Decolonial Storyworking and Gender “Misfits”: Transforming Selves, Scholarship, and Systems

Colonial ideologies are made visible through global sport, leading to misogynoir material-discursive spaces with disproportionately higher sex investigations of women from the Global South. Caster Semenya of South Africa and Annet Negesa from Uganda are two publicfacing women “outed” as intersex and barred from competition by these invasive and violent sex investigations. Well-intentioned scholars have unintentionally reproduced that same critiqued violence by attempting to discover, investigate, and settle dynamic, interconnected stories surrounding Semenya and Negesa. This article responds to the cross-disciplinary call for a methodological intervention in discourse surrounding Semenya and Negesa, particularly to feminist sport communication studies scholars Cooky and Antonovich’s (2022) call to “tell stories differently” (p. xi) by offering a theoretical argument for more scholars to adopt Jo-ann Archibald / Q’um Q’um Xiiem (Sto:lo First Nation)’s concept of “storywork” as a decolonial method. Through an example of storyworking with Semenya and Negesa’s stories, I argue that storywork as a decolonial analytical method highlights the dynamic realities and relationships within stories and individuals implicated within the same colonial assemblages of power, outlined by Jasbir K. Puar, in a way that illuminates specific, exigent experience—transforming ourselves, scholarship, and systems.