Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about sporting women of the Pacific Islands. It adds to the nascent body of literature on Pacific Island women and sport by presenting primary research into women’s experience of rugby union, other sports and exercise in Fiji, rugby union in Samoa, soccer in Solomon Islands and beach volleyball in Vanuatu. The book contributes to the broader feminist and critical sociology of sport. While sport-for-development policies may position Pacific Island girls and women as a physically inactive and/or socially excluded group that requires ‘intervention’, primary research foregrounding their sporting experiences can tell everyone a great deal about how power operates, and importantly, how it is contested, in and through sports in the Pacific. The feminist/transformative research reflexivity resonates with Pacific Island scholars’ work of decolonising knowledge about the region.