"We're just as good and even better than you": Asian American Female Flag Footballers and the Racial Politics of Competition

ABSTRACT:Intervening in the Black/white (and largely male) racial paradigm of sports studies scholarship, this article details how an annual flag football tournament became a crucible of competition between white and Asian American college-aged women. I analyze how white women perceived Asian American flag football players as incapable of athletic excellence. Proving that they belonged as athletic equals, Asian Americans did not take these slights lightly as they subsequently dominated their white counterparts by defeating them four years in a row. Drawing from seven in-depth interviews with second-generation Asian American women, I examine how their participation in flag football challenged dominant discourses of Asian American female exoticness and Geisha Girl stereotypes while also providing an alternative space for them perform female masculinity. Mundane arenas like flag football spaces, I argue, become critical arenas to investigate how Asian American athletes negotiated meanings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and belonging in relation to white women and the institution of whiteness.