The Caitlan Clark Phenomenon: Constructing Masculinities and Femininities through Women’s Professional Basketball

This paper addresses bodies in time and space, namely, in describing the processes of constructing masculinities, femininities through the bodily aesthetics and performativity as seen through the phenomenon of Caitlan Clark emerging as a media sensation in the WNBA, after a record setting career in college basketball.

Among the questions I seek to address are: What explains the construction of forms of femininity and masculinity in the rising popularity of women’s professional basketball? What does a sociological understanding of the phenomenon of Caitlan Clark tell us about the present state of gendered bodies in sport? How has the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity been at the center of competing forms of the gendered body? How has the body been shaped by cultural ideologies of the feminine and masculine body? What meanings, both local and trans-local were constructed around this dynamic form of leisure, play, and the body?

Using a culturalist approach to bodies in time and space from Henning Eichberg, I will seek to explain how culture and society have been shaping forces around the perceived masculinities and femininities of present-day women’s professional basketball in the form of the WNBA. As Eichberg states, “Show me how someone jogs, or how they bounce the ball, and I’ll tell you a little something of the society in which they live.”

In an era of ever-dynamic changes in gender and sexuality, are there emergent possibilities of femininity?