Basketball Diary

Abstract

I have played basketball for almost three quarters of my life. It is a sport I love and it taught me young that sexism exists and feminism matters. By paying close attention to the local and particular — playing basketball for almost 30 years in various gyms in Ontario, Newfoundland and Manitoba — I demonstrate in this piece how politics of gender, race and sexuality infuse our everyday lives and connect to larger themes of societal inclusions and exclusions. The piece is written as a series of fictionalized diary entries, beginning in 1987 when I was 10 and first started to play basketball, and ending in 2014 when I wrote the chapter. Learning to play the game came along with navigating life as a girl on a team of boys who passed the ball to one another but not to me. The tone and content of the diary entries change as I grow up and understand the world better, but the theme of passing the ball, and what it might mean to live in a world where we passed the ball more often and differently, remains central to the story. I chose to write a short story rather than an essay because form matters for how content is delivered and received. One thing I have learned from my students is that academic writing often communicates that the ‘we’ who produce it want merely to sound clever and not actually to communicate with the ‘you’ who try to make sense of it. Here I take seriously students’ concerns by writing in an engaging and accessible way, thus following a feminist politics of inclusion rather than alienation.

Citation

Thorpe, J. (2017), "Basketball Diary", Bonifacio, G.T. (Ed.) Global Currents in Gender and Feminisms, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 279-289. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78714-483-520171026