Anti-doping sciences, abjection and women’s sport as a protected category
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article we explore the relationships amongst anti-doping sciences, ‘abjection,’ and the protection of ‘women's’ sport. We introduce three novel concepts: ‘abjection bias,’ ‘abjection potential,’ and ‘intersectional abjection,’ as tools with the potential to provide greater nuance to understanding the context for these contentious issues in contemporary sport. The debate concerning participation in women's sport—especially elite sport—of people who do not fit within traditional definition of ‘women’ is increasingly fraught with acrimony with anti-doping sciences often recruited as arbitrator. With access to opportunities such as participation at the Olympic Games at stake, emotions run high in arguments that typically centre on inclusion of transgender and gender diverse (TGD) athletes on the one hand and protection of the women's category on the other. While sport theorists have begun the important work of identifying the roots of these problems deep within the structure of modern sport and society itself, they have hitherto paid little attention to the philosophical underpinnings of that structure. Through the lens of feminist critical analysis, we seek, in this paper, to understand the complex role of ‘abjection’ in framing the current debate in sport and in related anti-doping sciences. From a clear definition of abjection as a perceived existential threat due to violation of the status quo, we introduce the new concepts of ‘abjection bias,’ ‘abjection potential,’ and ‘intersectional abjection’ in order to understand and explain what in common parlance we might call ‘gut reaction.’ By looking at the few notable previous treatments of sport abjection and highlighting the historical connections between anti-doping sciences and efforts to protect the women's category, we demonstrate that this co-development is, in part, more easily understood in the context of ‘abjection.’ We conclude that the clarity gained can also help to shed light on current policy decision-making in relation to the question of protecting the women's sport category.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".