A tale of embodied domination, queer feelings, and decolonial disruption in sport

Abstract

Embodiment of patriarchy and ethnicity is a controlling device that can prime an athlete for success within a sport model that reinforces domination. In this paper, we offer a piece of auto-bio-ethnographic prose that covers two aspects of the first authors' subjectivity (ethnicity and gender) in a colonial upbringing. Becoming aware of unfairness and oppression and taking action to change one's circumstances is a demanding process without a definitive end or realistic goal of stability. As such, we advocate for reflexivity, ‘conscientização’ (critical thinking; Freire, 2005) to pursue (self-)consciousness as the first step in a process of enabling social justice and resistance in and beyond sport. Moreover, we argue that conscientização is a queering process, as one comes to recognize (resistance to) dominant scripts, and the messiness of challenging disciplinary technologies and knowledges. Using an intersectional queer praxis in the creation of meaningful narratives about personal histories and sport, we acknowledge the challenges of speaking up and embrace a new model of research and writing, auto-bio-ethnographic storytelling, to deal with the complexity of multifaceted domination, awareness, and resistance. The narrative in this paper shows this process. We conclude the article with an invitation to embrace ‘queer feelings’ (Ahmed, 2004) and draw attention to embodiment in sport and social justice, with an ultimate goal of decolonial disruption.