Indo-Fijian Women and Girls’ Sporting Experiences: Disrupting Cultural Hegemony

AUTHOR(S)
Rohini Balram
Jorge Knijnik
Culture

In Fiji, Indo-Fijians constitute the second largest community after Indigenous Fijians. Indo-Fijian women face gender and racial inequalities to access sports and Physical Education (PE) in Fijian high schools. To gain a comprehensive view of the sporting realities of these young women, an ethnographic study was carried out with 12 young Indo-Fijian women via participant observations and semi-structured interviews, which were driven by sporting experience-related photographs taken by the participants and participant-voiced free verses. This chapter extracts four young women’s experiences from the larger set of data and weaves a one-act play to holistically present their lived sporting experiences. This non-fiction creative piece captures the young women’s colloquial words and artistic writings, thus creating a space where the reader can hear their voices and feel their sporting experiences too. We employ intersectional lenses together with Critical Race Theory (CRT) to look at the social factors that influence their sporting lives. The findings reveal that factors such as traditional gender norms, racism, age, classism and internal migration from rural co-ed to urban co-ed schools intersect at various levels to determine the segregation of Indo-Fijian girls from ‘mixed racial’ (team) sports. Moreover, in high school PE lessons, iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) interests are maintained in sports where PE lessons are focused on dominant sports (rugby, soccer and netball) with emphasis on competition rather than inclusive participation for all. Therefore, this paper supports the opening of pathways for Indo-Fijian girls and women to participate in sports so that they can exercise their rights as Fijian citizens.

Downloads
There are no downloads available
Research Type(s)
Book Chapter
November 5, 2024
Published in
2024
SHARE

Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

What are you looking for?

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.

Filter by Categories

Sort by Categories

Filter by Year

Sort by Year

Filter by Review Status

Sort by Review

Filter by Country

Sort Country Popup
Skip to content