UC Santa Barbara

“Reading Between the Baselines: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Elite Women’s Tennis,” theorizes how women’s elite tennis functions as both an expression and incubator of discourse. The global dispersion of professional tennis tournaments and the international background of those who travel with the tour make it into a quasi-diasporic space defined by perpetual movement, competition, and precarity. This project engages with a series of interrelated questions: First, what does the women’s professional tennis tour articulate concerning global regimes of gender, sexuality, and race? Secondly, how do these regimes circulate and reproduce through the tour? And third, how does the tour shape experiences of gender, sexuality, and race globally?

I argue that the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) tour is not only a manifestation of various cultures, but through its policies, players, and media, it also molds discourses at the sites of its audiences. In five chapters, I show the ways in which knowledges about gender, sexuality, and race are inscribed on the bodies of Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, and other womens tennis stars. These inscriptions are disseminated widely by the apparatuses of the entertainment and advertising industries and constitute a powerful site of social instruction about the normative boundaries of gender, race, and sexuality that transgress national borders. I draw on my own background as a tennis writer and photographer, using my experience in media centers at some of the world’s biggest tournaments to better understand where knowledges about tennis come from and what editorial decisions shape mainstream representations. My insider-outsider dive into the creation of discourse forms the backbone of this analysis.

My dissertation reads the women’s professional tennis tour and its history as a text to be analyzed. Chapter 1 explores the fight for equal pay in tennis, asking what the labor of a professional tennis player is, if women demand equal pay on the grounds of equal work while competing in a separate system. Chapter 2 argues that while women’s tennis markets itself openly to US audiences as an LGBT-friendly sport, the tour and its culture actively discourage queer visibility by foregrounding Western models of identarian sexuality and dismissing queer potentiality outside of that imagination. Chapter 3 draws on Foucauldian theory, philosophy, and sports physiology to argue that prohibitions against loud grunting are intended to shame women into a silence that physically weakens them. Chapter 4 turns to formal logic to incorporate the superaltern as an analytic to theorize an individual ultra-elite position in post-Cold War power formations contrasted with the subaltern; I do this by tracing Maria Sharapova’s doping scandal back to the Chernobyl disaster and American interest in minimizing the public’s concern with radioactive fallout. Chapter 5 examines how Serena Williams has deployed social media to construct a nuanced self-representation that resists mainstream representations of her that are rooted in essentialist logics about Black women. I conclude that women’s elite tennis forges and circulates regimes of gender, sexuality, and race as they function globally.