Women and Sport: civilizing or (un)civilizing process

Abstract

The point of departure of this article is Elias’s concepts on the civilizing process and the ones that refer to the way of establishing value or patterns configurations among different spheres of the social universe. After that, the article focuses on the process of woman’s inclusion in different fields in direct competition with men. The value of non segregation is predominant in these fields. The sporting field was for many times, as the war, a place of no female inclusion. Nowadays, in spite of the fact that female participation may be equal to the men, the segregation for genders continues. The author raises two questions: a) could we consider the resistant to include female as meaning decivilizing and b) how to explain from the feminist epistemological horizon (deconstrutivistic, antinaturalist, inclusivistic and anti segregationist) the silence about the existing segregation between men and women in sport? The author proposes to work out the relation between the two processes (resistance to inclusion and maintenance of segregation) as if they can be understood from the decivilization vision of sport for female gender.