Of Gods, Money, and Muscle: Resurgent Homophobias and the Narcissism of Minor Differences in Sport

This article speculates about the political and psychic insights within the myth of Narcissus, who came to realize the tragedy of loving only the self by declaring it “an insubstantial hope, mistaking a mere shadow for a real body.” Specifically, Deborah Britzman's (1998) interpretation of “the narcissism of minor differences” is used to suggest how irrational and unconscious dynamics sustain and reinvent homophobias in college athletics, women's tennis, and the Gay Games. Of God? The article explores how the visibility of lesbians in college sports threatens the narcissistic dogma of some Christian athlete groups in the United States, generating a new form of evangelical homophobia. Of Muscle? The minor difference of muscle continues to fuel a familiar homophobic discourse in professional women's tennis, crystallized in the Mauresmo-Hingis conflict during the 1999 Australian Open. Of Money? The “Pay Games” protest against the commercialization of the official “Gay Games” in Amsterdam in 1998 highlighted the unwillingness of gay and lesbian sports to engage differences of economic privilege. The article offers

no consolation about these resurgent forms of homophobia in contemporary sport, and it merely questions whether feminist and queer sport studies might entertain the possibility that both homophobic and antihomophobic politics can succumb to narcissistic exclusions.