Sport, Migration, and Gender in the Neoliberal Age by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138390652
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Duelling sports developmental models and masculinities

As a new generation of athletes takes up sport in China, they are faced with a complex tension between two worlds of sports development and two models of masculinity. Success in tennis can turn an athlete into an international marketing mogul; but athletes must decide what route to success they should take, and this choice is in large part dependent on their class background, as elite athletes depend on their families’ resources. They must choose between the private programmes that have emerged since economic liberalization and the traditional provincial programmes supported by the state. The two-track system forces them to question how to reconcile the potential risks of “flying solo” in the new system of tennis development with navigating the state-run system. Further complicating the situation, players must navigate between competing images of masculinity, the traditionally valued image of intellectual masculinity and the image of physical masculinity, traditionally devalued but increasingly seen as a path to upward mobility.

Chinese athletes examine how they engage with an evolving transnational sports industry. They now see themselves as atomized economic subjects whose every action is an “investment” in the future (Figure 7.4). Economic reforms have created wide-scale institutional changes in the tennis industry, which have lasting implications and open up new avenues of upward mobility, in a society where mobility is the object of obsessive attention. The neoliberal political and economic reforms have created new social formations, and individuals have re-examined long-standing cultural assumptions about masculinity.

Figure 7.4Aspiring players participating in an event called the Road to Wimbledon, held at the Tennis Academy of China in Nanjing.

The players have a chance to test their tennis skills on the grass and can dream of playing on the world’s biggest stage.

(Source: Jiang Hong Wei, Tennis Academy of China at the Nanjing Sport Institute)

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