Feminism, intersectionality and the problem of whiteness in leisure and sport practices and scholarship

This chapter draws upon black feminism and intersectional theory to challenge assumptions of whiteness that frequently travel within British and North American leisure, sport and gender scholarship. To achieve this goal, we critically situate and apply an intersectional framework to explore two highly mediated cases: the controversies surrounding Don Imus and the Rutgers University women’s basketball team and the SlutWalk protest movement. This chapter makes clear the persistent need to challenge the primacy of gender as always and already the most important social relation, as some feminists infer. Such a conceptualization is problematic as it reifies the power of whiteness within feminist sport and leisure scholarship and popular narratives, as well as within feminist organizing and activism more broadly.