The Sexual and Gender Politics of Sport Mega-Events

Roving Colonialism

Heather Sykes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138318496
• eBook ISBN: 9781317690009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This challenging new study examines gender and sexuality in relation to the 'roving colonialism' of sport mega-events. Built around four case studies in postcolonial and settler colonial contexts—the Olympics in Vancouver, London and Sochi and soccer fans in the Egyptian revolution—the book examines sporting 'homonationalism' and anti-colonial resistance.

The first part discusses different moments of 'homonationalism' in sport. The second part explores how indigenous and anti-colonial protests against mega-sport events lead to different views about gender and sexuality politics in sport. It offers a critical counter-narrative to the view that gay and lesbian inclusion in global sporting events is simply a matter of universal human rights. The book calls for LGBT social movements in sport to move away from complicity with neoliberalism, nationalism and colonial-racial logics, particularly Islamophobia, toward a decolonial politics of solidarity.

Theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded, this book draws together important threads in the contemporary study of sport to illuminate the relationship between sport and wider society. It will be fascinating reading for any student or researcher interested in the sociology of sport, Olympic studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, indigenous studies, settler colonial studies or the politics of race and inclusion.

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Chapter 1
The sexual and gender politics of sport mega-events

Roving colonialism

Heather Sykes

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The cacophony produced through U.S. [Canadian] colonialism and imperialism domestically and abroad often coerces struggles for social justice for queers, racial minorities, and immigrants into complicity with settler colonialism.

(Byrd, 2011: xvii)

One of the main arguments in this book is that homonationalist queer politics in sport need to delink from the liberal politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) rights and inclusion. The book contains four cases studies of anti-colonial activism in sport: Ultras soccer fans in the Egyptian revolution; the winter Olympics in Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014; and the summer Olympics in London 2012. The first part of the book describes ‘homonational’ lesbian and gay politics at the Vancouver and London Olympics. The second part explores anti-colonial sport-based activism during the Sochi Olympics and the Egyptian revolution. Methodologically, the project focused on the insights, knowledge and analysis of anti-colonial sport activists in each of these sites.

This book aims to reveal some of the hidden racial and colonial logics of current mega-sports. It aims to question what is at stake when gay and lesbian sport advocates seek visibility and inclusion into sport mega-events, because this is not the only direction for a queer politics in sport. A dreadful necropolitics (Mbembe and Meintjes, 2003) undergirds the hosting of sport mega-events for national prestige and neoliberal profit. Sport mega-events proclaim to manage the biopolitics of elite sport and urban space, but in so doing rely on the necropolitics of bare life and profitable killing. The deaths, displacement and repression of poor, racialized and indigenous people required for a sport mega-event to take place creates an urgent need to question the involvement and complicity of gay and lesbian groups in this type of sport. This questioning of LGBT politics in sport cannot be done within the logics and rationality of neoliberal, western politics; rather, reimagining a queer politics for sport mega-events means decolonizing many of the taken-for-granted assumptions driving neoliberal LGBT sport advocacy.

Contemporary experiences of human destruction suggest that it is possible to develop a reading of politics, sovereignty, and the subject different from the one we inherited from the philosophical discourse of modernity.

(Mbembe and Meintjes, 2003: 14)

In every city where a sporting mega-event, such as the Olympics or the football World Cup, has taken place local, grassroots communities have resisted being evicted, exploited and repressed (Burbank, Andranovich and Heying, 2001; Lenskyj, 2000, 2002; Shaw, 2008). Local protests against sport mega-events are increasingly being communicated and connected, through both tactics and knowledges, within the anti-globalization movement or ‘movement of movements’. Anti-globalization movements link local crises caused by sport mega-events to the larger processes of globalization. This involves ‘the act of imagination needed to make the connections between the suffering of people far away and the problems and events in one’s own community’ (Starr, 2005: 93). These connections are being made by an array of social movements in global civil society working towards ‘justice globalism’, ‘anti-globalization’, ‘alter-globalization’, ‘globalization from below’ and ‘no global’ (della Porta et al., 2006; Harvey, Horne and Safai, 2009; Starr, 2005; Steger, 2009). Within this movement of movements, anti-colonial activism exposes the colonial and racial logics underlying sexual and gender politics at sport mega-events. There were unique forms of anti-colonial activism against sport mega-events in Vancouver, London, Cairo and Sochi, just as the sexual and gender politics were very different in each city. Thus, I approached each site as a unique node of sport and activism operating within a colonial matrix of power (Mignolo, 2011). The case studies of anti-colonial activism against sport mega-events in this book call for a profound questioning of homonational sexual and gender sport politics. Each case study presents a call to gay and lesbian sport advocates to decolonize their current assumptions and to delink from global sport systems that culminate in violence, injustice and death.

Roving coloniality: land, people and the sport mega-event

Sport mega-events, such as the Olympics, are forms of ‘roving coloniality’. Every two or four years, each mega-event touches down in a new city requiring grandiose construction projects and the displacement of poor urban communities. Huge profits are made by land and property developers. Ruling elites use the mega-events for geopolitical gain. The forced removal of local people, stealing of land to make profit and broken agreements between governments about benefits and legacies are all forms of ongoing colonization.

This book explores how some gays and lesbians allied with current, liberal sport initiatives are positioned with a colonial matrix of power. Through LGBT sport advocacy, some of those who were previously excluded as queer ‘Others’ have now gained access to this colonizing sport system. The history of modern sport is, in part, a history of activism by women, queers, people of colour and people with disabilities to be given access to sport. European colonial beliefs about white patriarchal supremacy were the organizing logic for modern sport in the nineteenth century. This meant that meant that able-bodied white men were the ideal ‘amateur’ athletes. Everyone else had to struggle to be allowed to compete at the elite level. Over the last 150 years, modern sport has slowly been forced to include marginalized groups of people. Gay men and lesbians are barely tolerated within many elite-level sports. Athletics organizations continue to invade women’s privacy in violent attempts to prove they are ‘female’ enough to compete. Gays and lesbians have fought homophobia to gain inclusion into many levels of sport. Gay and lesbian rights in sport now incorporates a level of institutional protection from homophobia – competing in a Gay Games, running in a Pride marathon or just being free from harassment as a gay spectator in a sports bar. Yet this is only part of the story. As stated above, modern sports originated as a military- and nation-building activity for elite males in colonial educational settings (Kidd and Donnelly, 2000; Mangan, 1971, 1985). Sport was used as a conduit of colonial modernity, along with missionary schools, the oil industry and militarization (Chehabi, 2002). European colonizers introduced modern sports as a tool to assimilate indigenous and colonized peoples. Soccer and cricket were effective tools used to disperse uprisings where indigenous people were being occupied and exploited by European colonialists. Thus, modern sport was a colonial tactic central to the establishment of colonial nation-states and maintaining patriarchy among ruling elites. In the contemporary moment, as gays and lesbians are gaining protection from discrimination, they are increasingly becoming benchmarks of ‘diversity’ and respectable subjects within the nation-state. The gay and lesbian politics of rights and inclusion in sport has not led to a radical transformation in the racial logics of sport itself; rather, it has generally supported the underlying logics that support white supremacy (Smith, 2005). Many of the underlying racist logics of nineteenth-century colonialism are still prevalent in contemporary sport in this era of globalization. This is why coloniality (Mignolo, 2007) is so important for critically understanding sexual and gender politics in contemporary sport. Contemporary colonial–racial logics of sexuality and gender at sport mega-events are constituted through glocal forms of nationalism, neoliberalism and securitization. The next section maps out the theoretical framework informing this argument, extending the basic description of terms in the Glossary.

‘Coloniality’ refers to hidden dimensions of modernity. It is related to the historical process of colonialism, but is not quite the same thing. Coloniality works through logics about race, sex and gender, about the economy, knowledge and epistemology, and life and death. These hidden logics of coloniality continue, even as the content and context of modernity changes. ‘Thus, hidden behind the rhetoric of modernity, economic practices dispensed with human lives, and knowledge justified racism and the inferiority of human lives that were considered dispensable’ (Mignolo, 2011: 6).

A colonial matrix of power was first described by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000) and developed by Walter Mignolo (2007b, 2011). The colonial matrix of power consists of economy, authority, knowledge and race–gender–sexuality. Here, the economy refers to the exploitation of labour, control of the land and natural resources; authority refers to institutions and the military; knowledge refers to epistemology, education and the formation of subjectivity. Throughout modernity/coloniality, these four areas of control were contested between European imperial states, and between imperial states and colonial subjects. Economy, authority, knowledge and race–gender–sexuality provide one way to analyse what Mignolo calls the ‘world order’ (p. 8). Patriarchy and theology/secular philosophy are epistemologies that legitimate the colonial matrix. As an approach to understanding global social relations, it is important to note that coloniality is distinct from approaches such as centre–periphery relations or world systems. Historically, Mignolo reminds us that colonialism was founded on Christianity, forged from the ‘long quarrel between the three religions of the book … when Christians managed to expel Moors and Jews from the Iberian peninsula and enforced conversation of those who wanted to stay’ (p. 8).

Racial classification, as Stuart Hall (1997) explained, began with religious discourse, and then entered anthropological discourse and finally scientific discourse. In the eighteenth century, secular philosophy and science replaced theology, and ‘skin’ supplanted ‘blood’ as the signifier of race and racism.

The trap in racism is precisely to allow what is manifestly there, what offers it to us as a symptom of appearance, to stand in the place of what is, in fact, one of the most profound and deeply complex of the cultural systems that allow us to make a distinction between inside and outside, between us and them, between who belongs and who doesn’t.

(Hall, 1997: 16)

Racial hierarchies of European and American imperialism remain embedded in the Olympics (King, 2007; Kwauk, 2008), although they shape the sexual and gender politics in different ways for each sport mega-event.

‘Colonialism’ broadly refers to external political domination, control of land and displacement of Indigenous people. Colonization and imperialism were key for empires during ancient, medieval, early modern and contemporary eras (Morrissey, Nally, Strohmayer and Whelan, 2014). European exploration and colonization became predominant in the early modern period, from 1420–1520, with the expansion of the colonial empires of Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain, along with Turkey and Russia. By the modern period, between 1800–1980, Turkey, Persia and Japan were empires, the Russian empire had become third-largest ever, and the British empire covered almost one quarter of the global land area (Fletcher, 2013). Currently, the American empire is a non-territorial empire based on oil, business and militarism. This neoliberal–military empire of the United States operates from the world’s wealthiest country, which, it is important to note, is also history’s largest debtor nation with unsustainable levels of debt (Pieterse, 2004). The nexus between sport–industry–militarism in the US, and at other sites, has become an important part of colonial matrices of power, especially when considering sport mega-events.

‘Settler colonialism’ relies on different logics from colonialism (Barker, 2009; Smith, 2011; Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995; Veracini, 2011; Wolfe, 2006). Colonization, according to Veracini (2011), is based on the ‘demand for labor’ (p. 4), whereas settler colonialism is the ‘demand to go away’ (p. 4). Colonizers seek to exploit indigenous populations for labour in the ‘colony’ while dominating from the ‘metropole’. Settler colonizers seek to displace, and ultimately eradicate, indigenous people from the land in order to set up independent nations. ‘The successful settler colonies “tame” a variety of wildernesses, end up establishing independent nations, effectively repress, co-opt, and extinguish indigenous alterities, and productively manage ethnic diversity’ (Veracini, 2011, p. 3). Settler colonialism relies on a ‘logic of elimination’ (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388) that aims to destroy indigenous society while establishing a settler society on indigenous territory (Wolfe, 2006). Andrea Smith (2011) refers to this as a ‘logic of genocidal appropriation’ (p. 50) in which Indigenous people must disappear so that non-indigenous people can claim the land, culture and resources: ‘In fact, they must always be disappearing, in order to allow non-Indigenous people’s rightful claim over this land’ (Veracini, 2011, p. 4). Eventually, a settler colonial nation seeks to claim that the land has been ‘settled’ and the nation is now ‘postcolonial’, or, in the case of Canada, ‘multicultural’ – ‘In other words, whereas colonialism reinforces the distinction between colony and metropole, settler colonialism erases it’ (p. 3). In some contexts, settlers aim symbolically to co-opt indigenous society to differentiate the new nation from the metropole (Wolfe, 2006). This was the case when Canadian settler discourses about the participation of indigenous people and First Nations in the Vancouver Olympics are used to highlight Canadian multiculturalism, with the implication that British colonization has long since passed, indeed, has been reconciled in Canada. Using settler colonialism and the underlying logic of elimination helped me to analyse non-native settlers’ assumptions about ‘taking part’ in the Olympics and where the Olympics ‘took place’.

The term ‘settler’ refers to people who are not indigenous to Canada, although this is an oversimplification and needs to be contextualized. Both colonizers and settler colonizers move across space to establish their dominance over indigenous populations (Veracini, 2011); however, settlers migrate intentionally to seek out a better life, make home and generate capital from indigenous land (Barker, 2009). ‘Settler societies’ arise where ‘Europeans have settled, and their descendants have remained politically dominant over Indigenous peoples, and where a heterogeneous society has developed in class, ethnic and racial terms’ (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995, p. 3). Canada had a history of dual settler colonization by France until the mid-eighteenth century, followed by British colonization, which meant that Canadian political institutions, such as law, government, sport and education, were based mainly on British models (Stasiulis and Jhappn, 1995). In Canada, white European settlers gain privileges due to the British, and to a lesser extent French, settler colonial history. The term ‘settler’ is being refined and debated (Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel, 2014). People arrive in Canada from both colonial and colonized contexts, and are racially positioned within white supremacies of Canada. The term ‘arrivant’ refers to settlers of colour (Byrd, 2011; Lawrence and Dua, 2005) and racialized people, people from colonized contexts and people who have been forced to move to Canada due to war, persecution, violence, economic and climate migration.

Mega-events: neoliberalism and globalization

In the twenty-first century, sport mega-events developed through processes of neoliberalism and globalization. ‘Neoliberalism’ is a political economic system that relies on private property rights, free markets and free trade, and requires ever-increasing levels of security, policing and militarism (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberal sport mega-events involve accelerated development, suspension of democratic process and the militarization of urban space (Gaffney, 2010). As modern sport became global, it lost most early twentieth-century aspects of playfulness and professionalism, becoming primarily a globalized media s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes in Contributors
• 1 The sexual and gender politics of sport mega-events: roving colonialism
• 2 Methodology
• 3 Gay pride on stolen land: homonationalism and settler colonialism at the Vancouver Olympics
• 4 Gay/lesbian asylum and the Pride House: imperialist settler homonationalism at the Vancouver Olympics
• 5 London Olympics, Islamophobia and English homonationalism
• 6 ‘Pot of blood’: Sochi Olympics and the Circassian genocide
• 7 The No Sochi movement and Circassian activism: colonial double-backing of the Sochi Olympics and Russian nation building
• 8 Egyptian football Ultras and the January 25th revolution: anticolonial masculinities and patriarchal state terrorism
• 9 Decolonizing sporting homonationalisms: from complicity to solidarity
• Glossary
• Abbreviations
• Index