A Critique of Critiques: Radical and Feminist Writings on Sport

This paper reviews and evaluates two critiques of sport. The radical critique argues that sport is authoritarian, excessively competitive and exclusionary. The feminist critique holds that sport is male-dominated and masculine in orientation. The critiques overlap in their emphases on social inequalities and instrumentality in sport and their advocacy of change. The analysis presented here argues that the radical critique is polemical and poorly formulated. The radicals' criticisms are reanalyzed in a discussion of the secularization and rationalization of sport. The feminist critique is insufficiently developed. Feminists who call for equality in sport and a diminution of the masculine orientation fail to explicate, respectively, the meaning of equality and the institutional features of a revised model of sport.