There is now a nice pair of videos, running for just under 12 minutes, on Oscar Pistorius, made shortly before the Beijing Olympics, up on Youtube. They take the story up to the point where the Court for Arbitration in Sport overruled the initial IAFF decision banning him from competing with non-disabled athletes. For that decision, see Gregor Wolbring’s thoughts and related discussion in earlier posts here and here.
Tag Archives: Olympics
Normalizing Gender for Olympians
An opinion piece in the New York Times by Jennifer Finney Boylan, “The XY Games”, explores the practice of gender testing in the Olympics to determine that female athletes are in fact female. The author discusses the history of this testing, its faults, and the ambiguity of sex and gender. Amongst some of the things that one might want to discuss is the following:
“So what makes someone female then? If it’s not chromosomes, or a uterus, or the ability to get pregnant, or femininity, or being attracted to men, then what is it, and how can you possibly test for it? Continue reading
What Sorts of Paralympics? A Disabled Swimmer’s Dream, a Mother’s Fight
Its about a swimmer with cerebral palsy and developmental differences. An excerpt
“Mr. Kendall Bailey, an athlete who is a citizen of the USA and eligible to represent the USA in international competition, is inappropriately classified to compete in International Paralympic Committee (IPC) swimming competition. Mr. Bailey is intellectually disabled. The intellectual disability classification for swimming (S14) is not presently recognized by the IPC; nor is an intellectually disabled swimmer eligible to compete under the IPC Swimming Functional Classification System.”
see hereTechnorati Tags: Sports, Ableism, Olympics, Paralympics, Discrimination, Disabled people
The Miracle of Bionics – Presenting Challenging Questions
another piece covering Bionic advances and that quotes me a lot that just came out.
more here
Cheers
Gregor
Technorati Tags: Sports, Pistorius, Wolbring, Olympics, Paralympics, enhancement, bionic
Oscar Pistorius: Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite
I’d be curious what readers think about the above video of bionic athlete Oscar Pistorius, obviously made before the most recent decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which Gregor Wolbring has discussed in earlier posts on the blog, including here. Anyone know where the video comes from? Who do you think the basic message is? What does it say about the Olympics? What does it mean to you? The thread for comments is open.
What sort of Olympics Paralympics: Beijing Olympics guide on Paralympians
DISABLED people can be unsocial, stubborn, controlling, and defensive according to an official Beijing Olympics guide. The Olympic manual for volunteers in Beijing is peppered with patronising comments, noting for example that physically disabled people are “often” mentally healthy……
more hereTechnorati Tags: Beijing, Olympics, Paralympics, Sports, Perception, Disability, Stigmatization
What sorts of athletes should there be?
This What sorts question many thought they had figured out is increasingly up for grasp again in all kind of areas. Athletes are one of them. Who is an Olympic athlete? Who is a Paralympic athlete? Who is….? As a contribution to this discourse I wrote the article below. It is an open access journal, so feel free to download the paper and of course any comment are welcome here or to me directly.
in SCRIPT-ed – A Journal of Law, Technology & Society
Oscar Pistorius and the Future Nature of Olympic, Paralympic and Other Sports
Gregor Wolbring, pp.139-160
| HTML | DOC | PDF |
Oscar Pistorius is a Paralympic bionic leg runner and record holder in the 100, 200, and 400 meters who wants to compete in the Olympics. This paper provides an analysis of a) his case; b) the impact of his case on the Olympics, the Paralympics and other –lympics and the relationships between the –lympics; c) the impact on other international and national sports; d) the applicability of the UN Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. It situates the evaluation of the Pistorius case within the broader doping discourse and the reality that new and emerging science and technology products increasingly generate internal and external human bodily enhancements that go beyond the species-typical, enabling more and more a culture of increasing demand for, and acceptance of modifications of the human body (structure, function, abilities) beyond its species-typical boundaries and the emergence of new social concepts such as transhumanism and the transhumanisation of ableism.
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