Transnational coaches: A critical exploration of intersections of race/ethnicity and gender

Abstract

‘Foreign’ or transnational coaches play an important role in elite sport. They are hired by national sport federations to improve athlete performance so that a country can win more medals. The role of the coach, however, goes beyond influencing athletic performance. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how transnational coaches may disrupt, challenge or reinforce dominant ideologies of race/ethnicity and gender in their host country. We argue that transnational coaches contribute to intersectional social processes that go beyond improving athletic performance and that these processes tend to be ignored by those appointing these coaches and by scholars who study coaching. We reflect on the position of coaches in terms of gender, heteronormativity and whiteness and the invisibility of this positioning in the scholarly literature. Specifically, we use a post-structural lens to draw on scholarly work on migration, critical management, gender, intersectionality and sport to explore how transnational coaching may contribute to and challenge complex figurations of race/ethnicity and gender and suggest a research agenda for doing so.