Yoko Kanemasu

This book presents the most comprehensive mapping and analysis of women’s football in Oceania and is the first to examine the game’s historical development alongside social, political, and cultural issues, weaving origin stories with players’ day-to-day challenges. Alongside presentation of the contemporary state of play and its overarching narrative of women’s game in the region, the book highlights key issues, discusses established and emergent themes, examines relevant contexts, investigates the status of the game at local and national levels, and lays foundations for further research. Its primary objective is to detail and illustrate the historical, social, and organisational development of the women’s game, including international tournaments, national competitions, and teams in an effort to amplify the efforts of the individuals that made or make a significant contribution to the game. It draws on extensive formal and informal discussion, realises insight, proposes the means and related fields of further investigation, and generates new knowledge alongside the uncovering of old. Women’s Football in Oceania covers key events, actors, and moments and fills a gap in research for scholars of sports history and women’s history.

This book presents the most comprehensive mapping and analysis of women’s football in Oceania and is the first to examine the game’s historical development alongside social, political, and cultural issues, weaving origin stories with players’ day-to-day challenges. Alongside presentation of the contemporary state of play and its overarching narrative of women’s game in the region, the book highlights key issues, discusses established and emergent themes, examines relevant contexts, investigates the status of the game at local and national levels, and lays foundations for further research. Its primary objective is to detail and illustrate the historical, social, and organisational development of the women’s game, including international tournaments, national competitions, and teams in an effort to amplify the efforts of the individuals that made or make a significant contribution to the game. It draws on extensive formal and informal discussion, realises insight, proposes the means and related fields of further investigation, and generates new knowledge alongside the uncovering of old. Women’s Football in Oceania covers key events, actors, and moments and fills a gap in research for scholars of sports history and women’s history.

This book focuses on the variety of strategies developed by women athletes in the Pacific Islands to claim contested sporting spaces – in particular, rugby union, soccer, beach volleyball, recreational sports and exercise – as a prism to explore grassroots women’s engagement with heavily entrenched postcolonial (hetero)patriarchy. Based on primary research conducted in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the book investigates contested sporting spaces as sites of infrapolitics intersected primarily by gender and also by other markers of inequality, including ethnicity, sexuality, class and geopolitics. Contrary to historical and contemporary representations of Pacific Island women as victims of gender injustice, it explores how these athletes and those who support them actively carve out space for their transformative agency. Pacific IslandWomen and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim focuses on a region underexamined by sport or gender studies researchers and will be of key interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sport Studies, Sociology and Pacific Studies as well as sport practitioners and policymakers.

This book focuses on the variety of strategies developed by women athletes in the Pacific Islands to claim contested sporting spaces – in particular, rugby union, soccer, beach volleyball, recreational sports and exercise – as a prism to explore grassroots women’s engagement with heavily entrenched postcolonial (hetero)patriarchy. Based on primary research conducted in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the book investigates contested sporting spaces as sites of infrapolitics intersected primarily by gender and also by other markers of inequality, including ethnicity, sexuality, class and geopolitics. Contrary to historical and contemporary representations of Pacific Island women as victims of gender injustice, it explores how these athletes and those who support them actively carve out space for their transformative agency. Pacific IslandWomen and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim focuses on a region underexamined by sport or gender studies researchers and will be of key interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sport Studies, Sociology and Pacific Studies as well as sport practitioners and policymakers.