‘Because I know God answers prayers’: The Role of Religion in African - Scandinavian Labour Migration

Drawing on interviews conducted with highly skilled Nigerian women footballers that have migrated to work in Scandinavian clubs, this article provides an analysis of how religious beliefs and practices function as resources for articulating, producing, and maintaining transnational mobility. Through taking part in transnational Pentecostal communities, Nigerian women migrants access networks and forms of knowledge that supports their status and mobility as labour migrants. Moreover, these women believe that their transnational and daily religious practices, such as prayer, are ways through which a transnationally mobile career can be achieved and sustained. Drawing on material from ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with migrant Nigerian women football players, I argue that religion provides these labour migrants with access to material, inter-personal and transcendental resources for achieving their career and migratory aspirations

Religion and Migration in Africa and the African Diaspora

Reflections on migration and religion at a time when migration remains a controversial political issue, whether it concerns disagreements in the US senate over financing President Trump’s proposed wall at the US-Mexico border, the continuing influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East into Europe, or xenophobia towards African migrants in South Africa and the Royinga in Myanmar. Consequently, continously changing trajectories, net-works and caravans of migration are produced, as a result of peoples differing needs and desires for movement and settlement.Those who have worked in the field of migration know that the migration of people has been a sustained phenomenon that has shaped the ma-king of societies, it has fractured hegemonies and ultimately produced diverse diasporas. This was evident in the works Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and Jamaica Kincaid as they have reflected on the fortunes and hardships of the windrush generation in the United Kingdom. Similarly, their predecessors Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Aime Cesaire, and Sol Plaatjie wrote widely about the social condition of being black in the world through narratives of migration, where they variously came to confront themselves of the objects of terror, curiosity and the exotic – all tropes that operate to deny black subjectivity. Thus we take as a starting point that transnational migration has significantly shaped the political and intellectual labour has of people of colour

Football, Femininity and Muscle: An exploration of Heteronormative and Athletic Discources in the lives of elite-level women footballers in South Africa

Normalised constructions of masculinity and femininity within a heteronormative social structure have shaped beliefs about women's capacities, characteristics and bodies, and have constructed a hegemonic feminine ideal that has historically excluded the possibility of being simultaneously feminine and athletic. However, following developments in Europe and North America (such as Title IV and WIS) and the increased production and consumption of globalised sports, new and more athletic feminine ideals have emerged and opened spaces for women to form sporting and athletic subjectivities. As a part of this process, women's football, across the world, has grown exponentially, in popular support and participation rates, since the first World Cup was organised in China in 1991 (Hong, 2004; Cox and Thompson, 2000). In South Africa, the development of structures for women's football was late, and women's football is not yet fully professional. In South Africa football is viewed as a game for men, and it remains a flagship masculine sport that serves to maintain and support masculine domination (Pelak, 2005). Because women's participation in a sport like football is considered a transgression, there is a heightened need to mark women's bodies as feminine, so as to reinforce the heteronormative and dichotomous constructions of male/female and masculine/feminine. This thesis presents an exploration of the ambivalent relationship between empowerment and surveillance as it presents itself in the lives of elite level women footballers in South Africa. It discusses empowerment and surveillance as they appear at the most intimate levels of women's sporting experience, and impact on the ways in which women footballers discipline and regulate their bodies within the expectations of heteronormativity, femininity and athleticism. The discussion is based on qualitative, informal interviews with 18 elite level women footballers in South Africa, 12 of which are currently members of the 5 senior women's national football team, Banyana Banyana. The remaining 6 participants are members of one of Cape Town's oldest and most successful women's football teams. The interviews took place at a national team camp in Pretoria in October 2008, and in Cape Town between August and November 2008. Utilising discourse analysis and postmodern feminist standpoint theory this thesis concludes that the empowerment and transformation sport has the potential to offer women should not be assumed to follow directly from participation. Women's access to sports participation and sporting subjectivities is stratified, and a complex and ambivalent relationship exists between empowerment and surveillance. This tense relationship between is particularly evident in analyses of gender/race/class intersections, heteronormativity and through examining women's participation at a professional level. Although the neo-liberal feminine athletic validates sporting subjectivities and offers women in elite-level South African football an arena for physical expression and freedom, this empowerment is deeply embedded within the regulatory schemes produced through constructions of a heteronormative feminine aesthetic

«Gjennomsnittskvinnen», kjønnstesting og det hvite blikket: rasialiserte forestillinger av kjønn i eliteidrett

I denne artikkelen retter jeg oppmerksomheten mot hvordan forestillinger om kjønn, rase og kropp kommer til uttrykk i såkalt kjønnstesting i internasjonal eliteidrett. Gjennom å utforske presentasjonen av Caster Semenya, mellomdistanseløperen fra Sør-Afrika som «et problem», viser jeg hvordan regelverk og praksiser for kjønnstesting holder fast ved en binær kjønnsforståelse som plasserer Semenya, og andre kvinnelige eliteidrettsutøvere i en paradoksal situasjon. Jeg hevder at når noen kvinnekropper identifiseres som mistenkelige og utsettes for kjønnstesting, er dette et utrykk for hvordan kvinnelige eliteidrettsutøvere holdes ansvarlige for «gjennomsnittskvinnens» kroppsliggjorte femininitet og kvinnelighet. Jeg stiller spørsmål ved kjønnstestingens vitenskapelighet, og utforsker hvordan historisk forankrede forestillinger om kjønn, rase og kropp artikuleres gjennom et normativt hvitt blikk. Med fokus på et aspekt av kjønnstesting, som til nå ikke har fått mye oppmerksomhet i norsk kjønnsforsking, utforsker jeg hvilke forestillinger om kjønn og rase som ligger til grunn for kjønnstestingens historie og praksis, og hvordan disse bidrar til innrammingen av Caster Semenya som «idrettens store dilemma»

Hetero-sexing the athlete: public and popular discourses on sexuality and women’s sport in South Africa

On the African continent sport has, particularly in the last two decades, been hailed as a useful tool in the quest for nation building and social cohesion. A popular claim is that sport has a particularly powerful role to play in achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Yet what often remains silenced in assertions about the benefits and potentials of sport, are the ways in which sport also produces and sustains exclusion, frequently along sex/gender and racial lines. Sport has social and cultural significance precisely because it provides an avenue for the reproduction of normativities of embodiment, gender and sexuality. In this article, we critically examine how South African discourses on sport reproduce heteronormative and racialised ideas about women’s sport and women athletes. Focusing in particular on representations of South African women’ athletes, we raise questions about the type and form of visibility that is afforded South African sportswomen. Using examples of public debates and media coverage regarding three South African women athletes –Eudy Simelane, Caster Semenya and Portia Modise – we argue that three representational regimes shape discussions of gender, sexuality and women’s sport in South Africa; annihilation, domestication, and expulsio