Protest or Festival? :LGBTQ+ Sports Activism and the Geopolitics of Gender in East Asia

• In Event: Transnational Sexualities (Co-sponsored by Global and Transnational Sociology Section)

Abstract

Global debates about sex testing and transgender inclusion have positioned sport as a key site of gender governance. Yet most scholarship centers Western institutions and elite sport, leaving underexamined how alternative gender policies emerge outside Euro American contexts. Drawing on multi sited ethnographic research in South Korea and Hong Kong, this article compares two LGBTQ+ sports events: the Queer Women Games in Seoul and the Gay Games Hong Kong. I argue that LGBTQ+ sports activism in East Asia navigates global gender policing through two distinct but overlapping frameworks: protest and festival. While the Queer Women Games challenges sex segregation by implementing a nonbinary participation policy and framing sport as collective resistance, the Gay Games Hong Kong adopts a gender inclusion model that operates within corporate and state legitimacy frameworks. These divergent approaches reflect differences in geopolitical positioning, colonial history, and state relations. By situating gender policy within transnational feminist and decolonial analysis, this study reframes fairness grounded in sex segregated sports structure as a geopolitical project rather than a biological inevitability and extends social movement theory beyond Western contexts.

Author

• Jinsun Yang, University of Oregon