In 2012, South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, became one of the first and most notable people to qualify for both the Olympics and the Paralympics. He earned a space in the semifinals of the 400-meter race at the 2012 London Olympics and won the gold medal in the 400-meter race at the 2012 London Paralympics. However, Pistorius’ performance in the Olympics was primarily notable due to the controversy it stirred up with people questioning whether or not it was “fair” for him to compete against non-amputee athletes who run with their organic legs rather than running blades. While other athletes with partial paralysis (Lis Hartel and Neroli Fairhall), visual impairments (Marla Runyan), hearing loss (Terence Parkin), and amputations (Natalie du Toit and Natalia Partyka) had competed in the Olympics before, he stood out as someone using highly visible assistive technologies in his competitions, his “Cheeta” running blades. Thus, whereas his coverage in the Paralympics focused on his athleticism, coverage from the Olympics fixated on whether his prostheses provided him with potential advantages (Smith 2015) and his disability came to be his primary signifier worldwide rather than other identities such as nation of origin (Ellis and Goggin 2017). After much deliberation, he was allowed to compete in “able-bodied events” after the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) deemed his carbon-fiber running blades were not giving him an advantage over his competitors’ biological limbs. This decision was based on biomechanical testing, which determined that Pistorius’ energy cost, endurance, and running mechanics were comparable to those of able-bodied runners—simply put, that running with the use of running blades was no less effortful than it was for his nondisabled peers (Weyand et al. 2009). Unfortunately, no athletes using running blades have been included in the Olympics since.
Yet Pistorius was not the only athlete using prosthetic legs who wished to compete alongside non-disabled peers. In 2012, Markus Rehm, a German long jumper, earned the gold at the Paralympics and set his sights on the 2016 Olympics. In 2014, Rehm competed and earned gold in the German Championships, but the win was tainted when multiple able-bodied competitors complained that his blade had given him an unfair advantage (“An Unfair Advantage” 2014). Eventually, Rehm’s national title was upheld by the committee, but that same year, the European Athletics Championships banned him from participation on the basis that he jumps off his running blade, which is three to four centimeters longer than his natural leg. His gold medal at the 2015 German Championships was subsequently invalidated when the German Federation ruled that his prosthetic gave him an unfair advantage. Despite a study by the University of Cologne determining that the balance of advantages and disadvantages of the blade gave him no overall benefit, the 2016 Rio Olympics denied him permission to participate (Kilgore 2021). Rehm went on to compete in the 2016 Rio, 2021 Tokyo, and 2024 Paris Paralympics, but entrance into the Olympics continues to evade him.
Alas, the narrative of running blades as extending the leg to unfair lengths persists. Blake Leeper, a US sprinter who repeatedly earned the silver to Pistorius’ gold in the 2012 Paralympics, lost his bid to compete in 2020 Olympics after the CAS deemed his running blades an “advantage,” claiming that the blades extend the reach of his gait beyond what height charts predict his natural reach might have been if he had been born with normative legs. Leeper and his lawyer argue that this determination of “advantage” was the result of racially discriminatory policies which assume “height proportions of Caucasians and Asians, not Black athletes” (Associated Press 2020, para. 6). Notably, Alena Grabowski, a researcher from the same team whose results were used to justify the inclusion of Oscar Pistorius in the 2012 Olympics, found that the length of one’s running blades did not have an overall effect on their speed (Schoolman 2019). Despite this, Leeper has been forced to wear shorter running blades when competing against able-bodied sprinters—such as during the 2019 United States track and field championships (Futterman 2021) and continues to be barred from participation at perhaps the most high-profile international athletic competition, the Olympics. In response to these imposed restrictions, Grabowski stated that “if this rigorous scientific evidence is not found to be sufficient…then we are unable to envision that any person with an amputation will ever be permitted to compete against non-amputee athletes in elite running competitions” (Marshall 2020).
These cases indicate a pattern of discourse and discrimination surrounding disabled athletes who wish to compete at the highest level of their sport. However, this phenomenon is not only important because of its effect on these individual athletes—or the millions of disabled people who could potentially view their acceptance into “mainstream” sporting events as an invaluable source of representation and inspiration. In this paper, I show how this phenomenon exemplifies interactions of broader social forces and find that the focus on “fairness” in discourse surrounding the inclusion of disabled athletes in elite sport reifies existing attitudes of disability as an essential and Othered category.
Many theorists have noted how technologies are not simply tools that people use, but tools that shape how we see things—consider the adage that “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Sherry Turkle (2005) explores this idea, arguing that the widespread adoption of technologies impacts cultural norms as well, shaping shared meanings and how people relate to one another. Marshall McLuhan (2001) expresses similar thinking in his writing, which argues that any technology can be conceptualized as a medium through which communication occurs, expressing information through its design and its use. Through the facilitation of said communication, media therefore have impacts on the individual level as well as on the broader social level. Essentially, technologies both reflect and shape cultural values and social norms.1
Beyond this social impact of technology, many researchers argue that our bodies and the technologies we use shape one another as well. As people create technology and begin to use it, they shape their behavior to optimize use of said technology. Franklin describes the process of biology and biotechniques co-evolving as shaping more than just our bodies, but our social structures as well, rebuilding and redesigning the world and our definitions of “progress, social justice, and power” through a cyclical process of interaction (2006, 168). Lloyd and Bonventre (2023) describe how this impacts uses of assistive technologies specifically when anticipated uses come to shape social meanings of disability. Fundamentally, technologies are not neutral; rather, they influence the individuals and societies that utilize them and have the power to either subvert or reinforce existing power structures within a culture (Benjamin 2019; Broussard 2023; Miller 2021).
The interaction between the body, technology, and power is highly visible when discussing disabled people and their uses of technologies. For example, people with disabilities often create or repurpose tools to assist them with daily tasks, actions which can reflect the creativity required for survival in a hostile environment (Bastian 2006; Bostic 1998; Cunnally 2013; Stewart & Watson 2020) or become a mundane part of everyday life as we become habituated to technology use (McLuhan 2001). In, Giving Voice, Meryl Alper discusses how assistive technologies such as mobility aids and prosthetics are “culturally associated with dependency and victimhood” (2017, 13), but argues that resiliency theory contradicts traditional narratives of disability as inherently limiting, instead noting the ingenuity and perseverance of disabled people as they learn to work around the barriers they face.
Sara Hendren, too, addresses the mix of creativity and mundanity as foundational to the experience of using prosthetics. In her book, What Can a Body Do (2020), she details examples of adapting to newer, more “advanced” prosthetics when available, fabricating one’s own designs for tasks one’s prosthesis is not well-suited to, and endlessly answering invasive questions about one’s body, disability, and prostheses. Technologies can be powerful tools and open opportunities for people who are otherwise restricted, but the opportunities and restrictions that technologies afford are inherently tied to social perceptions of said technologies. Culture and technology cannot be decoupled.
With the value of human-technology amalgamations at its core, cyborg theory is fundamentally a call to challenge power structures by undermining the social categories that are used to separate people from one another. In the Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway explicitly argues for a breakdown of the categorizations between the human/animal, organic/mechanical, and physical/nonphysical (2017), but the theory has been expanded to dissolve all sorts of binary categories, including man/woman, abled/disabled, and human/environment (Bastian 2006; Ellcessor 2017; Norman & Moola 2011; Silva & Howe 2019). With this broad focus, cyborg theory has been used to explore a wide range of topics. Here, I focus on its application to the notion of the “material cyborg”—the physical amalgamation of body and technology—exploring the ways in which cyborg narratives and cultural conceptualizations of the cyborg figure relate to the topic of prosthetics in sports.
Yet some able-bodied people whose dependence on technologies are considered mundane do not necessarily recognize their cyborg nature the way that people using assistive technologies do. People whose health is directly dependent on technology are likely to be aware of their own cyborg-ness even when their disability is relatively invisible. For example, Oudshoorn (2013) describes the “familiar cyborg” as an amalgamation of human body and assistive technology created by the implantation of pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators and normalized by decades of use as well as the relative invisibility of the technology to external parties. She states that these familiar cyborgs, who may be initially viewed as passive in their cyborg experience, are in fact highly aware of their hybrid identities and the role said technologies have in sustaining their bodies. They view their relationship to their pacemakers and defibrillators as a highly salient part of themselves, but the cultural understanding of those technologies as familiar rather than novel ensures that they do not face the same form of Othering as people whose dependence is more visible are subjected to. In contrast, prostheses, especially those like running blades which do not attempt to mimic the aesthetics of organic limbs, are highly visible and therefore act as constant reminders to onlookers of the users’ status as disabled people. The visibility of one’s cyborg nature is thus central to how they are perceived (Beldame et al. 2023; Pullen et al. 2020; Shew 2023; Weise 2018).
We live in a culture that, at its core, follows an ideology of ability, assuming that to be non-disabled is inherently more ideal than to be disabled (Siebers 2008). Additionally, what is viewed as threatening in a given culture is fundamentally reflective of the values and anxieties of that society. Yet, some common threads that are viewed as threatening across cultures include bodily difference and liminality (Rai 2013). Therefore, it is unsurprising that disability, which is viewed as undesirable and can create anxieties of frailty or contagion, is often either intentionally ignored or actively ridiculed.
In particular, the disabled body is viewed with abjection because it is regarded as disfigured, incomplete, or lacking. This view of the disabled body is established in contrast to the idea of a normative “whole” body, what Norman and Moola call the “naturalized” body, a socially constructed image of what bodies “should” look like (2011). Consider the saying of “ten fingers and ten toes” as a reassurance given to new parents that their baby is healthy (read: normal) or the way that surgeries are used to “correct” the bodies of intersex people, altering them to conform to the normative categorizations of male and female. These examples underline how the natural state of various bodies is constructed as “unnatural” when it does not fit into the outline of the naturalized body. This process underlines the cultural importance of defining clear categories and presenting them as immutable—people fight abjection by relegating the Other into distinct boxes, and often attempting to segregate them so as to avoid contact with the uncomfortable Other entirely.
Yet it is not only the disability itself which is stigmatized. It is also the assistive technologies themselves (Shew 2022). While some assistive technologies are so normalized that nobody would question whether athletes should be asked to perform without them (such as corrective eye wear) (Booher 2011), other assistive technologies are perceived as signifying long-term disability and visually inescapable Otherness, which can heighten abjection so that “the disabled cyborg becomes a target of suspicion and fear through the lens of media depiction” (Earle & Shew 2024, 6). Earle (2024) notes that cyborg aesthetics can fall into two dominant tropes: apotheosis and grotesquerie. Where apotheosis depicts cyborgs as superior beings in form and function, grotesquerie casts them as objects of fascination and horror. In each case, one’s cyborg identity paints them outside of the bounds of a supposed norm, facilitating their treatment as an Other, exceptional such that they are not “normal” people.
The discomfort of those in power can lead directly to marginalization—the relegation of the Other to an underclass which is shunned (Young 1990). But, in the case of people using prosthetics, the cultural desire to ignore disability by rendering it invisible is complicated by a fascination with the hyper-visible nature of the assistive technologies themselves. As a result, a tension forms when the technology available to “fix” the disability is viewed as sufficiently impressive. In Hendren’s book, one man, Mike, describes his experience as a child when he updated from his first prosthetic—an arm with a hook-like clamp at the end to act as an opposable thumb—to a new prosthetic which simulated the look of five “normal” fingers. He recalls going “from Captain Hook to the Bionic Man, overnight” in other people’s eyes (Hendren 2020, 38). While the function of his new prosthetic was not very different from that of his earlier model, the more futuristic design was more impressive to his peers, resulting in his social recategorization from pitiable to worthy of interest and praise. They no longer saw him primarily as lacking and instead were jealous of what they perceived to be an advanced robotic technology, something out of a futuristic science-fiction story.
This aligns with the findings of other writers as well, such as self-described cyborg, Jillian Weise, who notes that “They like us best with bionic arms and legs...They want us shiny and metallic” (2018). However, while there is a preference for the highly technologized cyborg, these advanced technologies continue to be a sight for hypervisibility and critique. Ott (2002) describes this distinction as the difference between prosthetic and cyborg aesthetics, with traditional prostheses intended to conceal one’s difference from the social norm and the cyborg aesthetic being aligned with the idea of voluntary technologization as an acceptable or even lauded form of bodily difference. Booher (2011) points out that it is possible that futuristic-looking designs actually work to further highlight the anxieties non-disabled people feel about technological advancements and possibilities.
Similarly, some scholars have noted how certain materials and technologies take on gendered meanings (Ott 2002), such as carbon fiber, which is associated with masculinity and is thus seen as a tool through which a man may not only become ambulatory but also be seen to “overcome” one’s feminizing disability (Hickey-Moody 2015). Additionally, in the case of Oscar Pistorius specifically, he was considered to play into the idea of supercrips and “was positioned as too good, too specialized, to compete with mere humans” (Hickey-Moody 2015, 148). Essentially, these technologies matter beyond their function. Their aesthetic designs impact the discourses that surround them and their users.
This dichotomy between the different views of disability is exemplified by the tendency to view people with disabilities as alternately sub- or super-human rather than equals (Garland-Thompson 2002). Ableist discourses alternately depict disabled people as disgusting and pitiable or capable and inspirational, and this tension is at the root of the question regarding whether it can be fair for double amputees and able-bodied athletes to compete against one another. For example, if disabled bodies are viewed as “lacking,” one might question how said incomplete person could be capable of being equal to (let alone superior to) someone who is “whole” (Swartz & Watermeyer 2008). The answer that many seem to arrive at is that this equality is only possible if the prosthetics are so vastly superior to biological limbs that the technology makes up for the disabled body’s supposed “failings.”
Since we live in an ableist society, the issue of visibility is central to the way that disabled people are treated, rendering certain disabilities impossible to ignore. Whereas internal technologies are mostly salient to the individuals being sustained, visible external technologies such as prosthetic limbs are salient to able-bodied people too, and their visible nature makes them difficult to ignore or normalize. For example, people who have pins in their limbs from surgery or who wear glasses are still cyborgs, but their technologies are perceived as maintaining or adding to a generally normative body, minimizing their social impact.
Meanwhile, other assistive technologies such as prostheses draw attention to a body which may be seen as missing some part that is necessary to be “whole.” It is these technologies that people question as conflicting with the spirit of the sport. After all, those Para/Olympians mentioned above who were largely accepted did not use visible technologies, and it was particularly the wheelchair user, Neroli Fairhall, whose place in the competition was criticized (Burkett et al. 2011). Some athletes are working to address this visibility intentionally, promoting themselves similarly to other athletes, reinforcing neoliberal and gendered images of athleticism to advertise themselves and garner large followings online and working to normalize disability in the sports arena (Pullen et al. 2023). Still, the hypervisibility of certain assistive technologies ensures that cyborg anxiety remains.
The body and perceptions of the body are fundamental to sport. Therefore, sports are a useful site for the exploration of cultural analysis. As mentioned above, numerous scholars discuss the co-evolution and reciprocal relationship between technology or media and culture. David Rowe shares this view and expands upon it, adding sport as an integral piece of cultural (re)production. He proposes that culture, sport, and media each create and reinforce one another in what he calls the “Unruly Trinity” (2003). Rowe argues that the media-sport-culture-complex can be seen in the use of symbolism in sports and the interconnectedness of sports and the culture that they are a part of (4), and Watson et al. (2014) point out how the Olympics and other international competitions are not merely sports, but culturally significant citizen-building exercises. Sports reflect broader social ideas of merit, excellence, and fairness (LaVaque-Manty 2005) and reproduce cultural hegemonies that idealize the image of the individualist, able-bodied figure (Hardin and Hardin 2005). Furthermore, the focus on competition reinforces the idea of a “natural” hierarchy of people where those who are the most “fit” are considered better than others (Hardin and Hardin 2005). Therefore, sport is a potentially transgressive space, where the “ideal” and normalized body can be reinforced or “subversive” bodies can shine, but differences between the two remain notable (Ellis & Goggin 2017; Silva & Howe 2020).
Since sport, technology, and culture inform one another, athletic competition is a site where one can either observe the “disabled” body performing extraordinary feats and transgressing ableist assumptions of inferiority, or alternatively see social categorizations and stereotypes reified and naturalized. Both disability scholars and sports studies researchers discuss the notion of the ideal body and the role of technology in supporting or improving the body in-depth. Central to concerns of disability scholars is the problematic philosophy wherein technology is often presented as a way to “fix” disabled bodies by making them “whole” again, a cultural belief that Ashley Shew calls technoableism (Shildrick & Price 1996; Shew 2023). Not only does this philosophy assume that disability should be fixed, but it also once again presents the underlying assumption that the only way for disabled bodies to be equal to—let alone superior to—nondisabled bodies is through reliance upon technologies.
This potential for people with disabilities to challenge the culturally accepted ideas of the naturalized body as ideal results in what some scholars call “cyborg anxiety” (Norman & Moola 2011; Swartz & Watermeyer 2008). Essentially, cyborg anxiety is a response to the ideology of ability. Once it is established culturally that people with disabilities are inherently inferior, anything that challenges this ideology is a threat to society’s fundamental beliefs about disability. Since the success of disabled athletes—especially those with highly visible disabilities such as amputations and those in direct competition with able-bodied competitors—contradicts the supposedly distinct line between bodies which are “able” to do things and those which are disabled and thus are assumed to be incapable of doing anything equally, the presumed superiority of nondisabled bodies is directly challenged, sparking feelings of discomfort, fear, distrust, and defensiveness. If fact, there are many instances where the anxiety of disabled athletes surpassing their non-disabled peers through the adoption of advanced technologies is made explicit, including in advertisements which feature disabled athletes and focus on the commodities of assistive technologies as central to their success (Montez de Oca et al. 2022) and coverage of international sporting events which express the concern that advanced enough assistive technologies would be so spectacular that all athletes will wish that they could use them (Pullen et al. 2020). As a result, nondisabled people attempt to reify their position of social superiority through legislation of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” forms of technologizing oneself (Butryn 2003; Norman & Moola 2011) and discourses about a “level playing field.”
Although much of this paper has focused on how the use of technologies is viewed as a visible reminder of one’s status as an Other, this is complicated by our culture’s fascination with new technologies and the prominent belief that technology is more impressive than biology. This is exemplified by the way that even non-disabled bodies are described through metaphors of machines and the suspicion that prosthetics have advanced to the point of being superior to biological limbs.
Increasingly, social discourses reveal a desire to control the human body and treat it as if it were a machine: testing it and considering its input and output to maximize efficiency (Butryn & Masucci 2003). This exemplifies how athletes are beginning to view themselves as mechanized beings, applying self-quantification techniques to constantly track themselves and make tweaks to their routines to try to “control” their bodies (Butryn & Masucci 2009; Lupton 2016). This focus on optimization reveals how the availability of technologies such as blood pressure monitors in watches, phone applications to track calorie and water intake, and systems which record one’s screen- or sleep-time are reinforcing these “health” habits even for the layman, let alone for professional athletes, who can record changes to their oxygen output or fluctuations of one’s speed down to decimal points.
The focus on treating the body as a machine to judge its value is tied to the view of technology as aspirational. Beyond being confounded by the practicalities of technologies’ functions, people are impressed by technologies because they view them as potential solutions to any and every problem—the deficiencies of the natural world or the failings of existing technologies can always be fixed by new, more advanced technologies. Shew, a cyborg herself, notes in her book, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (2023), that technology is used to determine the worth of disabled people, with those who reject or cannot use assistive technologies often depicted as “bad cripples.”
Shew goes on to describe technoableism as a bias against people with disabilities that presents technologies as important tools towards the goal of eliminating disability from society. Basically, technology is viewed as a solution to the “problem” of disability. Thus, any person with a disability who foregoes the use of technologies to minimize their disabilities, regardless of their reasons, is challenging the underlying cultural beliefs about disability and about technology. While people with disabilities tend to view assistive technologies primarily in terms of their usefulness, people who are not and have not been disabled tend to confer additional meanings onto these technologies as some vital item that is necessary to combat the undesirable disability. In this way, the experiences of people who need the use of technologies for their health or mobility differ from those who simply hypothesize about the miraculous nature of technologies. For example, Weise critiques non-disabled folks who take a techno-utopian view of the world and present futuristic technologies as the “solution” to disability (2018), calling them not cyborgs but “tryborgs.” This asymmetrical focus on new technologies as a progressive and positive force, as well as a misunderstanding of the limitations of many technologies, establishes a hierarchy of disabilities with athletes who are more willing to be “cyborgified” by capitalizing on awed reactions to their assistive technologies being privileged over other athletes, gaining more sponsorships and popularity (Beldame et al 2023). Essentially, because of our cultural assumptions in the power of technology as super-human, people with disabilities are expected to cleave to available technologies and nondisabled people assume that this relationship is one where in the technologies’ goals are to minimize disability from one’s life.
The perception of prosthetics as miraculous technologies aligns with Leduc’s explanation of the “charity model” of disability which describes “someone in possession of a less-than-perfect body, a disfigured body, someone who is set apart from society as a result of those differences…is at the mercy of others” and who must be “pitied and saved by both the medical and social establishments” (2020, 55). Essentially, society writ-large feels bad for disabled people and view technology as a pathway to “fixing” them. Thus, nondisabled people get to feel a sense of moral superiority when they treat disabled people charitably—despite the fact that much of this charity is deeply patronizing, de-humanizing, and often does little to address the actual concerns of the disabled people themselves. For example, while the disability community is very proud of our Paralympians, the insinuation from some able-bodied people that the Paralympics is some sort of “bonus” opportunity that is given to disabled athletes rather than an equal event of the world’s top athletes coming together to compete illuminates why disabled athletes might want to compete against able-bodied peers and prove that they are just as good.
Of course, prostheses are not the only technology whose use is regulated by the governing bodies of various sports competitions. For example, the ban on Speedo’s LZR Racer swimsuits after the 2008 Beijing Olympics was highly discussed and hotly debated. Proponents of the ban argued that in addition to reducing drag and skin friction (Betuel 2020) it also trapped air and gave swimmers additional buoyancy compared to competitors in swimsuits made from traditional fabrics (“Fina Extends Swimsuit Regulations” 2009). Thus, because of unequal access to these suits, it was deemed unfair to allow them. And yet, despite the ban on plastic swimsuits (in favor of textiles) sixteen new world records have been broken since the ban, so perhaps the swimsuits would not have made it impossible for continued improvements to be made in the sport anyway. Similarly to the LZR swimsuit, World Athletics banned the use of Nike Alphafly sneakers in elite track and field competitions after thirty-one of the thirty-six podium positions at major marathons went to competitors wearing that shoe (Witts 2021). Studies showed that the sneakers could improve running efficiency by up to 4%, and in the case of both the LZR swimsuit and the Alphafly sneaker, critics called the use of these advanced garments “technological doping” (“Fina Extends Swimsuit Regulations” 2009; Witts 2021).
This language choice comparing wearable technologies to “doping” is particularly notable because the use of performance enhancing drugs is nearly universally looked down upon as unfair and unsportsmanlike, including in disabled elite sport (Weber et al. 2022).2 Doping, using drugs to alter one’s body and provide advantages is inherently an act of technological enhancement. However, as new technologies allow for increasingly specific testing, questions have also arisen about whether some athletes have “natural” advantages which make their inclusion in competition unfair. For example, it has long been the norm that men and women are expected to compete separately in elite sports—presumably because men on average are taller and produce higher levels of testosterone, making them “biologically superior” at some sports. I would remind readers that women are expected to weigh less and be more flexible, and that these attributes are associated with different skills in sporting. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge that the most prominent discourses about fairness between the sexes in sport focus on the supposed superiority of traits viewed as masculine.
Regardless, the traditional segregation into categories of men and women are being challenged today as distinctions are increasingly being made between gender and sex and athletes who are intersex or transgender are complicating assumptions of binary biological categories. This obsession with biological sex is exemplified by the controversies in which numerous women, including Caster Semenya, Christine Mboma, and Beatrice Masilingi, have been banned from competitions because their bodies naturally produce high levels of testosterone (Associated Press 2021) and the recent controversy surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who was accused of being transgender and obscuring the truth about it to gain advantage in the 2024 Olympics (Morrison 2024).
Of course, discrimination based on gender, sex, and/or disability cannot reasonably be discussed without remarking on how race impacts these as well. Segregation of sports based on race was the norm for decades. It was not until the early 1970s that all US leagues rejected racial or ethnic segregation, and until the 1990s that this desegregation was achieved worldwide (Ainbinder 2020). Even after this desegregation, the history of stereotyping Black athletes as “naturally” stronger or faster than people of other races persists. Based on these historical discourses, it is no coincidence that the athletes being banned from competition based on their Othered bodies are shrouded in discourses of having “unfair advantages.” Although an ample discussion of how sex and race continue to be weaponized in debates of fairness and exclusion in sport would require their own projects, the intersection of multiply marginalized identities is important to keep in mind when thinking about the broader discourses of fairness in sport and how different bodies are regulated.
Another important factor to consider in this discussion is that of who is making determinations about what is or is not “fair” and whom they imagine that their determinations are fair for. For example, none of the athletes who are banned due to their body’s natural state (as amputees or people producing “abnormal” levels of hormones) view these bans as fair. However, some people argue that as we have better understandings of biomedical functions and genetic predispositions are increasingly under our control, steps can and should be employed to reduce any potential advantage that these differences could result in. I am not alone in arguing that these regulations primarily function to maintain social boundaries and reproduce hierarchies that privilege whiteness, maleness, and heterosexualized gender performances alongside able-bodiedness (Rembis 2013; Watson 2014). Technological advances and the previously mentioned focus on constantly tracking and optimizing all aspects of one’s body have enabled us to judge traits that would previously have not even been known to the athletes or regulatory boards. No longer are people simply judging what athletes do to alter their bodies (such as the use of performance enhancing drugs). Instead, a shift is being made to use people’s natural attributes as evidence of their ineligibility to compete “fairly.” Cyborg anxiety now extends to include concerns of liminality and bodily enhancements of all kinds.
Frankly, concerns about prosthetic limbs enhancing disabled athletes beyond their ability to compete on equal footing are simply not supported by the reality of existing prosthetic technologies. While there is always the possibility of this changing in the future, current prosthetics are in fact much more limited in their functions than many able-bodied people imagine them to be, often capable of only a handful of specific uses. Walter Benjamin (1969) describes how there are certain things which technology can easily master—if we can create one technology to complete a task, we can likely create a different technology to complete that same task. However, some tasks are innate to humans that technology is far less capable of replicating.
Technology has difficulty reproducing the fluidity and range of movement that the average organic body naturally enables. For example, while the human body has evolved over millennia to maximize efficiency, scientists creating prosthetics must constantly address competing design concerns such as attempting to balance strength, stability, and flexibility. Hendren (2020) asks her readers to consider how many “micro-moves” are made when taking an action such as stabilizing one’s weight or catching an object, drawing attention to the intricacies of movement which are often taken for granted in biological limbs. Attempting to design prostheses which can articulate in all the ways that normative organic limbs do is a challenge not yet met. Even when using prosthetics designed for a singular, specific function—such as running blades—empirical studies have continued to find that the prosthetics do not provide any overall advantage, beyond simply enabling the user to complete the task at all (Kilgore 2021; Schoolman 2019; Weyand et al. 2009).
In addition to the physical limitations of prosthetic designs, the use of prostheses at all is a complication for elite athleticism. One prosthetics company critiques the argument that the use of running blades inherently provides athletes with an advantage, stating that the discourse of prosthetics as unfair is “kind of interesting when you consider that able-bodied athletes don’t have to worry about injuries or pain from poor-fitting prosthetics or losing their prosthetic limbs during competition” (“Prosthetics in the Olympics”, para. 8). Notably, Blake Leeper, the American sprinter discussed earlier who is a professional with years of experience, had his prosthetic leg fall off mid-run during the 2020 Paralympic Trails. One cannot simply ignore that prostheses, as a group of technologies, are susceptible to breaking down or malfunctioning. For example, over 160 technicians and staff members were required to staff the prosthesis repair shop during the 2024 Paris Paralympics (Sarniguet 2024).
Additionally, the financial cost of obtaining and maintaining running blades creates an economic disadvantage for disabled runners compared to their non-disabled counterparts (McRuer 2018). However, “despite the reality that many disabled athletes are precluded from participating in elite sport due to lack of financial resources, debates surrounding unfair advantages in competitive sport obscure the point of racial and class privilege and access to equipment as they tend to focus on physical advantage” (Watson et al. 2014, 13). As a result, even if certain assistive technologies are allowed in competition against non-disabled athletes, unequal access to the technologies means that fairness is not guaranteed to all potential participants (Burkett et al. 2011). These practical concerns are not addressed in most discourses of fairness, but we should consider the balance of not only advantages but also the hindrances that cyborgified athletes face when determining questions of fairness (Booher 2011).
Finally, it is important to note that in addition to the physical difficulties of dealing with prosthetic limbs, there are numerous social and psychological challenges that one must overcome before making it into elite competitions, which further undermines the notion that the use of prosthetics is somehow an advantage. As discussed above, prostheses are not the magical solution to disability that some paint them as. Both literal and metaphorical discussions of prostheses often focus on the liberation that comes along with hybridity but fail to address the painful experience of being a cyborg (Silva & Howe 2019). For example, Ellcessor notes that “lived experiences of disability and assistive technology are often frustrating, painful, or stigmatizing rather than politically liberating” (2017, 1763). Similarly, Bastian argues that even scholars who focus on cyborg theory neglect to “fully explore the discomfort anger, and fear that go along with the inability to fit, preferring to enunciate the positive aspects of being cyborgian” (2006, 1038), and Quinlan and Bates, too, highlight the tensions in the cyborg experience (2014). Furthermore, Earle and Shew remind us that maintenance, body changes, and wear on technologies all impact the lived experiences of “actual cyborgs,” technologized disabled people (2024). These challenges are notably absent from much of the discourse about fairness, which focuses only on the ways that technologies might make sports “too easy” for disabled athletes to be allowed to participate. Realistically, athletes who use prostheses in competition face their own challenges which are simply not considered when regulators attempt to use the notion of fairness to reify existing social categories and bar disabled athletes from competing alongside their able-bodied peers.
The concept of fair play, with its origins in nineteenth-century upper and upper-middle class English society (Renson 2009), is foundational to contemporary views of sports ethics (Bronikowska et al. 2019). However, fairness here is also definitionally vague. Newey (2016) argues that when what is fair is considered vague, there is an increased tendency to subconsciously revert to self-serving bias to determine fairness. Thus, it is no surprise that when determining the rules for inclusion and exclusion in various sporting competitions, those in power tend to prioritize the conditions that benefit those they view as similar to themselves. In these cases, those who are seen as Other are easy to exclude in the same breath as one calls for fairness in their sport.
Thus, having discussed how cultural identity, stereotypes of disability, notions of superiority, and attitudes about technology each influence views about prosthetic use in elite sports, I argue that the root of the issue is not actually a question of which technologies are “fair” to use, but instead a question of how the notion of fairness is applied and which cultural values it upholds. Because, despite its vague nature, fairness is often upheld as an essentialist discourse, there is a cultural belief that what is “fair” is obvious and cannot be questioned (Swartz & Watermeyer 2008). Furthermore, it is assumed to be an inherent good. Pistorius himself made appeals to fairness in his own argument for inclusion (McRuer, 2018). Thus, attempts to regulate fairness are inherently efforts to establish boundaries that will minimize notable differences between competitors.
This is common practice in many sports, not only through sex segregation but also through practices such as the implementation of weight classes in boxing and rowing. Of course, some qualities provide an advantage but are not regulated for, such as the height advantage in sports such as basketball and swimming, where height is neither categorized nor used to disqualify players. Realistically, some people simply have more natural advantages than others. For example, Michael Phelps has a vast wingspan, double-jointed ankles, and produces half the lactic acid of a typical athlete, allowing him to train harder without becoming sore (Hesse 2019). Each of those attributes individually would assist someone in swimming competitions, so it is no surprise that he has broken numerous world records—and yet, these traits (which he has no control over) have not led people to question whether it was fair for him to compete.
The hypocrisy of lauding Phelps’ naturally low levels of lactic acid while simultaneously condemning the naturally high levels of testosterone in female runners reinforces my argument that the issue of fairness is more about policing social categories than about actually attempting to create a level playing field. “Although notions of a level playing field are ostensibly questions for a supposedly objective science to answer…they are more properly understood as philosophical and ethical questions about what it is to be human and are founded upon the presumption of a natural body” (Norman & Moola 2011, 1273). Semenya, Mboma, and Masilingi produce hormone levels which contradict the binary sex categories laid out in our cultural understandings of the “natural” body and that is why it is seen as unethical for them to compete.
To be frank, sport can never be “fair” because it is inherently about comparing bodies against one another to determine who is more capable of completing some task (LaVaque-Manty 2005). Some sports allow for ties, but the point of competition is to compete. Athletes might be segregated by race, by sex, by weight, and other physical traits but these regulations are not based on natural, immutable categories. They are active decisions that attempt to split the ambiguity of real life into clean groups. Not all bodies are capable of doing the same things. Disabled people are highly aware of this already. People have individual skills, talents, interests, values, responsibilities, and opportunities, all of which intersect and impact what we are capable of in various facets of our lives. These factors are not “fair.” Perhaps fairness is an admirable but inherently flawed concern. A line is always being drawn somewhere that attempts to wrestle the ambiguities of life into an objective scale for decision-making. The important question is: Who does that line leave out and why?
While it may be difficult to imagine a post-fairness framework for sport, some have already begun to conceptualize sporting events that reframe restrictions on participation as unnecessarily exclusionary. One rather controversial example is that of The Enhanced Games (TEG), a competition wherein athletes are permitted encouraged to “push the limits” of what the human body can do and are not penalized for taking performance-enhancing substances. The organizers of TEG argue that traditional drug testing is not about safety, but about upholding a specific notion of fairness. These games view enhancement as an issue of autonomy, eschewing the supposedly paternalistic regulations of other events and, in an ideal world, allowing participants to be healthier that they would be should they be taking questionable substances in an attempt to get around drug screenings (Cox & Piatkowski 2024; Turnock 2024). However, despite their supposedly inclusive goals, TEG have not mentioned what assistive technologies might be permissible in their events (Richardson 2024).
Of course, I do not mean to imply that the use of assistive technologies should be understood as equivalent to utilizing substances that give one any advantage over other athletes. In fact, it should be clear from the rest of this paper that I do not believe that to be the case. However, I do wonder how those who are already challenging the idea of fairness as all at once obvious, unquestionable, and necessary might provide space for the equal inclusion of people with disabilities or bodily differences in elite sport.
Still, we need not entirely reshape the sports world to work towards a more equitable system. One crucial step is rethinking why people with disabilities are excluded and how they can be actively included in the future. Allow people with disabilities to compete alongside their nondisabled peers. It is a simple but consequential step that not only provides individual athletes with the opportunity to share their talents on the mainstage, but also implicitly and publicly challenges the idea that disabled people are inherently inferior and must be relegated to our own spaces to find a semblance of success.
Scholars have been arguing for decades that culture and technologies co-evolve and that everyone can be conceptualized as a cyborg relying on technologies on a regular basis. With this in mind, I argue that there are two factors that distinguish the use of prosthetics in sports as such a controversial issue: (1) ableist thinking, and the resulting desire to reify social categories that privilege those who are able-bodied, white, and male, and (2) technoableist notions that new, impressive-looking technologies are practically miraculous tools to erase disability. Technology is often viewed as an avenue to “fix” disability (Ellcessor 2017; Shew 2023), but cyborg theory offers the opportunity to not only reframe disability, but to challenge the entire concept of (dis)ability, allowing for a radical shift in how varied abilities can be accepted on their own merits rather than categorized as an essential (and negative) trait. In reality, prosthetic limbs do not make disabled people “better,” they simply allow them to complete certain tasks that they cannot easily complete without said prostheses. Until society shifts from viewing amputees as inherently lacking and incompetent—and in need of magical limbs—they will never be viewed as true peers to able-bodied athletes.
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