BODY (A)NORMALITIES AND SPORTS

Abstract

Modern sport has already an established path that allows us to understand its modus operandi, particularly regarding the visibility of normality, the purposeful synchrony between bodies, genders and sexualities, and the establishment of sports performance with strict and correct techniques. The aim of this paper is to bring some cases of athletes who appeared in the history of sport during the twentieth century, in order to identify three troubles brought by such bodies: a) not visible gender dissonance tends to erase the athlete’s existence from official records; b) in the most popular and valued sports by Western culture is where invisibility is more identified in comparison with unknown sports; and c) the level of sports performance contributes to keep the exceptional cases hidden, i.e, the better the performance, the more a body tends to be normalized. From the analysis of variables like gender, visibility and level of performance we conclude that the system itself is in charge of establishing body (a)normalities and maintaining sport invisibilities to keep its status quo.