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This paper takes up the challenge posed by McDonald (2006) among others to interrogate queer privilege in the analysis of sport and sexuality. Using Puar’s (2007) concepts of sexual exceptionalism and homonationalism, and Morgensen’s (2010) notion of settler homonationalism, I analyze specific examples from the 2002 and 2006 Gay Games, and 2006 Outgames to demonstrate how emancipatory sexual identity events have also reiterated white, Western, bourgeois privilege through aspects of their instantiations. The argument is not just that race has to be added to the analysis of the international lesbian and gay sport movement, it is that relying on a primary focus such as homophobia actually contributes to the reproduction of other forms of potent oppression. The paper ends with a reading of the 2010 Winter Olympics as a new context for homonationalism in the production of queer abjection.

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This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. Our concerns crystallized during the spirited feminist responses to a fiery roundtable debate on Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) in New Orleans in November 2012. At that session, one audience member after another spoke to what they saw as the unacknowledged appropriation by PCS proponents of longstanding feminist—and feminist cultural studies—approaches to scholarship and writing. These critiques focused not just on the intellectual moves that PCS scholars claim to be making but on how they are made, with several audience members and some panelists expressing their concerns about the territorializing effects of some strains of PCS discourse.

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