Aspiring for inclusive sport: reflecting on intersections around exclusion

This paper attempts to address the intersections of gender, caste, class, sexuality, region, and other social attributes, that constitute the social web in India influencing the possibilities and exclusions within sport. Being at the margins of this social web makes individuals vulnerable to unethical practices such as discrimination, exclusion, and erasures of their lived realities, by both systemic and everyday practices. Using the lens of social reproduction the paper attempts to capture not just the productive work that sustains a sporting milieu in society, but the labour that produces leisure, entertainment, play, rest, fitness, pleasure, well-being, and care that sustains and is further generated by families, communities and entire societies. It examines the social identities/locations of being queer and located in caste society, as specific instances but also as intersecting with other social locations that may exclude or offer opportunity within a specific sport.