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

Abstract

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.

Citation

Balram, R. and Knijnik, J. (2024), "Indo-Fijian Women and Girls' Sporting Experiences: Disrupting Cultural Hegemony", Kanemasu, Y. (Ed.) Towards a Pacific Island Sociology of Sport (Research in the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 22), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 101-122. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1476-285420240000022006