“It is about discomfort and helplessness” – The hegemonic sports culture informed by the male gaze affecting karateka women’s embodied subjectivities

Abstract

Karateka women may be characterized as masculine when viewed from the traditional martial culture and stereotyped and sexualized within the sports culture. These characterizations are gender binary organized. Women are in an arena assumed to be hegemonically masculine, with the male gaze guiding their performance as athletes and dictating expectations for their performativity as women. We carried out a study with the Spanish women's karate squad in preparation for the Tokyo Olympic Games, aiming to analyze how the hegemonic sports culture affects karateka women's embodied subjectivities through the diktats of the male gaze. The data generated with athletes and coaches, mainly through interviews carried out twice with each of them, informed processes of objectification and consumption of women in sport. Their athletic performance is devalued while, contradictorily, there is an apparent valuation of them through the sensualisation and sexualisation of their bodies. It is not valuation, though, since it keeps just favoring a desirous male gaze that, due to hegemony, addresses women as others. At times, athletes get lost in criticisms of one another, as data reported, but they are brave in being there, facing oppression daily, and becoming stronger. They often develop reflexivity and criticality of their situation, but it is not an easy task to be carried out alone. So, a community of practice among women is welcome as much as having the support of conscious men, those with greater understanding capacity, as they are internal to male culture.