著者

石田 依子

出版者

日本スポーツとジェンダー学会

雑誌

スポーツとジェンダー研究 (ISSN:13482157)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.13, pp.169-179, 2015 (Released:2017-04-14)

参考文献数

9

---

“Gender equality” has been a critical issue among some ideas of equality, as well as “racial equality,” and has long been pursued through our modern history. It could be said that “Gender Studies,” which has been actively explored since the latter part of the 20th century, is trying to reach its destination these days. Analysis and recognition of human existence not only from a viewpoint of racial idea as ever but from of gender idea mean that more extensive research about human diversity has become to put in practice. It is no exaggeration to say that in our modern society we cannot understand a wealth of human existence without a viewpoint of gender idea. Therefore gender idea has become an active area of academic research so that we in this society feel a much greater sense of equality than any humans in history, in which there was no such thing as “equality.” In our daily life, however, actually do we have a mature sense of proportion for “equality”? It is possible to say that sexual difference between male and female become pronounced especially in sports fields. Most sport events are played separately by sex, which means men and women are never the same in their physical forces. But some cannot separate the sexes, whose best examples are motorsports. The reason simply comes from the fact that there are few female racing drivers so that race events could not be done in separating the sexes. This paper presents an analysis of the gendered bodies in motorsports, especially a sexual minority driver as well as females. A concrete sample here is Terri Leigh O”Connell, who is a former racing driver for NASCAR in the USA. She was born as an intersex individual, not feeling like man although being raised as a male, resulting from having a sex reassignment surgery in 1994. I conducted research about the receptivity for her and her own experiences in the field, showing the results in this paper. And a final purpose of this paper is to argue that how gender difference between the sexes is primordially recognized in motorsports field.