Feminist Softball as Everyday Utopia

In 1987, Susan Birrell and Diana Richter wrote “Is a Diamond Forever?” a study of feminist softball teams and their players’ efforts to use sport as a vehicle of political transformation, one of several pieces in which Birrell takes up sport as a feminist strategy. In this essay, I discuss the article as a historical artifact, contextualizing it in relation to intersectional critiques of second-wave feminism that readers might bring to it today. I argue that Birrell and Richter's emphasis on feminist attempts to transform sport remain relevant in a context where some progressive scholarship tends to prioritize critique over concrete change. I suggest that the feminist softball discussed by Birrell and Richter serves as an example of prefigurative or utopian politics or, in other words, activism through which people try to put their visions of socially just futures into practice. “Is a Diamond Forever?” reminds us of the feminist history of creative efforts to transform conventional models of sport and to engage the “potentialities” of sport in the project of making a better world.