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IT'S MY BODY

Feminist Approach to Sports

CREA believes that a feminist approach to sports goes beyond a girl’s physical fitness – new questions of identities, bodies, agency and well-being. A feminist approach to sports also place value on a girls right to occupy public space, have fun and build peer support networks.

CREA uses sports for challenging social norms around women and girl’s mobility and visibility, bodies and sexualities and subvert the notions of speed, strength of power and pleasure fun and leisure in lives of all girls. Also to advance the sexual and reproductive health and rights of girls, increase their bodily autonomy and to enable them to make their own decisions related to their bodies, health and lives where sports is used as a medium and pathway.

CREA’s vision for a feminist approach to sports includes:

  • Challenging existing gender and sexual norms by providing an experiential framework to understand and shift norms related to mobility, clothing, and visibility in public spaces.
  • Understanding and initiating conversation around bodily autonomy, rights, gender and sexuality. Sports is an opportunity to experience one’s own body, interrogate the way others see them and, in turn, develop a more comfortable and an affirmative relationship with the body.
  • Enabling adolescent girls to assert their rights. Entering a restricted space helps girls achieve self-confidence and form aspirations. We believe by strengthening the self-confidence, girls negotiation skills, especially in the realms of mobility, decision around education and marriage and accessing public spaces are enhanced.
  • Sports is a mean to build collective strength by creating safe spaces for reflection and sharing experiences. Girls strategize, build solidarity and take collective action for bringing about social change being in such collectives.
  • Creating inclusive spaces for girls especially for marginalized communities, out of school girls, and girls with disabilities. Using sports as mean to engage with girls with disabilities CREA wishes to break stereotype about ‘disability as being immobile’ or ‘sports as an able-bodied activity’.

Additional Resources on the topic

If you would like to read a little more about the feminist analysis of sports, here are some useful resources: