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“In thinking about queer bodies and community sports spaces, there is an explicit commitment to doing sports differently.” Who’s Coming Out to Play
In light of the upcoming (and previously postponed) 2020 Summer Olympic games, this week’s blog post encourages us to reconsider our perceptions and beliefs surrounding sports, athletic spaces, and societal definitions of athletic bodies. From online exercise videos; to ballet classes; to Olympic sports; MQUP author Claire Carter explores the various ways in which we can question societal narratives surrounding exercise and physical fitness, while shedding light on how queer community sports help create spaces that are more enriching, more inclusive, and more accessible.
In her new book Who’s Coming Out to Play: Disruption and Disorientation in Queer Community Sports, Claire Carter considers the potential of queer community sports to disrupt notions of the embodiment of gender and community, while maintaining an awareness of numerous factors that limit this potential. Exploring queer teams and leagues of varying sizes and from various locations, this book focuses on leagues that have previously identified as women’s or lesbian and are now becoming trans and genderqueer inclusive. Who’s Coming Out to Play paints a vivid picture of the lived experiences of queer bodies in queer sporting spaces, exploring both the possibilities and the continued problems they face.
In many Canadian cities, second vaccinations are becoming available and many people are starting to think about what ‘opening up’ will look and feel like. Conversations are taking place about our various levels of comfort at the idea of getting together, or about going out to eat, to a movie, or back to the pool or gym. Our daily routines and everyday interactions with people, as well as our understandings of bodies, ways of keeping healthy, and taking care of each other, have been massively impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Community spaces and programming are critical for many queers – for self-validation and identity, well-being, and various forms of support, and over the past many months, we have had to re-imagine ways of being together – at a distance. My book on queer community sports Who’s Coming Out to Play was published during the pandemic – during which time, many of the leagues I reference could not ‘come out to play.’ I adapted my own exercise habits and started doing online exercise videos with my partner; the exercises were great and my body definitely benefitted from the changes to my routine. However, many of these exercise classes reinforce dominant narratives about exercise that are highly gendered, prioritizing appearance and weight loss, and are transmitted by normatively ‘fit’ bodies, all of which leaves me longing for queerer movement options.
Amongst the many online exercise options, there is one fantastic example that disrupts this normative frame: Ballez, a ballet company begun in 2011 by genderqueer lesbian choreographer Katy Pyle. Ballez is the ballet school and movement community for those ‘forced into ballet’s shadows’ that demands “ballet defy its racist, cishetero patriarchal lineage, and embrace the vitality and powerful life force of positive, inclusive change.” I learnt about Ballez researching for a current collaborative project Moving Communities with Common Weal Community Arts and dance instructors at FadaDance Troupe. Ballez has a series of free dance instruction videos on YouTube, and while they were posted prior to the pandemic, they undoubtedly enriched many queers lockdown experiences.
Ballez’s mission and the space it is fostering connect to core aspects of queer community sports. Queer community sports are based in feminist principles of collegiality, sociality, and fun over and above winning (Caudwell 2007; Lenskyj 2003) and seek to provide a space of inclusiveness for many who have not felt welcome or have experienced discrimination or harassment within mainstream sports. Pyle speaks directly to this in an introductory video, asking participants to introduce themselves, including their pronouns, and to share problems they have with ballet as well as values they would like to cultivate with others. Pyle endeavours to queer the space by, for example, incorporating a ‘butch nod’ with dégagés and imagining the Ballez dance studio as a queer bar, a meeting place for moving and connecting with other queers. In an interview with Tisch Dance in 2018 Pyle recounts that when they were younger, they were told that their body was not acceptable within traditional ballet. Reflecting on this, Pyle asks, did that mean their body itself, the way they moved was a failure or did it mean there were other ways of moving to explore? This powerfully connects to my research on the potential of queer community sports spaces to foster new ways of imagining sporting bodies and new ways of relating and moving together (Carter 2021). Efforts to become more trans and genderqueer inclusive, as one participant expressed to me, led to greater comfortability for all bodies because now there was no assumption of what a queer sporting body looks like.
Sports and movement spaces have been experienced, as noted above, as discriminatory or oppressive for many due to fat phobic, racist, transphobic, homophobic, ableist, and sexist notions of bodily capability and health. As we begin the second summer of Covid, one of the major global sporting events is set to take place. Hubbard (New Zealand Weightlifter) and Berry (American Hammer Thrower) are two examples of athletes that encourage us to reflect and question our relationship to sports and their connection to societal structures and institutions of power. There are many important critiques of the Olympics (for example, Dhoot 2015; Sykes 2017), but as an international event they serve as an opportunity for us to critically reflect on sports and spaces of collaborative movement. What are the base principles we as a society want to uphold around participation and the relationship of sports, athletes, and social justice? How can we foster more inclusive and accessible opportunities to move together, that are not premised on exclusion, biased or inaccurate notions about bodies, and/or that depend on a denial or dismissal of histories of violence and oppression?
In preparation for the Olympics, Berry said, “I don’t need to do anything sport-wise…What I need to do is speak for my community, to represent my community, and to help my community. Because that’s more important than sports.” Perhaps this past year has offered us the opportunity to examine our complicated relationships with sports and movement practices – as Pyle has done – and to ‘make space for [our] own, and [our] communities’ presence within it.’ Going forward, how do we want to begin moving together and being in community again?
Claire Carter is an associate professor in women’s and gender studies at the University of Regina. She is the author of Who’s Coming Out to Play: Disruption and Disorientation in Queer Community Sports.
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