Decolonial queering sport and movement in Palestine

Abstract

Sport and human movement can be expressions of embodied freedom in response to the violence of settler colonialism that reproduces racism, transphobia, ableism, and other systems of supremacy (McGuire-Adams et al., 2022). For example, Palestinians and allies have taken up direct action through the body, in a wave of global protests against the Israeli State's genocidal occupation of Palestine (Al Jazeera, 2023a). In this paper, I offer two arguments: 1) decolonial queer theory illuminates the racialized and sexualized tactics of the Israeli occupation; and 2) a decolonial queer framework within kinesiology can serve as a tool for analyzing the intersections of movement, identity, and decolonization in research. To support my argument, first I provide background research on the occupation of Palestine (Said, 1979). Second, I synthesize literature on decolonial queer theories concerning the liberation of Palestine, since “sexual and bodily freedom cannot be separated from the fight against Israeli colonialism” (Alqaisiya et al., 2023, p. 115). Third, the paper provides an analysis of sport and movement in Palestine using decolonial queer theory. For kinesiology and sport sociology scholars interested in decolonial work, looking to decolonial queer theories can provide intersectional and liberatory frameworks of analysis that attend to the sexualized tactics of Israeli settler colonization.