Placing Caster Semenya Within and Outside of Discourse on Sex and Gender in the Space of International Professional Athletics

World Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist Caster Semenya’s body has caused a rupture within the space of international professional athletics, which is structured according to a binary conceptualization of sex and gender. This rupture created a space for international discourse about alternative ways in which sex and gender can be defined, and to reimagine the space of international professional athletics, and other binary-bound non-sport spaces, to be more inclusive. Cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove's concept of landscapes and Stuart Hall’s concept of coding and decoding provide a framework for exploring how Caster Semenya’s body has been read and interpreted like a landscape, and how her competitive performances have been portrayed, by United States media. While discourse exploring Semenya’s body-landscape has offered the opportunity to decenter the concepts of sex and gender, this discourse has been used to affirm the hegemonic ideology of sex and gender as binary, leaving Semenya in a liminal and silenced space of the “abnormal.”