches may use sexist or homophobic language to motivate athletes

  • Emotional openness, including crying after defeat, may be stigmatized

• Phallocentric libidinal economy seeks to conquer the Other while protecting and enclosing the self’s space, thereby increasing the sovereignty of the self and marking the Other as different

• Pronger’s analysis concerns the organization of competitive sport, not necessarily the motivations or character of every individual athlete

Pronger’s Warning

Pronger warns that even seemingly harmless or well-intentioned systems can limit people’s ability to live fully:

• Seemingly innocuous, indeed, well-intentioned systems do violence both symbolically and ‘materially,’ to our potential for living full lives (Pronger, 2002, p. 12)

Homophobia and Homoeroticism

Competitive sports permits physical closeness, touching, and celebrating between male athletes, but homophobia helps prevent those interactions from being interpreted as sexual

• This maintains the sport’s conventional heterosexual and patriarchal credentials while allowing forms of male intimacy within sporting contexts

• Pronger argues that competitive sport channels bodily connection into competition and dominance rather than allowing it to develop freely

Desire

A powerful force

• (desire doesn’t necessarily mean sexual desire)

Pouvoir and Puissance

Pronger drwas on Deluze and Guattari’s ideas about desire and power

• Pouvoir

• Puissance

Pouvoir

Power organized to govern, territorialize, and restrict life’s possibilities

Puissance

The body’s capacity to connect with other bodies and generate possibilities; associated with positive, creative, and potentially socially just relations

Domination, Protection, and Masculinity

Phallocentric desire seeks both to dominate and resist vulnerability or penetration

• Masculine desire aims to distinguish itself as separate, conquering, and inviolable

• Pronger argues that masculinity’s pouvoir channels and constrains puissance:

  • “The pouvoir of masculinity territorializes puissance by simultaneously channeling it and damming it up.” (Pronger, 2002, p. 381)

Metaphors

Using the metaphors of the penis and the anus, Pronger links:

• Penetrating capability with winning

• Vulnerability to penetration with humiliation and defeat

Giving oneself or one’s team to the Other is treated as denigrating

Competitive Sport and Pouvoir

Competitive sport has the qualities of pouvoir

• It channels bodily puissance toward competition and spatial domination, foregrounding masculinity and phallocentrism

Competitive Sport as a Brutal Economy

Pronger describes competitive sport as a “brutal economy”: it subtracts from the Other to add to the self

• Argues that competitive sport violates the Other’s vulnerability to stimulate the strength of the self, rather than protecting or remaining open to the Other

• Concludes that competitive sport organizes desire in a profoundly unethical way as a “festival of cruelty”

Alterity

A branch of ethics and continental philosophy that centers on the concept of the "Other" (L'autrui)—that which is fundamentally different from oneself

• Rather than trying to understand, categorize, or absorb other people into our own existing frameworks, alterity philosophy argues that true ethics begins when we acknowledge that other people are inherently beyond our full comprehension or control.

Philosophy of the Limit

Drucilla Cornell’s Philosophy of the Limit (1992) involves:

• Identifying what systems exclude and how those exclusions obstruct social justice

• Considering what forms of resistance are possible beyond those limits

• Remaining open to and committed to appreciating difference

Alerity and the Philosophy of the Limit

Cornell describes the project as an effort to create ethical, nonviolent relations with the Other and to accept responsibility for guarding the Other (cited in Pronger, p. 378)

Reimagining Sport

The module asks how sport could be reimagined around puissance and alterity, rather than domination and the violation of vulnerability

• Discussion prompt: What might such a sport look like?