[Each
year for the last
few, I’ve used Super
Bowl week as a platform
for a series on sports
in America. This week, I’ll be AmericanStudying figures and moments related
to women in sports, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on cheerleading in
American society and culture!]
On two factors
that have entirely changed my perspective on the tennis superstars.
I have to start
this post with full disclosure: for many years, indeed most of their long and
hugely successful careers in professional tennis, the
Williams Sisters would have been most likely to show up in this space as
part of my annual post-Valentine’s
non-favorites series. There were quite a few things that rubbed me the
wrong way about Venus and Serena Williams, but I would highlight two in
particular. One is not at all on them: their father Richard
Williams, who had always seemed (and still I will admit largely seems) to
me to embody the worst kind of overbearing and self-centered tennis/sports
parent. And the other was much more fully about them, and especially Serena,
who (I long felt) could never lose a tennis match and credit her opponent in
any way; she always seemed to be blaming herself and her play, suggesting that
if she just played the way she could, it would be impossible for any opponent
to give her a challenge. Given Serena’s unrivaled career success, that might
well be an accurate assessment, but it still felt at best petty and at worst
downright disrespectful to so consistently (as I saw it) talk about her
opponents and matches in that way. So even a couple years, I would have viewed
the upcoming (as of my writing this post) Australian
Open final between Venus and Serena as the worst thing that could happen in
a women’s tennis tournament.
My perspective
has entirely changed in the last couple years, however, and while I know that
doesn’t and shouldn’t matter at all to the Williams Sisters, I do think that
the two most central influences in shifting my point of view are interesting
ones to AmericanStudy and are both relevant to this series on women in sports. The
single most
powerful influence has been the sections of Claudia Rankine’s poem Citizen (2015) dedicated both to
narrating one particular controversial moment in Serena’s career and to portraying
and analyzing perceptions of Serena’s identity (that New York Times Magazine piece by Rankine echoes and extends many of
Citizen’s topics, if in a different
genre of course) and her responses to them overall. Of course I had long
recognized, when I took a step back from my personal feelings on Serena and the
sisters, the crucial roles that both race and gender (in an intersectional
combination) have always played in shaping our narratives of the Williams’.
But it’s one thing to recognize something analytically, and another to feel it
empathetically; and I have to admit that it was reading Rankine’s book that
truly made it possible for me to emphathize with Serena (and Venus) and how
such narratives and frames have affected (if in no way limited) them at each
stage and moment. Perhaps I should have been able to do so without the book,
but of course works of art can and do greatly amplify our capacity for empathy,
and Rankine’s portrayal of Serena offered a wonderful case in point for me.
The other main
factor in shifting my perspective is a bit more complicated to write about, and
a lot more 21st century. To put it simply, many of the scholars and figures whom I follow on
Twitter—many of them women of color, but also certainly folks in every conceivable
ethnic and identity category—are huge fans of Serena and Venus, and would often
during and around tournaments Tweet about what the Williams Sisters meant to
them. I’ll be the first to admit that Twitter often fails to live up to this
ideal, but at its heart one of the things it best represents is a chance to
listen to other people, to hear and learn from their voices and perspectives
with an immediacy and (in its own digital way) intimacy that’s not possible (or
at least not the same) in any other medium with which I’m familiar. I can’t
pretend that the first few times I saw such pro-Williams Tweets, I wasn’t more
annoyed than anything else; but fortunately I continued to see them, and
starting listening to and learning from them. I’m not looking for a pat on the
back for that, as again I was doing both what Twitter should allow us to do
and, for that matter, what any human being should do in conversation with
others. Instead, I want to highlight this effect as both a model of what a site
and space like Twitter can do and mean, and as a particularly good example of
how these 21st century communities can, again at their best, help
open us up to perspectives and voices that it might be otherwise harder for us
to truly hear and be shaped by. Thanks to such perspectives, as well as to
Rankine’s wonderful poem, I now am nothing but excited for the Williams Sisters
to have one more (or another—who knows how many more there might be?) Grand
Slam tournament battle.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other women and sports connections or analyses you’d share?
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