Hardcore Parqueer

This paper endeavours to evaluate the accessibility of fringe sports like parkour to queer people, and to ascertain how fringe sports can be used to challenge oppressive systems. Sports such as parkour break the mould established by traditional team sports in how they position their practitioners and use space. Fringe sports are often born from niche interests or subcultures, and are characterized by a lack of major popularity or a widely recognized governing body. In their unique perspectives, interests, and goals, fringe sports like breakdancing or skateboarding are likely to create environments that prioritize individuality, incite creative expression, and allow for subversion of expectation and space. These sports are young and dynamic, with norms that are much more easily swayed and evolved than the long-established norms of sports like football or hockey. Fringe sports therefore have the potential to transgress dominant cultures that seek to categorize and homogenize, which parallels queer existence in societies that are predicated on the systemic oppression of queerness and are threatened by queer perspectives. The perpetuation of cissexist and heteronormative cultures upholds that sexuality is invalid if it does not conform to the heterosexual norm, that gender must exist in a hierarchical and biological binary, and that the expression of anything other than this oppressive binary is to be squandered. Due to its nature as a fringe sport, parkour can thus be seen as a tool for challenging and circumventing harmful cultures. Through autoethnography and a review of literature on public space, queer existence, and parkour culture, this paper analyzes otherness and individualism as tools for both exclusion and queer expression. Ultimately, we find that fringe sports are complex and subversive, and create an important avenue of expression for queer people as we navigate space.