ABSTRACT
Globally, there has been an inflow of black sporting bodies into traditionally white spaces. That influx has encouraged, incurred and presented an outpouring of dialogues on racial stereotyping and gender marking in sports, especially pitting the black male and female sport personalities against idealized white male and female bodies. Discourses on race and gender have therefore moved beyond the biological to social categories of analysis steeped in relations of power where race and gender converge. This chapter seeks to demonstrate categories of analysis in sport as subjectively built upon precepts of racialized and gendered ideals in society, particularly as they impact African and African diaspora bodies. Those edicts prove disparaging for men of colour who are vilified against their white counterparts and for white women who are not considered legitimate heirs to sport practices by virtue of not being male. The precepts are twice as contemptuous for women of colour who are removed from the sporting centre based on both social categories – race and gender.
