Serena Williams’ career, including her eloquent retirement essay, is testimony to an emerging feminism that is concerned for the physical, lived experience of women in their bodies. | OPINION by JacquelineMaley
Most noted is her ability to beat tennis balls, relentlessly and with unforgiving focus. She beats records – she has won 23 grand slam titles, the most of any female player in the history of modern tennis.She has beaten a thousand racist stereotypes, and a constant cruel focus on her body: her butt, her legs, her muscularity, her nose, her hair, and underlying it all, of course: the colour of her skin.She has beaten her biology – in 2017 she won the Australian Open, two months pregnant.
Williams is hyper-human, a world-famous figure who exists at the nexus between sporting great and icon – someone who has come to mean much more than the sum of what she does for a living.This week she announced – via a personal essay published in AmericanShe has played little in the last couple of years, but this announcement made official her withdrawal from competition.“I definitely don’t want to be pregnant again as an athlete,” she wrote.
She wrote the story herself, accompanied by iconic pictures where she looks like a sort of Olympian mother-goddess, her little girl hiding in the folds of her flowing gown.Instead, she used the word “transition” and said she was “evolving away from tennis”.She was open about the disappointment and frustration that accompanied her decision.“I don’t think it’s fair.
Perhaps the public resignation letter is yet another advance Williams had made on behalf of us, lesser women. Open conversations about the practical and social consequences of menstruation and menopause have begun, particularly in relation to workers. This is the ultimate third wave feminist dream: not just that women will be allowed to take an equal place in society, but that society itself will become more feminised, and meet them halfway.“I hate that I have to be at this crossroads,” she wrote.This reluctance is contrary to the marvellous spirit of resistance she embodies on the court and off.essay is when Williams talks about her anger, and the stubborn contrarianism that urges her to prove her critics wrong.
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