… to Fitness and Leisure

Abstract

This chapter continues the task of contextualising and theorising pole classes, which was begun in Chapter 2. Commonly feminist scholars have focused their attention on women who play team and/or maledominated sports such as American football (Kotarba and Held, 2006), soccer (Scraton, Caudwell and Holland, 2005), windsurfing (Wheaton, 2004) and Australian rules football (Wedgwood, 2004). Women who play such sports embed their embodiment within the very masculine cultures and often face accusations about their sexuality or a loss of ‘femininity’. In contrast, pole is predominantly taught and attended by women, and so poses different questions. Pole lacks credibility because it is not about women trying to succeed in a masculinised sport. Waskul and Vannini (2006, p. 9) argue that skill display in women’s American football ‘constitutes an alternative to these hegemonic discourses, thus providing women with an oppositional symbolic zone for the redefinition of their bodies’. Instead of issues around lack of access or acceptance, the focus moves to individualised, biographical, cultural, physical accounts and the potential for agency within the limitations of being seen as ‘only’ a feminised form of exercise — but, just the same, ‘in competitive sports, women’s bodies are sexualized but men are portrayed as powerful’ (Kotarba and Held, 2006, p. 153); we will return to this issue in Chapter 10.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard ‘God, this is so much harder than I expected’.

(Sam)