Sport Feminism: Challenges to Emancipation

DOI: 10.33876/2311-0546/2023-4/118-135

Abstract

The article explores women sport in the context of gender relationship evolution, female self-affirmation in the process of historical development of society. As vanguard of female emancipation sport feminism displays overcoming of androcentric foundations, perfection of gender relations, puts up the women as equal partners with men. I focus on transformation of gender stereotypes, image and status of women in sport through the prism of metamorphoses and paradoxes of the social history of different regional, social, cultural groups and female sport movement on the whole. Global changes associated with the transition to the information age are accompanied by growing economic crises, mass migrations, cultural conflicts, pandemics and wars. New realities confront the pre-modern social orders, stimulate the improvement of human relations and the overcoming of numerous contradictions, among which gender relations stand out. Gender equality remains one of the key issues of social modernization. Sports feminism, the vanguard of women's emancipation, which emerged in the context of the social and political movement of women in response to male domination, actualizes the position of women in society, expresses their self-affirmation through sports as the most organized form of struggle for equal rights with men. Sports arenas serve as a platform for demonstrating social problems related to gender inequality in wages, sexualization of the female body, etc.