"Jumping like a Girl:" Women's Ski-Jumping, Risk Discourses and Discursive Silence

Introduction In a January 2008 agreement brokered by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Canadian government pledged to pressure the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reconsider a November 2006 decision denying women the right to compete in ski-jumping at the 2010 Olympic Games. (2) Shortly after this announcement, representatives of the IOC affirmed their decision to exclude women, suggesting that the decision was not gender. (3) Rather, they argued that women's ski-jumping failed to meet the criteria for Olympic inclusion. (4) Even more recently, several ski-jumpers filed a lawsuit in the British Columbia Supreme Court against the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. (5) This paper considers the case of women's ski-jumping, contextualizing these events the history of gender politics that has characterized the modern Games. (6) Sport scholars have criticized the IOC for its exclusionary practices, suggesting that despite rhetoric of inclusion and emancipation, it continues to entrench notions of gender difference and plays an important role in constructing men's sport as the real version against which women's sports should be measured. (7) In the history of the modern Olympic movement, female athletes and their advocates have long had to struggle for inclusion in the even going so far as to institute the Women's Olympic Games, first held in Paris in 1922. (8) In response to these challenges, the IOC has (sometimes grudgingly) instituted changes that resulted in more equitable (less inequitable?) gender representation in the Games. These changes have not come about easily, and, just as importantly, have often had the effect of locating women, and their participation, under the control of male-dominated governing bodies. (9) In this paper, I problematize the Olympic discourse upon which the IOC has drawn in constructing the recent ski-jumping decision. I suggest that this discourse focuses on the 'technical merits' of the sport and 'objective' criteria for Olympic inclusion. I then interrogate the silences in this discourse, including the history of women's participation in the sport, recent achievements of women in ski-jumping, and the exceptions that the IOC has made to inclusion criteria on numerous occasions. Most importantly, I highlight the silence around the risk discourses that have played a central role in excluding women from participation in particular events. Olympic Discourse Michel Foucault's notion of discourse serves as a jumping off point for this discussion. Building on (and departing from) earlier approaches to representation that focuses the meaning conveyed by visual representations, Foucault approaches representation in a way that permits a more nuanced theorization of the operation of power. (10) Moving beyond a consideration of language, Foucault uses the notion of discourse to capture the production of meaningful statements about a given topic in a particular historical moment. (11) As Hall points out, Foucault uses this concept in an attempt to overcome the traditional distinction between what one says (language) and what one does (practice). Discourse, Foucault argues, constructs the topic. It defines and produces the objects of our knowledge. It governs the way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about. It also influences how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others. (12) What makes the notion of discourse compelling for theorizing power is that it never rests in one moment, text, practice, or even set of practices. (13) Instead, a given discourse appears with regularity across a range of texts (broadly defined) and practices to regulate what may be said within the true (14) about a given subject in a particular socio-historical moment. (15) It is critical to remember that for Foucault, the focus was always on the implications of these processes for power: . …

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