V8 Supercars started in Australia, is an international touring car racing. For more than two years, Hamilton city is stop of the racing and V8 Supercars Hamilton becomes one of the biggest tourism events in Hamilton (Hamilton City Council, n.d.).
In fact, the V8 Supercar is a set of car racing events that can be used as materials to explore some geography disciplines like femininity and masculinity, body and mind and sex and gender. To address the matter of femininity and masculinity, I wonder anyone noticed that the racing car spaces are dominated by men, from pit crew to drivers, and coordinators to other workers. The only type of women exist in the field is “race girl” or “race queen”. The roles of men and women in car racing confirm the stereotypical constructions of femininity and masculinity because sexual and masculine bodies (Johnston, 1996). Men dominate the wheels and pit shops and actively discourage women from participating in the driving and racing, while the women dominate and other causal spaces. Women bodies are then produced by the environment of the car racing events that they wear make ups and put on clothe that expose their flesh as expected. Under such a manner, because of the normal sex and gender expectations, one will never see a race car driver or a pit crew with miniskirts.
However, as I suggest in my work flexing femininity: female body builders refiguring the body (1996), the traditional feminine/ masculine binary is not always unchanged. Inside my paper, I investigated the bodies building of female body builders and their training environments and argued that one of the reasons for female body builders to build their bodies was to against the hegemonic notions of masculinity.
No comments:
Post a Comment