Hetero-sexy self/body work and basketball: The<i>invisible</i>sporting women of British Pakistani Muslim heritage

Abstract Muslim women's personal relationship with the body beneath and beyond the veil has received little attention, especially in the sporting literature. Instead, talk of sporting Muslim women has been more frequently animated around a monolithic Orientalist narrative that sensationalises the veil, and asserts the oppression of Islamic thinking on gender equality and female sexuality. Similarly, discussions of South Asian Muslim women's participation in sport have been more routinely informed by ethnocentric stereotypes about the 'passive Asian woman'. In this paper I engage postcolonial feminist thinking to move beyond uncritical dichotomous re/presentations that have systematically denied diverse sporting Muslim women an identity or bodily presence outside of the discursive identity of the veil. I focus on British Muslim Pakistani women who play basketball, and explore the multifarious, dynamic ways in which these women negotiate and perform various discourses pertaining to idealised yet dramaturgical notions of 'hetero-sexy' femininity on and off the court. By drawing the fe/male ocular away from the visual aesthetics of the veil and Islamic theocracy in shaping their engagement in sport, I seek to unveil something more personal about the relationship these sporting Muslim women have with the body that they own and an identity which they are actively carving out. Notes 1. The sporting narrative around the Afghani athletes Muqimyar and Razayee who participated in the 2004 Athens Olympics not only codified the Muslim female body as a passive site of male derision, but insinuated that 'Their' participation was only made possible because of the 2001 US-led invasion which ousted the Taliban regime, thereby 'liberating' the oppressed Muslim women of Afghanistan (see Wilkinson, Citation2004). In a similar vein, media narratives pertaining to Saudi female Olympians tended to focus, almost exclusively, on the role of Western pressure from the likes of the International Olympics Committee in freeing the 'oppressed Arab woman' to participate in sport overlooking, in turn, the public and political demands from Muslim communities and Muslim women themselves for the Saud regime to move beyond its misogynist laws (Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford Citation2012). That such accounts also ignored almost two decades of social, cultural educational and political reforms that are now culminating in a steady rise of female athletic participation across the Middle East should not be overlooked. Instead, social media reported the presence of the first Saudi female at the 2012 Olympics as 'democracy in development' for the 'oppressed Arab woman' instigated through Western intervention (Coleman 2012). 2. The term 'shorom' refers to the modesty and self-reserve of women to accrue respect from respected community members and elders. 3. Dwyer (Citation1998, 8) uses the term 'cultural conflict model' to describe how the rhetoric of a 'culture clash' between a unified 'West' and 'East', 'Islam' and the 'Rest' works to not only alienate cultural and religious identities as being too different (or antithetical) to fit into a mainstream dominant host society, but also contributes to popular perceptions and fears about communities living parallel lives. 4. In fact, Mirza's bodily comportment also sparked concern. One of the criticisms about Mirza was that she had her legs up on a bench in front of the Indian flag, thus, whether un/knowingly, defiled the meaning of the flag. 5. The surveillance and pressure for non-White sporting bodies to adhere to and perform within a racialised contemporary sporting domain that continues to privilege 'whiteness' should not be overlooked, and is poignantly explored in Carrington's (Citation2010) work. 6. Of course, the diversity of outfits worn on the basketball court meant that women would look at each other scrutinising over how un/fit or un/sexy they looked compared to their team mates, but I do not centralise these testimonies or observations here. 7. My use of the word 'alternative' here should not be read in essentialist terms. I do not claim, nor envision hetero-sexy self/body management routines to be exclusively 'Western' fashioned gendered practises for this would merely re/affirm the ethnocentrism that I seek to move beyond. 8. Edwards (Citation2012, 567–569) speaks of a similar phenomenon in her paper about the re/negotiation of the 'Shangai modern woman'. The empirical discussion alludes specifically to an adoption of the 'unbridled, limit-free… allure of fashionable "healthy beauty"' of American popular culture in the 're-orientation of ideas around how to be modern and Chinese women'.