Some of us are still brave: Sport and the social production of black femaleness

Abstract

This chapter explores the contemporary politics of black female embodiment in the discursive sites of tennis, and track and field. Because the classification of black women’s bodies has always been inextricable from their location in relation to their humanity, I am interested in how the (hyper)visible arena of sport (re)produces and reinforces public understandings of black female alterity. I contend that the insistent querying of the humanness of black female athletes and their bodies is a feminist issue, because the corporeal integrity and personhood of black women is not simply being questioned, it is being violated. I demonstrate how the development of integrated and complex analyses of discourses of difference and domination is key to the cultivation of any meaningful and liberatory feminist sporting projects.