Journal of Sport and Social Issues

This article is about the development of baseball in Taiwan, and how it has been connected with Taiwan’s entangled history of Japanese colonization, the Chinese Nationalist’s authoritarian rule, the ethnically stratified social structure, and the emergence of the Taiwanese identity. Baseball was foreign to Taiwan when it was first introduced to the island. The sport then crossed the ethnic and class boundary between the Japanese colonizer and the Taiwanese islander in the 1920s, later the Taiwanese natives and the Chinese mainlanders in the 1970s, and in turn became a symbol of Taiwanese nationalism. This article argues that baseball does not circulate a fixed meaning as it travels to different places. The story of Taiwanese baseball indicates the interpenetration of colonialism, class, ethnicity, and nationalism.

America’s national pastime has long been associated with masculinity and more recently has acknowledged its problems with racial exclusivity. Yet from the time it was professionalized in the 19th century to the aftermath of the Little League Lawsuits of 1973, baseball has excluded girls and women, regarding itself as “too strenuous” or “too violent”, in spite of American girls’ and women’s post-Title IX participation in other more violent contact sports. The contrived exclusion of girls and women ignores their long-abiding affection for and participation in baseball from the early 19th century onward. What explains sequestering baseball for boys only? What are the civic implications of the insistence on masculine exclusivity for the game associated with American national identity?

North Korea is arguably the least understood and the most reclusive country in the world. This article discusses the use of sport in the country as a vehicle for political propaganda and, in particular, the role of nationalism within the communist sporting culture. Although most nation states have become increasingly interdependent politically and economically in the so-called global era, relatively few countries have an official relationship with North Korea. Sport may be one of the few arenas in which the world can glimpse North Korean people and their culture because North Korean athletes consistently participate in international sporting competition, both inside and outside of the country, regardless of political and economic isolation. In this article, an attempt is made to paint a picture of North Korean society by exploring the country’s sport culture. Particular attention will be paid to the political, and specifically the nationalistic, dimension of sport in North Korea. To this end, three case studies— football, taekwondo, and mass gymnastics—are explored. This study of North Korean sport offers useful insights into the political and nationalistic elements embedded in the country’s cultural practice, and, more generally, insights into the problematic relationship between communism and nationalism.

This essay argues that the gendered body is not accounted for in the physical conditions of motorsport but instead through the discourse of the sport. Specifically, women’s bodies signify as different in three main ways: beyond vehicles (navigating the space filled with other bodies and their respective vehicles), with vehicles (coordinating with the technology of the vehicle), and inside vehicles (operating in the space of and interacting with the technology) but situated by their gender’s discursively constructed characteristics. For women drivers in motorsport, these locations of identity formation offer embodied experiences mediated through discursive constructions. This article examines these articulations of the female body in motorsport, focusing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donna Haraway, and Iris Marion Young.

The social institution of sport reflects a society that presupposes the values, mores, norms, and standards of the majority and subsequently determines who can participate in sport and who can be identified as an athlete. Recognizing the growing importance of disability sport to people with disabilities, the purpose of this study was to use the construct of symbolic interactionism to examine the identity development of adolescent girls with physical disabilities who participate in organized wheelchair sports with a specific focus on athletic identity development. An understanding of how the girls’ interaction with various socializing agents through a wheelchair sport program to develop an athletic identity was developed through interviews. Results are presented utilizing Keliber’s framework for identity development through leisure participation, including sport.