- Title
- 'If it weren't for rugby I'd be in prison now': Pacific Islanders, rugby and the production of natural spaces
- Creator
- McDonald, Brent; Rodriguez, Lena; George, James Rimumutu
- Relation
- Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 45, Issue 11, p. 1919-1935
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1492909
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- This paper examines the positive role of sport in building social cohesion and the accrual of social and cultural capital for many young Pasifika men. In the process, we also critique the disciplinary discourse, underpinned by bio-racism and commodification, which is enacted on the bodies of Pacific Island men in the context of post-colonial, neoliberal, Australia. This results in over-representation in the rugby codes, manual labour, the security industry, and in prison. Of specific interest to this paper are the ways in which certain spaces, and the means to occupy them, become naturalised. This naturalisation serves to obscure the actual regulatory, and at times exploitative, function of sports; instead positing them as exemplars of individualism and self-governance. In positioning neoliberalism as the reengineering, rather than simply the deregulation, of the state, sports such as rugby enact considerable disciplinary power over the bodies of a minority ethnicity. We refer to this diversion from conventional working class employment opportunities as ‘sportfare’. Qualitative data for this paper has been drawn from several independent studies engaging with Pasifika communities in Australia.
- Subject
- neoliberalism; disciplinary logic; Pacific Islanders/Pasifika; sportfare
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1459994
- Identifier
- uon:45830
- Identifier
- ISSN:1369-183X
- Rights
- © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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