The ‘women’s international sports movement'

Abstract

Abstract This article is about the recent history and development of the ‘Women’s International Sports Movement', characterised as a global cultural flow which links women from different countries across the world in a common cause. Its growth and apparent success is treated critically, raising questions about local-global connections and strategies, which in turn lead to questions about empowerment. Pivotal to the various groups and organisations which compose the international women's sports movement is the idea that they should cater to a global community of women, but it is argued that its original middle-class, elitist character and white, Western, educational and cultural hegemonic stance, has not changed fundamentally over the years. Empirical evidence shows that women from the developed world are in dominant positions throughout the movement and that they have been joined by ‘neo-colonial elites’ from the developing world, facilitating complex hegemonic relations based on Western consciousness and acculturation. Although in some ways the women's international sports movement has provided a channel of empowerment for women working for female sport in countries with a wide geographic spread, and it claims to embody a sensitivity to difference and an understanding of the lives and problems of women in the developing world, it has strong links with state apparatuses and stands the risk of remaining subject to overt or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination. The final argument is that if the women's international sports movement is going to grow in strength, it needs to transform the existing sets of power relations and to involve women from under-privileged backgrounds in a process of reconstruction. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd