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Despite a long history of participation in sports, women have yet to gain equal access to this male-dominated realm. The national sports culture continues to regard them as marginal, if not invisible. For more than a century, women athletes have struggled against a subordinate status based on rigid definitions of female sexuality, an emphasis on white middle-class standards of beauty, and restrictive cultural expectations of motherhood. This dissertation, however, reveals a vital story of feminist women who have consistently stretched the boundaries of gender and have actively carved out their own identities as women, athletes, and mothers while playing an integral role in the development of sports. Drawing on oral history, archival materials, and a wide range of other sources, I provide a comparative analysis of women's experiences playing basketball and Roller Derby. These two sports have included women from their outset and at different times both challenged society's restrictions on women's femininity, sexuality, and physical abilities. One of my major objectives is to explore and explain the tension between women's representation and agency, between cultural constructs and women's lives, between images of women and their individual identities. Both women and men struggle for self-definition in the world they inhabit, and they often surmount formidable obstacles on the path to change not only themselves but also the ideals against which they measure themselves. In a culture that champions individualism, women "sweat" their identities because they want to be themselves, yet realize that self-definition is still shaped by a powerful set of cultural ideals and pressures about what it means to be male or female, man or woman, boy or girl. While these women sporting pioneers pushed their way into the public limelight, they worked to prove that athleticism could in fact be a part of the female identity, even while that identity was continually in flux. But until American society is ready to accept women as viable athletes, realize that athleticism can be a feminine and masculine quality, and allow women to play multiple roles, women will continue to sweat their femininity.

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The current debate about women and gender in development, sustainable development, and the impact of western development systems on Third World countries, has provided the primary impetus for this study. The ongoing debate is between two opposing view points, profit-oriented and people-oriented. This study focuses primarily on the newly independent Eastern Caribbean States, former British colonies referred to as the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). The Caribbean as a region has largely been lumped together with Latin America, and these nation states have not attracted many scholars to examine or investigate their intrinsic development and political systems. My intent is not to present a definite or fixed model, but to suggest an alternative development paradigm for the Eastern Caribbean. The specific contours of the transformation process would vary from one nation or area to another, depending on particular individualized circumstances. The broad based principles of the transformation process would nevertheless be applicable to the larger Caribbean region, as well as other Less Industrialized Countries. I drew on grounded theory and qualitative research to describe and analyze the practices and factors that characterize a development project in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. This approach is particularly appropriate for a topic which is multi-dimensional in its investigation. Using multiple qualitative data sources and the involvement of the investigator as a researcher and participant observer to the social environment of the chosen site, allowed for the greatest possible depth and richness in this study. It included opportunities for observations of the formal and informal processes of the project implementation. The proposed alternative paradigm includes factors such as development that redefines growth; development in which women play a central, active and guiding role; development which revitalizes indigenous culture and identity; development that empowers the poor majority and builds a basis for genuine democracy; development that permits a spectrum of political and economic options and experiments. The practical outcome is that Eastern Caribbean Nations and Less Industrialized Countries no longer have to adhere rigidly to one paradigm to guide their development path.

This dissertation takes a critical standpoint on developmentalism, a theoretical perspective which conceptualizes development as more than an apolitical, socio-economic endeavor: Instead, development is presented as an artificially orchestrated network of institutions and practices which have systematically created the objects of which they spoke. It molds and arranges them in specific and limited ways in order to reproduce relations of dominance. This dissertation will explore the power/knowledge nexus within the Gender, Environment and Development (GED) discourse that has been articulated by the United Nations within the Sustainable Human Development paradigm, to examine the problematization of the concepts of gender and the environment and their subsequent appropriation and bureaucratization to reproduce relations of dominance. French philosopher Michel Foucault through his complex analysis of power and knowledge, lends the most appropriate framework to critically examine the negotiation and balance of power through the analyses of discourse. This dissertation uses Foucault's fundamental insights into the nature and dynamics of discourse, power and knowledge to analyze dominant disciplinary and normative mechanisms, and thereby to illustrate how the West has produced discourses about the Third World to maintain dominance over it. In addition to the analysis of development as a discourse of power, this dissertation studies in depth the complex constructions of gender and the environment within the development discourse of the United Nations using a unique tripartite methodology which reveals the power/knowledge nexus embedded within representative gender, environment and development discursive texts. It emphasizes the objectification of Third World women and the environment as mere resources to the economy via the textual rules of formation and policy. Therefore, through its deconstruction of "underdevelopment" as articulated within the discourse on gender and the environment, this dissertation allows for the anthropologization of this domain in a manner oppositional to those based on liberal and individualistic Western notions of equity, efficiency, rationality, progress, growth and empowerment. In this way, it illustrates the spaces created by the trajectories of the three major strategies through which development has been deployed.