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Homosexuality Of Subject In Sport

Decent Essays

According to Stephen Whitehead, the masculine subject is meant to capture the idea that everyone perceives and reacts to cultural discourses. There are two sides that Whitehead emphasizes when looking at masculine subjectivity, this includes: “1) Subjectivity of the individual and 2) Subject acted upon by cultural discourses” (Whitehead, 2002). Subjectivity is a practice, or an activity that involves masculine ontology. Masculine ontology is “the pursuit of being and becoming masculine by the masculine subject”(Whitehead, 2002). The ontological desire is the desire to have a self, and does not necessarily have to do with sexual desire. It is “the pursuit of being and becoming masculine by the masculine subject”(Whitehead, 2002). In pursuing …show more content…

In this specific case, focusing on the rejection of the other, we can turn to competitive sports and its connection to masculine heterosexual desire and the prominence on sexuality. Sport is a productive logic; it conditions the body to act a certain way. Sports gives us the idea that the way to go about living our lives is through this penetration, aggression and protecting the home front. The kind of ‘selves’ that are produced establish its wholeness by dominating space and excluding everything that gets rejected as the other. Pronger illustrates how sport colonizes desire and produces it in a narrower way, and gives us suggestions moving forward. He emphasizes that competitive sport is a discursive framework that produces particular kinds of bodies, selves and subjects. Pronger argues that such masculine learning begins when boys are initiated into male sport in which the phallic desire to penetrate and the anal desire to resist penetration are existent. “Boys raised on competitive sport learn to desire, learn to make connections according to the imperative to take space away from others and jealousy guard it for themselves”(Pronger, 382). This is specifically linked to the competitive sport of football. Pronger argues that

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