Muslim women's sporting spatialities: navigating culture, religion and moving bodies in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Working at the intersection of feminist sport and leisure studies and Muslim geographies, this paper reveals gendered Islamophobia as a spatialized process occurring at different scales in sport: fields of play, indoor facilities, organizational policy, discourse, moving bodies and emotion. Drawing upon focus groups and interviews with 38 Muslim women (aged 16-63 years old) living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we explore the embodied experiences and socio-spatial practices of Muslim women across a range of sports and physical activities. In so doing, we highlight the agency of Muslim women in finding and creating ‘safe’ sporting spaces that allow them to maintain their ‘embodied respectability’ while also accessing the physical, social and psychological benefits of sport and active recreation. We then illustrate how the three hijabs—visual, spatial, ethical—operate as ‘genderizing discourse’ that is enacted and enforced by some within the sports sector, the public and the Muslim community, thus challenging Muslim women’s ‘right’ to sport. Finally, we reveal Muslim women’s active participation and refusal to be made ‘invisible’ in sport, thus offering an important example of the complex relationship between gender, culture, and religion, and the political reimaginings of Muslim moving bodies in public sporting spaces. Ultimately, focusing on the everyday and embodied sporting experiences of Muslim women, this paper offers an examination of gendered Islamophobia as it is lived and felt by Muslim women in everyday sporting spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand.