Introductory essay: Race, gender and queering/querying sport and movement cultures

Abstract

Queer theorizations offer an evocative lens to trouble taken-for-granted readings of different cultural contexts, including those of sport and movement cultures. Yet, a distinct focus on the moving body is missing from both women's studies and race and ethnic studies, ignoring the utility of this cultural context for exploring complex inequalities at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and nation. Acknowledging the paucity of literature that focuses on women of color and queerness in socio-cultural studies of sport, in this Special Issue opening essay we provide an original critique of this literature and directions for future study. Specifically, we engage in queer, transnational, feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial knowledge systems, to better position pressing debates about race, gender, and sexuality. We argue that through queer disruption, new critical insights about sport and movement cultures can be gleaned, which trouble predominant, white, and western framings of being “in the closet”, apparent inclusion, and neoliberal multiculturalism. By turning our critical lens inwards to query queer theorizations, we also offer an alternative approach that makes visible queer translations and centers race and non-normativity in cultural and material analyses of sport and movement cultures, locally and transnationally.