Negotiating Norms, Challenging Stigmas: Athletes’ Management of Gender, Sexuality, and Emotion on and off the Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sport participation can be psychologically and socially damaging to athletes. Although sport is a major cultural force often correlated with socially positive aspects and benefits such as elevated self-esteem, academic success, and financial rewards, sport can also be a socially constructed site where individuals often feel pressured to conform to dominant gender and, by extension, sexual norms. Athletes often find themselves negotiating norms and challenging stigmas where gender and sexuality are concerned as they endeavour to fashion identities that will be deemed acceptable to the culture in which they find themselves. This dissertation outlines a study conducted to explore the complex symbolic significance attributed to the construction and performance of various male and female identities in the world of sports. In particular, it will examine the relationship between the sportsworld, as a social construct, and the subsequent pressure of the dominant gender/sexual norms. Questionnaires were handed out to fourteen different Canadian university sports teams (N=261) as part of a research project with the overarching objective of identifying the ways in which athletes cope with social stigmas, manage gender and sexuality identities and emotions, and achieve social conformity. With this in mind, the athletes were asked a range of questions, most of which focused on the following themes: athletic characteristics, coping strategies, emotions, and sexual orientation. This dissertation will offer a synopsis of the data and findings. It will conclude by discussing key limitations that have been identified over the course of the research and by suggesting topics requiring further investigation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".