Book

Incidents of doping in sports are common in news headlines, despite regulatory efforts. How did doping become a crisis? What does a doping violation actually entail? Who gets punished for breaking the rules of fair play? In Testing for Athlete Citizenship, Kathryn E. Henne, a former competitive athlete and an expert in the law and science of anti-doping regulation, examines the development of rules aimed at controlling performance enhancement in international sports.

As international and celebrated figures, athletes are powerful symbols, yet few spectators realize that a global regulatory network is in place in an attempt to ensure ideals of fair play. The athletes caught and punished for doping are not always the ones using performance-enhancing drugs to cheat. In the case of female athletes, violations of fair play can stem from their inherent biological traits.

Testing for Athlete Citizenship combines historical and ethnographic approaches to offer a compelling account of the origins and expansion of anti-doping regulation and gender-verification rules. Drawing on research conducted in Australasia, Europe, and North America, Henne details how race, gender, class, and postcolonial formations of power shape these ideas and regulatory practices. Testing for Athlete Citizenship makes a convincing case to rethink the power of regulation in sports and how it separates athletes as a distinct class of citizens subject to a unique set of rules because of their physical attributes and abilities.

To place an order, please refer to the Rutgers University Press website. Use the discount code 02AAAA11 for 20% off online orders. The book is also available for purchase via Book Depository, Fishpond, and Amazon.

Endorsements and Reviews

“With sophisticated analysis and descriptive prose, Testing for Athlete Citizenship offers provocative arguments. Author Kathryn Henne breaks new ground in showing that testing practices are not just about catching ‘cheaters,’ but are implicated in corporeal, gendered, economic, and postcolonial ideologies.”

—Mary G. McDonald, Professor and Homer C. Rice Chair in Sports and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology

“A masterpiece of hybrid governance. This book chronicles with nuance the entire global history of a regulatory regime, yet through a micro lens, through the eyes and bodies of colonized athletes. A landmark of gendered and racialized problematics of fair play.”

—John Braithwaite, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

“Even though anti-doping regulation and gender verification testing were not implemented until the late 1960s, the ways in which Henne demonstrates how these practices circumscribed older notions of ideal athleticism suggest her conceptualization of athletes as a specific caste of citizens could intriguingly influence scholars of sport studying a range of time periods.”

—Reviewed in Sport in American History by Cat Ariail, University of Miami

“Critically, the arguments presented advance scholarship well beyond the confines of sport…. Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport offers a compelling, sophisticated, and much needed reevaluation of contemporary global sport.”

— Reviewed in Crime, Media, Culture by Ophir Sefiha, Western Carolina University