Hetero-sexy self/body work and basketball: The invisible sporting women of British Pakistani Muslim heritage

Abstract

Muslim women's personal relationship with the body beneath and beyond the veil has received little attention, especially in the sporting literature. Instead, talk of sporting Muslim women has been more frequently animated around a monolithic Orientalist narrative that sensationalises the veil, and asserts the oppression of Islamic thinking on gender equality and female sexuality. Similarly, discussions of South Asian Muslim women's participation in sport have been more routinely informed by ethnocentric stereotypes about the ‘passive Asian woman’. In this paper I engage postcolonial feminist thinking to move beyond uncritical dichotomous re/presentations that have systematically denied diverse sporting Muslim women an identity or bodily presence outside of the discursive identity of the veil. I focus on British Muslim Pakistani women who play basketball, and explore the multifarious, dynamic ways in which these women negotiate and perform various discourses pertaining to idealised yet dramaturgical notions of ‘hetero-sexy’ femininity on and off the court. By drawing the fe/male ocular away from the visual aesthetics of the veil and Islamic theocracy in shaping their engagement in sport, I seek to unveil something more personal about the relationship these sporting Muslim women have with the body that they own and an identity which they are actively carving out.