Queer theory, normalising regimes and the cultivation of (safe) sportscapes: a queer intersectional praxis for belonging and inclusion in physical education?

<p dir="ltr">This paper draws on data from a case study into a local women’s Australian Rules football team, investigating how players experienced the particularities of the sportscape in which they played. Emerging from the dataset was an overwhelming emphasis on discourses of belonging and inclusion, with players expounding on the nuances of this space as somewhere that their variously gendered bodies, sizes, abilities and selves were not just accommodated, but normalised. Reflecting various axes by which inclusion was experienced, players highlight the enactment of an intersectional lens which enabled a sportscape in which difference was seen, accepted and responded to inclusively. Drawing on queer theory, this paper explores how normalising difference – applying a queer theoretical lens – undermined normalising regimes across various axes of difference in this local sportscape, with implications for players’ experiences and participation. It further asks what role the active cultivation of this sportscape played in impacting players’ experiences and perceptions of acceptance, inclusion and belonging, and asks whether a queer lens – a critical consciousness of and around normalising regimes of power and hegemony along various axes – might offer us ways for thinking through the cultivation of more inclusive (safer) physical education spaces. A queer theoretical lens demonstrates the ways in which normalising regimes re/produce that which becomes hegemonic within different spaces. This paper considers how we can apply the principles of normalising difference within this football sportscape to physical education (PE) spaces to explore how PE teachers might cultivate spaces which foster inclusion, belonging, participation and engagement through normalising diversity in relation to intersectional axes of difference.</p>