‘Who wants to make aloo gobi when you can bend it like Beckham?’ British Asian females and their racialised experiences of gender and identity in women's football

Abstract

Capturing the football frenzy of the 2002 FIFA World Cup Finals in Japan and South Korea, the film Bend It Like Beckham hit the British movie screens. The film is about Jess, a young Sikh girl, who dreams of playing football for England. Although the film helped to raise the public visibility of British Asian girls who play football in this country, worryingly, it also reproduced the popular belief that playing sport is seen to be antithetical to British Asian family traditions, culture and religion. This mirrors much of the wider research about British Asian males as it is believed, despite the rich diversity of British Asian leagues, teams and football networks, that playing sport at elite levels is not as important to British Asians as following traditional routes of success through the educational system. In this article, I am critical about the essentialist and stereotypical nature of past research that mostly serves to render invisible the multiplicity of British Asian females' experiences. Adopting a feminist conceptualisation of difference and intersectionality, I explore the vicissitudes of British Asian females' racialized experience of gender and identity. I argue that British Asian females' interpretations of ‘femininity’ does not necessarily fit into a simple polarity, that is as either ‘traditional’ (the ability to undertake domestic chores and behave in an ‘honourable’ fashion) or ‘modern’ (assimilating to ‘English’ values and lifestyles, e.g. going out and socializing with boys). Their identities relating to their Asianness and femaleness are increasingly hybrid and fluid, across time and space.