‘Who wants to make aloo gobi when you can bend it like Beckham?’ British Asian females and their racialised experiences of gender and identity in women's football

Abstract

Capturing the football frenzy of the 2002 FIFA World Cup Finals in Japan and South Korea, the film Bend It Like Beckham hit the British movie screens. The film is about Jess, a young Sikh girl, who dreams of playing football for England. Although the film helped to raise the public visibility of British Asian girls who play football in this country, worryingly, it also reproduced the popular belief that playing sport is seen to be antithetical to British Asian family traditions, culture and religion. This mirrors much of the wider research about British Asian males as it is believed, despite the rich diversity of British Asian leagues, teams and football networks, that playing sport at elite levels is not as important to British Asians as following traditional routes of success through the educational system. In this article, I am critical about the essentialist and stereotypical nature of past research that mostly serves to render invisible the multiplicity of British Asian females' experiences. Adopting a feminist conceptualisation of difference and intersectionality, I explore the vicissitudes of British Asian females' racialized experience of gender and identity. I argue that British Asian females' interpretations of ‘femininity’ does not necessarily fit into a simple polarity, that is as either ‘traditional’ (the ability to undertake domestic chores and behave in an ‘honourable’ fashion) or ‘modern’ (assimilating to ‘English’ values and lifestyles, e.g. going out and socializing with boys). Their identities relating to their Asianness and femaleness are increasingly hybrid and fluid, across time and space.

Notes

1. Football Association, ‘Women's and Girls' Football’.

2. Scraton, Caudwell, and Holland ‘Bend it Like Patel’.

3. Many younger generations of South Asians, whose ancestry stems from the Indian subcontinent, choose to identify themselves as ‘British Asian’. By adopting the British marker of identity they are asserting their political, ideological and cultural heritage as firmly rooted in this country. In this article, however, reference to the identities and/or traditions of first‐generation migrants from the Indian subcontinent will be referred to as ‘South Asian’. In this way, for definitional purposes, I am separating ‘British Asian’ and ‘South Asian’ although in theory, I recognize that they are inter‐related and form complex labels of identification (Ali, Kalra, and Sayyid, ‘A Postcolonial People’).

4. Ratna, ‘British Asian Females' Racialised and Gendered Identity’.

5. The Women's Football Pyramid refers to the mainstream organization of the sport by the English Football Association. At the top of the pyramid is the FA Women's Premier League National Division. Below the top level are two other leagues equal in status, which are the FA Premier League Southern Division and the Premier League Northern Division. Below this level of play are a further four leagues divided into the South West, South East, Midlands and Northern. At the bottom of the pyramid are a number of regional and county leagues (Football Association, ‘Futsal in England’).

6. Basu, ‘Bengali Girls in Sport’; Dagkas and Benn, ‘Young Muslim Women's Experiences of Islam and Physical Education’; Hargreaves, Heroines of Sport, ‘Sport, Exercise and the Female Muslim Body’; Taylor and Doherty, ‘Adolescent Sport, Recreation and Physical Education’; Walseth and Fasting, ‘Sport as a Means of Integrating Minority Women’; Walseth, ‘Young Muslim Women and Sport’.

7. Hagreaves, Sporting Females; Kay, ‘Daughters of Islam’; Scraton, Caudwell, and Holland, ‘Bend it Like Patel’.

8. Edwards and Hargreaves, ‘Sport Feminism’.

9. The film is about Jess, a young Sikh girl from Hounslow, who dreams of playing football for England. The storyline focuses on the way in which the heroine persuades her family to accept her identity as a football player. In the film, Jess asks the rhetorical question, ‘Who wants to make aloo gobi when you can bend it like Beckham?!’ She eventually wins the support of her parents and at the end of the film is awarded a scholarship to play in the USA.

10. Dwyer, ‘Planet Bollywood’; Giardina, ‘“Bend it Like Beckham”’.

11. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora; Puwar and Raghuram, South Asian Women in the Diaspora; Wilson, Dreams, Questions and Struggles.

12. Modood and Werbner, The Politics of Multiculturalism; Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism.

13. Bagguley and Hussain, ‘Flying the Flag for England’; Werbner, ‘Theorising Complex Diasporas’.

14. The term ‘white’ is used to denote the ‘white’ ethnic population in Britain as heterogeneous, with differences in ethnic identity and with varied opinions on social issues pertaining to ‘race’ and ethnicity. In regards to their perceptions of the British Asian population, I acknowledge that not all ‘white’ people share the view of them as alien.

15. Ballard, ‘The Emergence of a Desh Pradesh’.

16. Sharma, Hutnyk, and Sharma, Dis‐orientating Rhythms.

17. Ballard, ‘The Emergence of a Desh Pradesh’.

18. Wilson, Dreams, Questions and Struggles.

19. Hargreaves, Sporting Females; Kay, ‘Daughter's of Islam’; Walseth and Fasting, ‘Sport as a Menas of Integrating Minority Women’.

20. Carrington, Chivers and Williams, ‘Gender, Leisure and Sport’; Carroll and Hollinshead, ‘Ethnicity and Conflict in Physical Education’.

21. Lewis, ‘Ethnic Influences on Girls' Physical Education’.

22. Lyons, Asian Women and Sport.

23. Walseth, ‘Young Muslim Women and Sport’.

24. Deem, All Work and No Play?; Green, Hebron, and Woodward, Women's Leisure; Scraton and Watson, ‘Gendered Cities’.

25. Fleming, ‘Home and Away’.

26. Dagkas and Benn, ‘Young Muslims Women's Experiences’.

27. Dwyer, ‘Questions of Identity for Young British Muslim Women’; Qureshi and Moores, ‘Identity Remix’.

28. Walseth, ‘Young Muslim Women and Sport’.

29. On September 11, 2001 (9/11) two planes crashed directly into the World Trade Cenre's Twin Towers in New York. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon, Washington DC. Approximately 3000 people were killed. This symbolic moment marked the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’ and, for some, the war on Islam (Abbas, Muslim Britain). In 2005, four years after 9/11, four suicide bombers struck in central London killing 52 people and injuring 770 (BBC News, ‘London Attacks’). The consequences of this terrorist attack have been far reaching, affecting the lives of British Asians in a way that they could not have anticipated prior to the attacks.

30. Abbas, Muslim Britain.

31. Wilson, Dreams, Questions and Struggles.

32. Werbner, ‘Veiled Interventions in Pure Space’; Wilson, Dreams, Questions and Struggles.

33. Abbas, Muslim Britain.

34. Wilson, Dreams. Questions and Struggles.

35. Raval, ‘Gender, Leisure and Sport’.

36. Fleming, ‘Sport and South Asian Youth’.

37. Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Said, Orientalism; Spivak, In Other Worlds.

38. Lovell, ‘Sport, Racism and Young Women’; Raval, ‘Gender, Leisure and Sport; Burdsey, British Asians and Football.

39. Jacobson, ‘Religion and Ethnicity’.

40. See Burdsey, British Asians and Football; Burdsey, ‘One of the Lads?’.

41. Carrington and McDonald, ‘“Race”, Sport and British Society’.

42. See Hargreaves, Sporting Females; Raval, ‘Gender, Leisure and Sport’; Scraton, Caudwell, and Holland, ‘Bend it Like Patel; Sfeir, ‘The Status of Muslim Women in Sport’.

43. Ansari, ‘Patterns of Prejudice’.

44. Scraton, ‘Reconceptualising Race, Gender and Sport’.

45. Ismond, ‘Black and Asian Athletes in British Sport and Society; Scraton, ‘Reconceptualising Race, Gender and Sport’.

46. Majumdar and Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Gendered Kick’.

47. Palmer, ‘Soccer and the Politics of Identity’.

48. Ratna, ‘Taking the Power Back’.

49. Ratna, ‘British Asian females' Racialised and Gendered Identity’.

50. Hargreaves, ‘Querying Sports Feminism’.

51. Scraton, ‘Reconceptualising Race, Gender and Sport’.

52. Scraton, Caudwell, and Holland, ‘Bend it Like Patel’.

53. The Black political identity will be referred to with a capital letter from here on.

54. Scraton, ‘Reconceptualising Race, Gender and Sport’.

55. Alexander, ‘Writing Race’; Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Gunaratnam, ‘Researching “Race” and Ethnicity’; Bulmer and Solomos, Researching Race and Racism; Mirza, Black British Feminism.

56. Alexander, ‘Writing Race’.

57. Birrell, ‘Race Relations, Theories and Sport’.

58. Butler, Gender Trouble.

59. Anthias, ‘Rethinking Social Divisions’; Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins’; Hussain, ‘South Asian Disabled Women’.

60. Modood, ‘Culture and Identity’.

61. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’ (1996).

62. Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World.

63. Anthias, ‘Rethinking Social Divisions’.

64. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’ (2003).

65. Scraton, Caudwell, and Holland ‘Bend it Like Patel’.

66. Ahmad, ‘Still “In Progress”?’.

67. See Alexander, ‘Writing Race’.

68. Stanley and Wise, Breaking Out Again, ‘Method, Methodology and Epistemology in the Feminist Research Process’.

69. See Maynard and Purvis, Researching Lives from a Feminist Perspective; Oakley, ‘Interviewing Women a Contradiction in Terms’.

70. Shah ‘The “Partial Insider”’.

71. Ibid.

72. Phoenix, ‘Practising Feminist Research’.

73. Ibid.; Alexander, ‘Writing Race’.

74. Oakley, ‘Interviewing Women’.

75. Stacey, ‘Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?’; Maynard and Purvis, Researching Lives; Patton, Qualitative Research and Evaluative Methods.

76. Tierney, ‘Undaunting Courage’.

77. Birrell, ‘Race Relations’; Sparkes, ‘The Paradigms Debate’.

78. Sparkes and Templin, ‘Life Histories and Physical Education Teachers’.

79. See Brownell, ‘Sports Ethnography’.

80. This test series was epic because it was the first time India had played in Pakistan in the last 30 years. Continued disputes between the two countries over the region of Kashmir had been very intense before this time. In 2003, political and social tensions were deemed have abated enough to allow competitions between the two countries.

81. Futsal is the name given to a variant of 5‐a‐side football. The popularity and growth of this small sided game is evident at various European and World competitions, and in this country is supported by the FA (Football Association, Futsal in England).

82. This competition occurs every four years and is an alternative to the Olympic Games. It is the only occasion where Muslim women can participate at the highest international level in a female‐only environment. The UK team – the only one from a non‐Muslim country, played for the first time in 2002. Even although officially representing the UK, all members are from England.

83. Ratna, ‘British Asian Females' Racialised and Gendered Identity’.

84. Ibid; Burdsey, ‘British Asians and Football’; Burdsey, ‘One of the Lads?’; Mansfield, ‘Fit Bodies and Intersectionality’.

85. Ratna, ‘Taking the Power Back!’.

86. Walseth, ‘Young Muslim Women and Sport’.

87. Ibid.

88. Ali, Kalra and Sayyid, A Postcolonial People.

89. Kalra, Kaur, and Hutnyk, Diaspora and Identity.

90. Mansfield, ‘Fit Bodies and Intersectionality’.

91. Phillips, Davis, and Ratcliffe, ‘British Asian Narratives of Urban Space’.

92. Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.

93. Ratna, ‘British Asian Females' Racialised Experiences of Gender and Identity’, ‘A “Fair Game”?’.

94. Ibid

95. Dwyer, ‘Questions of Identity for Young Muslim Women’.

96. Benn, ‘Muslim Women and Physical Education in Initial Teacher Training’.

97. See Dagkas and Benn, ‘Young Muslim Women's Experiences of Islam and Physical Education’; Jacobson, ‘Religion and Ethnicity’; Zaman ‘Islam, Well‐Being and Physical Activity’.

98. Ratna, ‘Off With Their Headscarves, On With Their Football Kits?’.

99. Ibid.

100. Ratna. ‘A “Fair Game”?’.