The political imperative of feminism

This chapter focuses on feminist research about sport and physical cultures to illustrate the various ways that praxis has and continues to operate in a range of ways that have impacted women's representation and participation in sport and physical cultures. Feminist cultural studies link the focus on power relations in everyday, lived, contextual experience, with feminist politics and commitments to praxis and equity. Feminist research explores and makes visible women's understandings and experiences of the world, as well as the patriarchal frameworks that have historically shaped these understandings and experiences. Understanding power relations in sport as engaged with cultural, contextual, embodied and relational moving bodies, helps to explore how sex and gender differences are constructed, understood, experienced and negotiated through subjectivities, participation, relationships, representations and performances in particular socio-cultural contexts. The chapter focuses on how feminist researchers have negotiated two: ethnographic methods and knowledge production.