Race, Gender and Sport

The Politics of Ethnic 'Other' Girls and Women

Aarti Ratna, Samaya F. Samie, Aarti Ratna, Samaya F. Samie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317266877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The experiences of ethnic 'Other' females have – until recently – been widely overlooked in the study of sport. There continues to be a need to produce critical scholarship about ethnic 'Other' girls and women in sport and physical culture, in order to represent their complex, multifarious and dynamic lived realities. This international collection of critical essays provides compelling insight into the lived realities of ethnic 'Other' females in sport.

Throughout the book, contributors either draw on the political consciousnesses of 'Other' feminisms, or privilege the voices of ethnic 'Other' girls and women so as to broaden, diversify and advance critical thinking pertaining to ethnic 'Other' females in sport and physical culture. The purpose of the collection is both to produce knowledge and privilege otherwise subjugated knowledges, which individually and collectively present counter-narratives that better speak to the lived realities of racially oppressed groups of women and girls.

Race, Gender and Sport: The Politics of Ethnic 'Other' Girls and Women is important reading for all students and scholars with an interest in the sociology of sport, gender studies, or race and ethnicity studies.

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Chapter 1
Mapping the field

Research about ethnic ‘Other’ females, sport and physical culture

Aarti Ratna and Samaya Farooq Samie

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Introduction

This chapter critically charts research about race, gender and sport, particularly as it pertains to the representation of ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women’s voices, identities and experiences in sport and physical culture.¹ In mapping developments in the field, our objectives are twofold. First, to interrogate the theoretical interjections and critical turns in knowledge production, that shape the predominant representations of different groups of ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women, across time and space. And second to critically assess the theoretical contours that have broadened knowledge, and expose moments when researchers have (perhaps inadvertently) limited the possibility for further ‘critical’ insights to be produced. We begin with a broad debate about sport, race relations and gender, and emphasise the omission of knowledge about ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the largely positivistic, androcentric, assimilationist, ethnocentric and Eurocentric thinking which has colonised much of the scholarship in the sociology of sport. Moving on from this, we problematise both the reproduction of dominant discourses about (some) ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women and the cultural institution of sport. Reflecting on subjugated knowledges and the agencies of ethnic ‘Other’ females, we critically debate the turn in knowledge production which sensitises the politics of difference and intersectionality. The final section of this chapter provides a critique of the growing body of scholarship about ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women, sport and physical culture, since the turn of the millennium produced in, by and predominantly for Western countries. Although the narrative developed is generally ordered from past to present, we do not suggest that shifts in knowledge production are by any means linear, becoming more progressive with the march of time (see Caudwell, 2011). Instead, we note that the process has been rather patchy and is characterised by peaks and troughs in critical understanding as well as progressions and regressions in theoretical engagement, in and across particular moments of time. Whilst we attempt to provide a critical review of pertinent scholarly work written about particular gendered ethnic ‘Other’ groups, we remain mindful of one important fact: that this reflection cannot be deemed ‘complete’ by any means. Oppressive forces of power and control will be experienced differentially in and between ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women, and we do want to conflate and/or universalise group experiences (see below for further debate). Yet we cannot review the particular histories, voices, dynamic and manifold experiences of every group – who may fall within the ethnic ‘Other’ female label – in one chapter either. Instead, our intention for this chapter is to examine the interplay between structural determinants and systems of power, and the complexities and vagaries of particular ethnic ‘Other’ female experiences, and their agentic beings and becomings, purely as a means to illustrate critical issues and turns in knowledge production. This is our critical reading, but one which we sincerely hope provides an avenue and platform for other scholars who may also wish to further interrogate such issues in their own studies as well as to interrogate what this may mean for the sporting, physical needs, pleasures, experiences and endeavours of different groups, within and across broader ethnic ‘Other’ female groupings.

Sport, race relations and gender: the problems and perils of categorical research

In 1989 Birrell published what many sports scholars deem to be a canonical text in sport studies. Race Relations Theories in Sport heightened awareness about the extent to which the complex issues of race, ethnicity, cultural difference and so on were either being obscured or explored superficially. When we first encountered this text in the early 2000s, being amongst a handful of non-White feminist (and female) scholars trying to get ahead in what remains a predominantly White, masculinist institution, we embraced it for many reasons. We were concerned about the ways in which issues of race, ethnicity and gender had traditionally been documented (by White, Western researchers, in and through selected epistemological, ontological and methodological traditions) written in and predominantly produced for English speaking countries (or ‘the West’). That earlier discussions of racial and gendered tropes were replete with a plethora of omissions, inaccuracies and misrepresentations about non-White women and girls, and their multifarious relationships to sport and physical culture. Yet at the time of Birrell’s publication, little attention had been placed on such issues. Only a handful of critical sport scholarship about non-White women and girls even existed within the sub-discipline of sport sociology, or sport and leisure studies (see e.g. Douglas, 1988a, 1988b; Raval, 1989; Trivedi, 1984), and most of what was produced was unpublished (and therefore not widely available to the general public, or for citation in scholarly or other intellectual contexts) (e.g. Abney, 1988; Alexander, 1978; Barclay, 1979; Murphy, 1980). Some critical literature about minoritised females did exist, but it was published in cultural studies or mainstream sociology, and did not deal with sport per se. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, Black feminist theorists were critiquing the essentialism and the referentiality in theorising ‘woman’ in (secular, liberal) feminist theory and political activity (Davis, 1981; Feminist Review, 1984) and Black feminist politics were taking aim at the concept of “global sisterhood” for its failure “to fully take on board the power relations that divided” women (Brah and Phoenix, 2004: 76). (South) Asian feminists, too, were vigorously challenging the essentialist connotations of racism, rejecting in particular universalist theories of ‘Other’ women’s identity as unjust and oppressive (Amos and Parmar, 1984; Grewal et al., 1988; Trivedi, 1984). However, sports scholars rarely engaged with this broader spectrum of feminist thinking and/or critical studies of race, controlling and limiting, in turn, the ways that ethnic ‘Other’ women and girls’ engagement with sport was known and understood (both within and beyond the sporting literature).²

Instead, sport was romanticised as an arena for social and civic progress, and positioned as an essential ‘social service’ and an integral feature of ‘social planning in Britain’ (Coghlan and Webb, 1990; DoE, 1975). That is, sport was portrayed as an arena for racial progress, a force for good (Carrington, 2010). Issues of racial inequalities were explored idiosyncratically and represented as a ‘thing’ that Black men were believed to live with as the otherwise meritocratic system of sport adapted and adjusted (see Birrell, 1989). During the 1960s and 1970s, researchers sought to develop “a generalized sociological framework for the analysis of race, racism and race relations” (Jarvie and Reid, 1997: 213; see also Cashmore, 1996), but gender was rarely considered as a relevant or necessary area of social inquiry. The persistence of racial myths and fallacies about ‘natural’ physical strengths, and ‘intellectual’ inadequacies of certain (male) cultural groups (e.g. African Americans) dominated the literature (e.g. Kane, 1971). As Wiggins (1989: 158) noted, “people from all walks of life – coaches, athletes, trainers, cultural anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, physical educators, biologists, medical doctors, and sportscasters” were putting forward “their own theories regarding racial differences and their possible effects on sport performance”, especially as it related to Black (male) athletes. Likewise, quantitative studies that privileged androcentric and positivistic epistemologies erased females from this documented knowledge, and rarely critiqued the character of racial oppressions either. For example, researchers seldom questioned the production of “stereotypes, prejudices and myths about ethnic minority groups” and the various contributions this type of thinking had on strengthening discrimination against, and legitimising the under-representation of ethnic minority peoples within certain sports (Jarvie and Reid, 1997: 211; see also Coakley, 1986; Eitzen and Sage, 1978; Spracklen, 2008). In fact, despite a wealth of literature tracing the role of sport in distributing, establishing and maintaining “dominant patterns of social organisation and […] power” within and beyond the colonies (Houlihan, 1991: 10; see also Dunae, 1988; Mangan, 1986; Stoddart, 1988), much of this earlier research ignored the impact of colonial legacies in manufacturing racial mythologies between White and non-White peoples in the metropolis. For instance, scholarship of the time frequently overlooked the impact of historical connections between certain sports, and the assumed racial and ethnic differences that categorised and juxtaposed Whites as superior saviours and leaders (read: colonisers) and represented non-Whites as inferior, backward and the uncivilised ‘Others’ (read: colonised) (see Birrell, 1989; Carrington, 2010; Wiggins, 1989). Likewise, the position and actions of sporting White women during this imperial age was, and still is, relatively overlooked (Nicholson, this volume). The sports literature was, instead, polarised, with discussions about gender centralising the experiences of White (typically middle-class, able-bodied, heterosexual) women, and talk of race privileging African Caribbean or African American men (Birrell, 1989, 1990; Bruening, 2005; Hargreaves, 2000; Scraton, 2001). When attention was paid to diverse ethnic cultural groups, predominantly White, fe/male researchers perpetuated ethnocentric perceptions about the agentic capacity of non-White females (see e.g. Carrington et al., 1987; Leaman, 1984; Leaman and Carrington, 1985; Lewis, 1979), overlooking how factors such as ‘White patriarchy’ and/or ‘racism’ itself (the institution, ideologies, practices and product) negatively impacted women of colour in sport (see Raval’s 1989 response to Carrington et al.’s. 1987 work). Birrell (1989, 1990) suggested that to move beyond bias models of understanding, race needed to be viewed as more than just a descriptive variable. More research was required in order to examine how ideologies about race produced racial categorisations, that over time and across different context developed and crystallised into dominant racial relations of power and control. She argued that materialist theories, for instance, offered the potential to critically understand racial relations as shaped by both capitalist and colonial projects (Birrell, 1989). At this time, she proposed a cultural studies solution to further exploring the social constructions of race:

[…] the field [the socio-cultural analysis of sport] might benefit from a blending of materialist and cultural analyses of the sort that cultural studies offers […]. The analysis would be critical and reflexive; it would take into account the contours of the particular relations of dominance and subordination that exist among groups located at the intersections of class and racial conflicts; it would be grounded in a historical analysis or the origins of such relations; it would carefully attend to the production of ideologies of dominance and subordination; and it would utilize analytical strategies that respect the dialectical relationship between material conditions and cultural reproduction.

(Birrell, 1989: 220)

Of course, not all research produced on Black and ethnic ‘Others’ during the 1980s was complicit in perpetuating racial mythologies or Eurocentric ideologies. Researchers did recognise that White, African Caribbean and South Asian women all faced different opportunities and restrictions in relation to all aspects of their life within (British) society. Many called for “research on (racial) minorities” to entail a focus on ethnicity and the notion of “groups within groups within groups” (Fleming, 1994: 169; see also Raval, 1989). The reliance on quantitative methodologies greatly impeded progress towards more radical and critical interventions. Ethnic ‘Other’ female groups were represented as ‘hard to reach’, yet very few concrete efforts were made to consider, much less to engage, these diverse communities of women.

Dominant discourses, subjugated knowledges and (political) agency

At the turn of the millennium – almost a decade after Birrell’s poignant call for more ‘critical scholarship’ to be produced on the sporting experiences of women of colour – we were disturbed by the fact that scholarly (and political) enquiries about the structures, cultures and discourses omnipresent in sport and society remained scarce, and narratives about the agentic potential of ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women ‘inside’ of these spaces were still subjugated. Exceptions, did, of course, exist (see Douglas, 2002; Hargreaves, 2000; Jamieson, 1998, 2003; Scraton, 2001; Smith, 1992). The critical contribution by Hargreaves’ Heroines of Sport, published in 2000 as a collection of essays about “different groups of women whose stories had been excluded from previous accounts of women’s sports and female heroism”, was crucial in complicating otherwise uncritical and essentialist debates about issues of race, ethnicity and gender (2000: 8). This seminal work situated Black women in South Africa; Muslim women from the Middle East; Aboriginal women from Australia and Canada; and lesbian and disabled women from different countries worldwide, as active agents in the making and shaping of their own lives and sporting endeavours. It drew attention to the everyday agencies and acts of resistance that collectively marked the experiences of women who existed on the margins of sport, in terms of race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class and culture, and who were otherwise forgotten or excluded from intellectual debates about sport (ibid.: 5). Despite this promising turn, the wider body of research in this area was heavily skewed, focusing either on African American (Black) women or South Asian women (in Britain). The sporting preferences...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: sport, race and gender – the politics of ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women
• 1 Mapping the field: research about ethnic ‘Other’ females, sport and physical culture
• Part I Theoretical interventions and knowledge production
• Part II Experiences at the intersections of identity
• Part III Everyday struggles and transformative practice
• Index