Thursdays, 1:00-3:00PM

June 9, 2022 - July 7, 2022

Application Deadline: Rolling deadline until seats are filled.

Pending COVID restrictions, this microseminar will be offered in person on the MIT campus.

This microseminar explores the intersections of sport and sexual misconduct in modern America. Sport has historically been a patriarchal proving ground for masculinity that relied on violence to demonstrate men’s primacy in U.S. society. Men athletes’ bodies have represented a heteronormative patriotism forged in combat—picture Theodore Roosevelt leading a cavalry unit he financed in the Spanish American War, for example—and virile dominance in strategic situations or sexual encounters. In this context, women, nonbinary, and trans athletes have borne consistent harm when breaking down traditional notions of sport participation and pushing masculinist sporting norms to be more inclusive, claiming the myriad benefits of competitive sport and fitness. Sexual harassment, assault, rape, child abuse, and intimate partner violence are long-held behaviors that sport powerbrokers wield to control their victims’ wellbeing. In sport, victims of sexual misconduct have endured these and other dehumanizing tactics, living with the traumas incurred for decades afterward despite their efforts to challenge these masculine power structures at individual and institutional levels. This course will draw on theories of power and liberation to examine the impact of trans, nonbinary, and women athletes, as well as folks outside sport, who have swept the #MeToo movement into sport. Students will use a diverse collection of materials—for example, activists’ literature, federal policy, memoir, academic literatures, and podcasts—to analyze victims’ demands for accountability and practices for moving forward to survive their gendered mistreatment. We will also consider the intimately connected elements of ethnicity, race, disability, nationality, class, and other pivotal markers in victims’ demands for safety.

Faculty

Dr. Anne M. Blaschke is a historian of twentieth-century U.S. political culture in the American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published academic articles on U.S. political economy, gender, diplomacy, immigration, and civil rights. Blaschke also writes publicly for the Washington Post. She is revising her first book, Foxes, Not Oxes: Women’s Athletics in American Political Culture, for publication. Title IX—the 1972 law mandating sex equality in American education—is the subject of her second book project.