Playing “Like a Guy”: Game Style, Physicality, and Embodiment

This chapter examines what it means to play basketball “like a woman,” a concept that is shaped by a long legacy of gendered and racialised restrictions. Though it is commonly accepted, both by the general public and WNBA players, that women basketball players have a different form of embodiment and way of playing the game compared to men, WNBA players have a complicated and contradictory relationship with this notion. Drawing on the work of Iris Marion Young, I argue that WNBA players, despite being at the pinnacle of their craft, continue to be constrained by gendered discourses that limit their embodied possibilities. This chapter utilises both the practice and discourse of the dunk to argue for the continued relevance of Young’s work and the continued restrictions put in place that prevent women from engaging in certain embodied practices. By using new materialist ideas, I argue that these embodied restrictions should also include race and gender presentation, arguing that bodies like Griner’s “misfit” in certain locations, and that there is a need to consider the body as an assemblage. This chapter does emphasise the possibilities for embodied pleasure that physical sports like basketball provide, particularly through the assemblage of bodies, crowds, physicality, and creativity; however, I argue that who gets access to these pleasures, and in which context, is constrained by gender, race, and sexuality.