Gendering and the Scrutiny of Bodies

Для Лизы Егоровой

Let's Talk Gender

M. Gabriela Torres

We have normed the scrutiny of bodies. All too often we blame the media for teaching us how to judge our bodies through the constant circulation of unachievable physiques. Yet, learning to discipline our bodies into what they should be starts with the everyday. Take for instance, the practices of regular inspection and assessment that take place in our country’s schools.

The detailed ethnographic work of anthropologists has shown that well-meaning efforts to collect public health data or induce social change through BMI monitoring actually pose particular risks to health and welfare of individuals and may carry a number of objectionable social consequences.

Susan Greenhalgh, for instance, has called attention to the unintended consequences of BMI measurement, noting the rise of new types of disordered eating. Two recent volumes caution us on the social consequences of this type of bodily scrutiny. In Reconstructing Obesity and Fat Talk Nation, medical anthropologists call attention to the ways that the moral arguments of America’s War on Fat are couched as health-talk, but are ultimately used to define which bodies enjoy the full privileges of citizenship and which bodies endure the force of stigma.

The scrutiny of bodies and behavior, even when it is designed within the context of medical care, has been shown to be particularly problematic because it enables forms of institutional violence that restrict women’s agency and bodies. Claire Wendland’s work shows this by looking at how obstetric practices that purportedly seek improved health outcomes for women are organized around the erasure of the pregnant body from consideration.

Institutions are not alone in norming through scrutiny and its accompanying judgements. In practice, the scrutiny of bodies appears in tandem with common assessment and judgement mechanisms that are habitually employed for disciplining persons into gendered expectations.

The political acumen of female politicians is well known to be routinely measured by their performance of acceptable forms of femininity. Diane Nelson, working on the reaction to Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu’s turn to political office in Guatemala, shows that the performance of femininity is one of the first ways that female political figures are evaluated in public discourse.

Our culture – and not just the media – routinely engages in the norming of women. All too often, this is done through the use of surveillance tactics that are problematically close to the ways we examine and judge our children’s bodies. Just as in assessments of weight or dress, anthropologists show that morality assessed by self-acclaimed authorities looms large in defining whose bodies are ultimately found to be healthy, socially acceptable, professional, and even presidential.

Для Дмитрия:

Soccer, Kinship and Migration Dreams in

Cameroon

From the first morning sunlight, a rough gravel soccer field in Buea, a small town in the Southwest region of Cameroon, is crowded with young men hard at soccer training. Some are there only for leisure, but most are attending the training sessions of one of dozens of soccer academies in the region. The players dream of professional careers that will take them far away from Cameroon, ideally to elite European soccer clubs, or more realistically, to any soccer club abroad that will provide a stable income to send back home to their families. They are bent on moving overseas, often declining offers from top division clubs in Cameroon and instead fixating on whatever opportunity to migrate comes their way. These aspiring athletes make extraordinary sacrifices to pursue a career in international soccer, a career fraught with the uncertainty of tough competition for positions in clubs, short-term contracts, and a high risk of injury. They become dependent on soccer agents and managers, who are motivated by the possibility of making a profit from the players. In the process, it is the young players’ parents and elder relatives who play a key role in the making and unmaking of migrant athletes.

During my fieldwork in Southwest Cameroon in 2014–2015, it became clear to me that the parents and elder relatives of soccer players had ambiguous feelings about the young men’s soccer dreams. They often saw the sport as a distracting street activity in which the young men wasted their time and talent. But in other cases, parents came to view soccer as a means to make responsible men out of disobedient boys. Even more striking was the way that soccer managers used this dynamic relationship between the young soccer players and their elders, at times separating the players from their parents, but more notably stimulating the financial demands of the parents in order to tease out better performances from players. These findings made a case for a new approach to studying sports migrants from the Global South: one that considers migrants not merely as passive victims of exploitative international processes, nor as isolated individuals driven and blinded by dreams of fame and places afar, but as people deeply embedded in their social surroundings—in this case their kin.

Many Cameroonian parents associate soccer with disobedient young men, whom they refer to as “strong-hed” in Cameroonian Pidgin, the lingua franca of anglophone Cameroon. “Strong-hed” boys ignore the orders of their elders and spend all their time on soccer fields instead of sitting in classrooms or helping with household chores. In March 2015, I interviewed Vally, a retired soccer player from Buea. Referring to his childhood self as a “strong-hed” boy, he recalled the beatings he received from his parents after he returned home from playing soccer. On the most severe occasions, his mother would tie him down, grind hot pepper, mix it with water, and rub it all over his body, causing him burning pain meant to dissuade him from going back to the soccer field.

One of the players I followed, a prospective right-winger in his mid-twenties whom I will call Ayuk, had quite a clever manager. Planning to send him for trials in Europe, the manager, a Cameroonian from Buea with whom Ayuk was well acquainted, offered to arrange travel documents and trial trainings in Europe. However, he did not want to assume the financial burden in its entirety; instead, he asked Ayuk to cover about half the costs. As the manager subsequently explained to me, he knew full well that Ayuk would be unable to cover these costs by himself, but instead had to beg for money from his parents, uncles, and older siblings, creating obligations to eventually pay them back. In this way, the manager continued, the player would be more “serious”, work harder, and give his best in the tryouts abroad, since he would feel the pressure to earn money and pay off his debts. Speaking with Ayuk’s older brother and sister, I found that they were perfectly aware and accepting of the manager’s reasoning. When I met them for the last time in August 2015, they were still paying off the bank loan they had taken in order to pay for Ayuk’s travels. Needless to say, their investment came with high expectations. The manager had thus managed not only the individual player, but also his relationship with his kin.