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Clothes have been central to visibility and display in sport and to the regulation of sport. In the ancient games athletes largely competed without any clothes, but contemporary participants wear body revealing attire that has gendered implications. Wearing appropriate clothing that involves the freedom to display their bodies in sporting practices in the public arena remains problematic especially within some cultural, religious contexts in the twenty-first century, although such restrictions make sport a site of resistance where such rules can be challenged (Fozooni, 2008).

Thus, a useful starting point for an exploration of what constitutes sport is to trace some of these ideas about how it has evolved. 44 Embodied Sporting Practices From ancient to modern: Sport over time As Richard Giulianotti notes, sport carries strong connotations of play; we mostly do sport because we want to and not because we have to (2005). Sport is strongly linked to pleasurable activity and to play, which is found in all humans and indeed most animals, at least mammal cultures. Games of physical skill have been found in all societies, past and present (Chick, 2004), although games are not as old as play.

Feminist critiques (Battersby, 1998; Martin, 1998) have shown how the body in Western thought has often been either denied or dismissed, with the mind or the soul occupying positions of ‘higher’ status than women’s embodied experiences, such as those of menstruation, birth, lactation and the menopause. Motherhood has often been an ‘absent presence’ (Woodward, 1997), both in the systems of representation that constitute culture and in critical analysis (Irigaray in Whitford, 1991); motherhood has been taken for granted.