(In) Justice in Sport: The Treatment of South African Track Star Caster Semenya

On the day she won, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the governing body that oversees all aspects of inter-national track and field competitions, ordered her to undergo gender verification testing: the IAAF and other female runners were suspicious of Caster Semenya's "rapid perfor-mance improvements." Semenya's body. has been made a case of too many things-mis-taken identity, unfair advantage, impossible being-by many com-batants in the debate who display little awareness of the history of the scientific gaze on the gendered and sexualized body for, at least, the last three hundred years.2 In recognizing these intricacies, we hope to avoid either objectify-ing Semenya's gender liminal position or "reinforcing a narrative of South Africa as a'tragic, hopeless scene of gender trouble'" by plac-ing colonial, apartheid, and democratic histories, as well as the global struggles based on them, at the center of this piece.3 In this article, we draw from a variety of South African print media sources, including the Mail & Guardian (a liberal newspaper that has the largest readership in South Africa), the Sowetan (a newspaper aimed primarily toward a black readership), and various South Afri-can social justice websites that focus on gender, sexuality, and intersex justice.