Construction of Gender in Sports. Gender Tests in Elite Athletics

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Gender Studies, grade: 1,0, University of Münster (Sportwissenschaft), course: Körper ¿ historisch, soziologisch, kulturwissenschaftlich betrachtet, language: English, abstract: In the context of this thesis the topic of the gender construction is taken up. Subject areas of the social and natural sciences try to find the causes of the gender-specific differences with the aid of various theories.

At first, an analysis of the relationship between society, gender and sport should make it clear how the social subsystem Sport was influenced and structured by everyday theory. Using the example of the controversial phenomenon of sex tests in sport, it should be shown that the gender of a person cannot be measured using biological-medical criteria only. This thesis is contrary to the widespread opinion in medicine and biology that sex can be clearly determined based on five criteria. Therefore, a fundamental understanding of the procedure and basics of gender testing should be created by summarizing these criteria. In a second step, it is shown that it is possible by a social-scientific point of view to question hypotheses of a purely biological, pre-social nature of man. A basic insight is that the society in which we live is a result of our own actions. The everyday distinction between man and woman is an expression of attribution that does not refer to the individual but to the cultural system.

It raises the question of the social aspect in the gender categorization. This questions the collective assumptions of the binary system of attribution as it considers the process of forming different genders in the social world.