ABSTRACT
A decade ago, Susan Birrell (1989, 1990: 186) argued for ‘a broadening of our theoretical frameworks and theorizing difference within the field of gender and sport’. Ten years on, there appears to be little evidence that feminist sport theorists, or indeed sport sociologists in general, have risen to this task particularly concerning the complex relationships between race, gender and class. It remains the case that most research and writing tends to concentrate on sport as a key institutional site for the construction of gender (Birrell 1988; Birrell and Cole 1994; Hargreaves 1994; Hall, 1996) or the relationship between race and sport (Cashmore 1982; Carrington, Chivers and Williams 1987; Jarvie 1991). In the former, the emphasis is predominantly (although not exclusively) on white sportswomen, and in the latter, black sportsmen. Not only is there a serious lack of information on black women’s experiences of sport but there have been few attempts to provide a critical analysis that ‘listens to’ the writings and autobiographies of black women both inside and outside sport (Birrell 1990). Sport sociology and feminist sport scholarship in the UK have been virtually
silent about the experiences of black women in sport and sport as a racialized and engendered arena. White women, who have dominated feminist sport discourse, have failed to address sufficiently the marginalization of black women and have failed to seriously interrogate their own whiteness. I place myself within this dominant white feminist sport discourse and the following discussion is a reflexive consideration of why this position is untenable and contradicts the fundamental definition of feminism as anti-oppressive and committed to challenging the marginalization of all women. We, as white feminists, are in a privileged position and cannot simply hide behind guilty and apologetic statements (De Groot 1996). Sporting feminism cannot analyse sport without fundamentally challenging it as a racialized arena, recognizing difference as a key theoretical and political challenge. Beyond the world of sport, theorizing difference has been high on the agenda
of feminist thought for the past two decades. During this time there has been an abundance of work theorizing ‘difference’ initiated by black feminists1 (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1993; Bhavnani and Phoenix 1994; Brah 1996; Collins 1990;
hooks 1984, 1989, 1991; Mirza 1997) and more recently within the debates around postmodernism and poststructuralism (Butler 1990; Elam 1994; Probyn 1994, 1996; Spivak 1992). In addressing the invisibility and marginalization of black women in feminism, Mirza argues:
The invisibility of black women speaks of the separate narrative constructions of race, gender and class: it is a racial discourse, where the subject is male; in a gendered discourse, where the subject is white; and a class discourse, where race has no place.
