Given the vast number of feminist theorisations that value embodied forms of knowledge production, Women’s Studies International Forum (WSIF) have been instrumental in giving the popular, institutionalised, and corporeal cultural context of sport significant critical attention (e.g. see M. Ann Hall guest editorial collection published in 1987). With sport so closely intertwined within the national imaginary, what is less recognised in WSIF is sport as a fervent ground for different womyn of color to mobilise actions to challenge structures of power and control (exceptions include Hargreaves, 1987, 1999) as fans, coaches, leaders, leisure enthusiasts and athletes. For instance, US tennis moguls Serena and Venus Williams challenged racial discrimination and gender pay gaps while selling “Black woman magic” to a western neo-liberal sporting audience and global fan base (Douglas, 2018). South African athlete Caster Semenya engaged in legal actions to express her womanhood in sporting competitions against fragile and scientifically defunct definitions of appropriate (meaning: “white”) femininity; see Karkazis and Jordan-Young, 2018; Ratna and Samie, 2017). Recently, Indian transwomyn’s activism heralds their right to dance for love and fun with whomever they wish (Klubchandhee, 2021). These are important matters, not least because they show how differently marginalised womyn of color are united, across time and space, through their shared passions for sport, leisure, and physical activity whilst, concomitantly, exploring new and ongoing forms of oppression and resistance (Harper et al, 1997; Puar, 2007; Rowe, 2008). Significantly, we are not interested in focusing on womyn of colors’ engagement in sport, leisure, and physical activity as a form of “oppression Olympics” (based on additive models of analysis); rather we view sport, leisure, and physical activity as a polymorphous and dynamic g/local arena for exploring lived happenings, dreams, and pleasures (Andrews & Ritzer, 2007; Rand, 2021; Ratna and Samie, 2017; Joseph, 2014; McGuire et al., 2022).
Whilst Black feminist, postcolonial, and critical studies of race and ethnicity have focused on sport as a site of resistance and knowledge production for cis and trans womyn (Adepong, 2021; Carter-Francique et al., 2015; Carter-Francique & Flowers, 2013; Douglas, 2018; Greey, 2018; Jamieson & Villaverde, 2009; Joseph 2014; Zannell, 2018), we wish to further these works in this proposed special issue, to specifically include queer, crip, mad, and decolonial lenses. Our aim is to encourage authors to turn the lens inward to challenge theoretical gaps and absences in current scholarship about womyn of colour. We are reminded of the important theorisings of Black feminist scholars such as Marques Bey (2019), for example, who encourage acts of fugitivity to find spaces of being and knowing that queers and queries theory beyond the “white”, western, secular, and universalising social sciences canon. In this respect, we deeply value the prescient critique offered by Jose Munoz (1999, p. 10), that suggested: “[m]ost of the cornerstones of queer theory that are taught, cited, and canonized in gay and lesbian studies classrooms, publications, and conferences, are decidedly directed toward analysing white lesbians and gay men “without any analysis of race.” Munoz (1999) continues, “the vast majority of publications and conferences that fill out the discipline of queer theory continue to treat race as an addendum” (p. 11). We can critique the centrality of whiteness in many queer studies of sport and remedy this gap by sharing other stories and further deconstructing white identity (King, 2008; 2009). We can use queer theory to consider queer desire, understand our feelings of (in)difference in academia, create queer (non-normative) spaces, and explore alternate sport and movement cultures. Thus, the gendered and sexual ontologies of womyn of color are even more significant to retrieve, as storytellers of resistance, as knowers of their own sexual/sensual embodiments and dis/abilities, and as engagers in wide-ranging sport and movement practices.
Thus, this special issue aims to:
We are pleased to welcome submissions of essays, poetry, short fiction, activist statements, manifestos, notes from the field, and artwork that examine issues relating to a wide range of movement cultures among differently positioned womyn of color and, also, represent a significant contribution to the fields of feminist, queer, critical studies of race, transnationalism, and interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies. Papers may wish to consider (but are not limited to):
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- The relevance of western signifiers such as LGBTQI, and how womyn of different racial and ethnic groups experience their discursive and material inclusion/ exclusion from such political labels through sport and/or movement cultures.
- Hierarchical assemblages of gender, sexuality, race and nation, focussing upon the lives of womyn of colour, in and/or across the Global North and Global South, which reproduce or challenge structures and cultures of privilege and power through the context of sport and movement cultures.
- Re-claiming the lived politics, dreams and desires of womyn of colour, which examines and lays-out an agenda and/or methodology for de-colonising sport/movement knowledge productions.
- Engaging with the “erotic” (Lorde, 1984) within sport and movement cultures as a form of embodied, feminist, and queer critique.
- Critically exploring how sport and movement culture can be appropriated as an imperial, neo-liberal, patriarchal straightening project and/or used to resist such normative forces of power and control.
- Digital, online and offline, forms of racialised, queer politics and sport activisms.
- Queer and Indigenous embodiment during social isolation/pandemic times that serves to right relations or decrease social fidelity
- Womyn’s pluriversal politics in/ across the racial, gendered and sexual crevices that unify us as political actors, even as collective racial and ethnic projects limit the inclusion of diverse voices, and what this means for opening up spaces of mutuality and resistance in and through sport and other movement cultures.
- Reimagining the ways fugitivity links with a crip, mad, queer lens to forge coalition in everyday movements and practices to refuse binary, ableist framings of women’s corporeal, transnational, and political movements as well as strategize living “well” despite a constant state of surveillance.
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Manuscript submission information
March 1, 2024 – Abstract submission deadline date
March 31, 2024 – Review of abstracts
April 1, 2024 – Send invite for full manuscript submissions
August 1, 2024 – Due date for full manuscripts
~September 30, 2024 – first reviews completed
~Dec 20, 2024 second reviews (as relevant) completed
Jan 31 2025 – Introductory essay sent to WSIF managing editor for review
March 31, 2025 – Copy-editing process completed and final special issue pages confirmed.
For any queries related to Special Issue, please reach out to Managing Guest Editor, Dr. Aarti Ratna at aarti.ratna@northumbria.ac.uk
Guest editors
Professor Katherine Jamieson earned their PhD in Kinesiology from Michigan State University. Their teaching and research interests are focused on issues related to sport, power and social stratification. Dr. Jamieson’s most current research interests include feminist and postcolonial analyses of physical culture, including projects on the USLPGA as colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexualized sporting space; and theorizing sporting spaces through the lens of “brownness” which puts race into articulation with sexuality, gender, and social class. Dr. Jamieson’s academic leadership is focused on faculty mentoring and advancement, critical pedagogical practices, and transforming rhetoric of diversity into actions for equity. Dr. Jamieson’s co-edited contribution to the Journal of Lesbian Studies (published more than a decade ago in 2009) is the only other special issue specifically to focus upon complex assemblages of power, sport and movement culture.
Dr. Janelle Joseph is an Assistant Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education and Director of the Indigeneity, Diaspora, Equity, and Anti-Racism in Sport (IDEAS) Lab. She is an internationally recognized scholar committed to disseminating knowledge about marginalized communities and diasporic physical activities using critical race theory and post-colonial studies. Dr. Joseph completed two post-doctoral fellowships, one in New Zealand at the University of Otago and the other a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship held at Ontario Tech University. She was elected to the Royal Society Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2022 and selected as the 2023 Canadian Association of Leisure Studies Emerging Scholar. As a woman racialized as Black, cis-gendered, and currently able-bodied, born of Caribbean heritage in Tkaronto ((Toronto, Ontario, Canada), Dr. Joseph is committed to research that transforms communities and systems.
Dr. Kyoung-yim Kim received their Ph.D. from the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto. She held a Social Science Research Council of U.S.A., and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Research Fellowship at Tohoku University, Japan. Born and raised in South Korea, their work has dealt with three major geographic locations of the U.S., Korea, and Japan, where the ties and tensions are strong with colonial, military, and imperial relations. Dr. Kim’s research focuses on interlocking systems of power in media, labor migration, environmentalism, and civic solidarity and activism within transnational, postcolonial, imperial, and military contexts. Dr. Kim is an associate professor of the practice of social science at Boston College, U.S.A., where she is cross appointed in the Department of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies.
Dr. Aarti Ratna is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Northumbria University. Their most recent work A Nation of Family and Friends (contracted with Rutgers University Press) applies queer of color theorising, transnational feminism, and decolonial critique, to explore the politics of race, gender, and the nation. Dr. Ratna is well known for the co-edited collection Race, Gender and Sport, and their published work around women of the South Asian diaspora. In more recent work, Dr. Ratna has explored the social significance of walking as a leisure pastime and methodological strategy, to explore the lived dynamics of belonging and citizenship for first-generation Gujarati Indian migrants. In her work and activisms, Dr. Ratna continues to call-out white supremacist machinations of the neo-liberal academy.
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