Breaking the Gender Barrier: Hayley Wickenheiser

Hayley Wickenhieser has been the face and name highly spoken of when women's hockey is talked about around the world. A member and long time captain of Canada's national women's hockey team, Wickenheiser has always been a strong advocate for the sport and a women whom is not afraid to break the gender barrier of women playing with men. In a culture that is dominated by mens pro sports, she attempted to break the barrier by playing professional mens hockey after spending over a decade on the Canadian women's national team. Her ability to dominate the women's game after winning consistent olympic gold medals gave her the opportunity to go to Finland and play in the country's professional men's league. This created a massive uproar of media attention, speculating her to be more masculine and question her sexuality. Critics whom live in our culture of sport and media target elite women athletes like herself due to their innate abilities of succeeding beyond expectations of average women athletes. 

Even though it has been undoubtedly known that she is a very gifted athlete that always is looking to challenge herself, she has been perceived as a very masculine and many have challenged her as being a lesbian. The culture we live in has given her the title as "butch", in which many outstanding female athletes are given throughout the world of athletics and sport. The challenge of gender norms my be true in these instances, but for Wickenheiser this has been seen untrue. She is married and has a 12 year old son. Therefore, she breaks these gender norms and stereotypes as being a heterosexual mother. This is very typical in a sport like women's hockey to target and label these women as masculine or lesbian due to the nature of hockey being a very masculine sport. But for Wickenheiser, she has turned her image into a feminine view to avoid and remove the typical gender norms we see. She has been seen numerous times on covers of women's magazines and speaks at women's conference as an advocate for women's athletics and sport. 

It has been seen that gender and gender performance in sports is fluid, dynamic, and constantly changing. Wickenheiser is a prime example of proof that gender performance is constantly changing with advancements in women's abilities and skills to raise themselves to a level that some men may never reach. Even though this is very rare, women like Wickenheiser try to improve others and pass on their knowledge in hopes of developing the game for women. But still, sexuality is still seen at stand still, in hopes of changing stereotypes in women sport. Even though many elite female athletes make their mark known of their straight sexuality in masculine dominated sports. Women like Wickenheiser are proof of female athletes who use their voices and elite status to make others aware of the gender differences of male and female sport.