Mapping the field: Research about ethnic ‘Other’ females, sport and physical culture

In this opening chapter, we question what is ‘critical’ about academic studies of sport, race and gender, as they pertain to ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women, now. We re-trace the theoretical contours of the field in order to highlight and question problematic scholarship as well as to examine the nature of persisting issues. We specifically argue that whilst there has been a growth in research about ethnic female ‘Others’, the supposed ‘critical’ turn, which claims to situate difference and the voices of ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women, is still blighted by issues of past scholarship. In this respect, we claim that whilst the geopolitical context of sport and physical culture is undoubtedly changing, the purpose and functionality of sport, as a (whitening) force for good, remains. The omnipresent structures of inequality and control still require deeper political scrutiny, and an expression of ethnic ‘Other’ female agency as something more than just resistance to the cultural signifiers of particular ethnic community. We recognize the contribution of studies which do just this, and consider other ways in which alternative understandings of ethnic ‘female’ activism can be made visible, accounting for the multiplicity of power systems which affect their sporting, physical and leisure choices and experiences. By elucidating the consequences of problematic processes of knowledge production, we aim to re-address the stereotypical assumptions, mis-recognitions and silences that engulf the real lived material realities of varying groups of ethnic ‘Other’ girls and women. In conclusion, we pay homage to the critical contributions of feminisms of ethnic ‘Others’ as important lenses through which scholars can (re)position and (re)view the lives of ethnic ‘Other’ women, in and across the manifold and varied ways that these collectives of women see them.