S2 EP 2 - Asian Sporting Masculinities

This is the Sports and Society Podcast, where we go beyond scores, statistics, and personalities to focus on issues and controversies in sports worlds. Your hosts, Jay Cochely and Jeff Montez-Dioca, are sports sociologists and the authors of the book, Sports and Society, Issues and Controversies. The episodes in this podcast give you a behind the scenes look at the textbook, with stories from our lives, the scholars, and athletes, as well as providing analysis of ongoing issues and controversies in contemporary sport worlds. We welcome hearing your thoughts and analysis, so please use this space to engage with us about the textbook or any of the topics we cover in this podcast. Hello and welcome to the Sports and Society Podcast, your hosts are Jay Cochely and Jeff Montez-Dioca. Hey Jay. Hello Jeff, good to be with you and our guests this morning. Yeah, in this episode we're discussing sports in Asian communities and more specifically Asian sporting masculinities with two of the world's leading authorities on this topic. This episode is directly related to chapter 7 on gender and chapter 8 on race and sports, so we're really honored to welcome Stan Thangaraj and Kandasio Arnato to the show. Anthony Thangaraj is a sociocultural anthropologist and the James E. Hayden chair for the study of race, ethnicity, and social justice at Stonehill College. His first book, Daisy Hoopdremes, examines the practices of basketball, masculinity, race, class, and sexuality through co-ethnic South Asian American basketball, leagues across the U.S. and Canada. His newest forthcoming book, project with University of Texas Press, looks at Kurdish American and their practices of place making desire and pleasure across sites in the United States. Kandasio Arnato Jr. is associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Gender and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is author of Filipino American Sporting Cultures, the racial politics of play. Welcome to the politics, I politics, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. All right. Yeah, let's jump in with the first two questions and we ask these questions of all of our guests, so Stan, why don't you go ahead and go first and please describe your experience in sports? Yeah, so I grew up as a child of multiple generation of Christian preachers in Southern India who all had asthma. So no one expected me to play sport, but my mom was so strong and so athletic and she was playing all these sports as a young college student and then as a mother on the college campus that we worked at in mother a India. So I grew up fascinated by sport because of my mom. It wasn't the story of the dad socializing the kid into sport. I saw my mom, right? She was amazing and all the kids in the college were playing sports and the Christian college we were on. Once a year they split the campus into four teams and they would put random people on the teams and it was all based on, you know, Christian Apostles. So here's a team based on Matthew versus Mark versus John and so on, right? And so we would battle against each other and I loved it. I was so intrigued by it as a young kid, but then my dad got recruited to do his PhD in Harvard and we came to Boston in 1981 with the Celtics run, Larry Berg, Kevin MacKale, Robert Parish. Oh, I love those guys and Robert Parish was my hero and I was so enamored with basketball that when we went back to India, I couldn't find a space for basketball, but Indian cricket had really blown up, so I started playing cricket and that followed me all throughout my five years back in India and then once we came to Atlanta, I could connect with basketball again with Dominique Wilkins, Spud Webb, Doc Rivers, right? Moses Malone, all these guys that were just incredible. So my journey was woven already through a certain Christian aesthetic I didn't even know about till I started reading Kansansya's book on muscular cricket Christianity and Linda Espanyam Maron's book and so sport was a part of my life and a way in which it connected me to my mom. It connected me to other people in Atlanta as a recent immigrant. I was there were pathways to playing pick up basketball with African Americans and white students at my high school that would not have been possible if I didn't enter the realm of sport. Sport was a site to build community and to build family for someone who felt so out of place. Awesome, thanks so much Stan as incredible Kansansya, do you want to address this question as well? Yeah, I mean, I really loved how Stan kind of broke it down and talked about his entry into sports. I am a child of immigrant parents from the Philippines. I grew up in a Bay Area of California and while folks might think the Bay Area is diverse, it's really progressive. I actually grew up in a place called Clayton, California, which is like East of Oakland, East of Concord. If anybody knows where Wanda Creek is, East of Wanda Creek literally at the base of a mountain called Mount Diablo, and so my parents moved to the Bay Area. My dad, my late father was in the U.S. Navy. My mom is now a retired nurse and so I think for me, my entry into sports was through my late father and I still remember this quite vividly. When I was a kid, I would stare at his trophies that would like be placed on this mantle in our house and they were bowling trophies and I found out that he was an avid boulder and he would bowl on the Navy ship with his friends and so I would stare at them like wanting to have trophies of my own. And so my late father introduced my two other brothers and I into sports. So he introduced us to like football, especially at baseball. So I started playing baseball at a young age. I was a fan of the Golden State Warriors, the San Francisco 49ers, Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants. So I played all kinds of sports, baseball, basketball, volleyball, football, soccer. And so when my father passed away, my mom actually took up the task of driving my brothers and I to football practice, baseball practice, basketball tournaments and she in fact was the reason why we continued to play sports. And so it was a huge part of my identity as an athlete but also as a fan. My favorite athletes were black athletes, Tim Hardaway performing the crossover. In my book, Philippine American Sporting Cultures, his crossover and the way that I practiced it allowed me to think more, I guess theoretically and analytically about what can the crossover do if we apply it as an analogy but also as a metaphor. So I credit Tim Hardaway for introducing me to the crossover and allowing me to practice it. So that was like my move in basketball. I'm not very tall but I found a lot of pleasure in faking people out, crossing people over and just loving sports from a really young age. Well, Constazio, you're anticipating our next question and which is, how have you experienced in sports influenced the questions you ask and the research that you conduct? And I think that the crossover, right, since that is important in your research, right, is a great segue to this next question if you'd like to address that. I love this question because one of the things I appreciate as a scholar of sports is allowing me to reflect on how sports informed my research and the theoretical claims I'm making. And so for me, reflecting on all the sports I played, sports was in many ways like a training manual for me to understand questions of race and in particular heterosexual masculinity. And so it gave me a template or a masculinity manual of sorts to early understandings of what it meant to be a man, to be a manly boy. And so I say this because thinking about the teams that I was on or the folks I was playing with, or against, mainly men or mainly boys and then later young men, like it was okay to be angry or to posture aggression, but it was not okay to be sad or to cry, right, like the whole, the line in a league of their own, there's no crying in baseball, right? And so. Because sports is about the body, I was supposed to act tough and to use my body as a weapon. And so this meant that performing a certain kind of masculinity meant denigrating girls, women or queer folks. But then to complicate this a little bit more, my own brown body became a way to challenge what it meant to be an American, right? Because Asian Americans are seen as forever foreigners. And so thinking about the crossover as a theoretical or analytical tool, like how can we use the experiences of Asian American or Asian athletes to challenge these long-standing stereotypes, to fake out or to challenge these dominant representations of Asian Americans? And I guess finally, I want to emphasize that sports for me was a way to bond with other boys, right, our young men. It was a certain kind of intimacy that we developed that I also wanted to highlight, because it's pleasurable to play sports, and I don't want to shy away from that either. >> Yeah, and one of the things you see in a consensus, an incredible book, is it covers a wide spectrum of sport, right, and the ways in which we never think about Asian American masculinity and Asian masculinity across the spectrum of sport, right, where we might understand it. And well, no, this is what Filipinos are supposed to play, or what South Asians are supposed to play, and there's a way in which we're put into very constrictive, restrictive categories that don't showcase how diverse our sporting experiences are. And that's where his book going from the realm of spectatorship with boxing, to flag football, with women, to basketball, right, and I think it allows us to see the much larger scale of engagement with sport that's also both across time as trans-historical and across nations as transnational. Like we bring these stories and experiences of sport that's not readily there when we talk about Asian American masculinity as either too nerdy, too terroristic, right, or too unmanly, not man enough, right, and so what his book does is capture the great spectrum of Asian American sporting experiences. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a fantastic point and Consassi, I don't know if I mentioned you, but I had a friend in college who used to like to tell me, uh, Filipinos are pound for pound, the best basketball players in the world. And I just thought it was so hilarious that he would use that boxing metaphor. Yeah. But as the equalizer, right, because the weight categories become the equalizer in boxing and we'll come back to Filipino boxers in a moment, uh, but, uh, that, that claimed to meant using sport to make that claim to manhood despite the fact that he's perceived as small and foreign and had a very, um, athletic, uh, you know, persona so that he couldn't be seen as nerdy, but uh, sin, I want to pick up on something you brought up when, when answering this question is the way in which, uh, Asians in particular, and Asian men get put into boxes related to sport. And, and I know you push back a lot on the cricket playing South, South Asian, um, image. And so maybe you could talk about your relationship with sport and how that, and, and talk more about how that informs the, the research that you do. Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. I love, love that question. And so in, I'm in my book, Daisy Hoop dreams, when I was doing the research for it in Atlanta and in Chicago, there were cricket leaks featuring South Asians, a very vibrant scene in Atlanta, but I wanted to think more about why is it that when we understand Asian Americans, we understand it through the trope of modem minority, what does modem minority do as a gendered phenomenon? We always think of it as a racialized fan phenomenon, but we don't see how racializations are also gendered. So I was thinking about like modem minority as a way to think about how there's a celebration of a certain type of professional and academic success and excellence, but the ways in which it combines us in a way as Vijay Prasad talks about as all brain. And what that does is allows us to understand South Asian and Asian American masculinity only through a certain type of professional practice, very stoic, who's an academically excellent and professionally proficient, but without pleasure, right? And so what I do in Desi Hoop dreams is try to understand masculinity as a side of understanding desires and pleasures. It's not just about gender roles, but the ways in which we talk about masculinity as an affirmation, embodiment, and performance of pleasure. What it means to be a baller and the way in which Kansansu and I like to self-identify each other as scholar ballers, right? And for us, I'm in my book that meant that you're looking at young men who, first of all, don't or not modem minority, right? Who come post-1980, who are working in kiosks at malls? Their parents are working in gas stations. Their children do not go to college or if they do is often to community college, right? And they don't have the same type of access to prestigious four-year colleges and to the professional realms of medicine, lawyers, lawyership, and science, right? And engineering. And so what I wanted to do was to look at how, as masculinity and respectable masculinity is understood through the modem minority, it doesn't allow us to see the struggles within this community to see how they make themselves visible. Their stories are not visible as other than as nerds, as spelling be script spelling be championships, champions, right? Which they won for like 14 of the last 16 years, right? But there's a whole spectrum of everyday American sporting pleasure and everyday American sporting masculinity that's not detailed even in the script spelling be when several of the winners talk about playing basketball, playing football, and playing baseball, right? All of a sudden those stories go missing. So what I wanted to do in Desi Loot Dreams is to look at how the sight of pleasure allows us to see Asian American and South Asian American engagement in American sport as not just a spectrum of trying to claim Americanness and finding belonging, but a way to affirm what it meant to be a South Asian American man. Yeah, I'd like to just pick up on what you both have said, and how has popular culture, for example, in the United States in particular, influenced what you're talking about now? You know, kind of this transition from being stereotyped in one way, but seeking pleasure in another in through sports, for example, because some of the stereotypes and the perceptions that have been popular in the United States is that is that Asian American men generally are not seen in physical terms, in terms of physical abilities, but there's been a change in popular culture, TV, movies, and so on, and I'm wondering how that has affected what you're talking about now, has it perpetuated, you know, to what extent has it perpetuated stereotypes, and to what extent has it challenged them in ways that you've noticed in your own lives? I can't sense it, can I jump on this? We'll be okay. Thank you. So, one, we're still seen as exceptional, right? That is not normal. That a great Asian American athlete becomes the abnormal Asian American figure, right? And even the media coverage of Jeremy Lin during the incredible Lin-Lin Sanity run was never attentive to the everyday sporting cultures in which he grew up in. There was not a mention of the Asian American sporting cultures in California. No mention of the longer history of Japanese American basketball leagues in California that Nicole Wims and Pristina Vichin look at, right? And so when you're postured as exceptional, then it is a complete erasure of the everyday quotidian practices of sporting masculinity that we live through every day, from childhood through adulthood and in adulthood. Like for example, when I play pickup basketball, in which I still continue to do, unless people know me, I'm not going to get picked up. Even if I am the tallest person on the court, even if I am the most physically core, you know, corporately resembling a tall, lean, basketball muscular player, I do not get picked up. Because our bodies are already scripted prior to our rival. So what that means is we have to constantly prove that we belong in this space where it's not just that we have access to it because we're men, but as men where there's a hierarchy of who is seen as the legitimate basketball player and respected as that, that we have to put so much work to being seen as even a plausible athlete, right? You know, Jay, like your question really gets at the ways in which our everyday stories of sporting excellence become invisible, right? That Jeremy Lynn becomes the only visible marker that then removes all the incredible athletic feats of Asian American athletes, especially Asian American women in American sports. And this is where we're seen as both physically not man enough to play American sports of basketball football and baseball. And then secondly, we're seen as culturally not American enough to know what to play, right? Like the stereotype of South Asian Americans and Middle Eastern Americans as terrorists is actually a construction of a dangerous masculinity that is outside the contours of American cultural acceptability that we're not culturally American enough, right? So the realm of the physical and the cultural play out in producing us as always outside the boundaries of Americanness and American sporting masculinity. Yeah, I can sense you. You want to add anything to that? I mean, you know, in terms of your experience to what extent did those stereotypes influence your approach to sport and how characteristic is that among other Filipino athletes and Asian American men generally? Yeah. I mean, I love that Stan emphasizes this notion of the everyday, the mundane, the quotidian because I think, you know, the case of Jeremy Lynn, like he becomes the exception, but like there have been is, you know, Asian American basketball leagues that have been around forever. Like I had counted and I actually did like a mini research project looking at, okay, how many are, how many Filipino slash Filipino American basketball leagues are there in the United States? And I counted over 150, but that was like a couple of years ago. And so, Filipino Americans have been playing sports ever since the U.S. colonized the Philippines. It became part of the institutionalization of the Philippines, like the young men's Christian association became embedded in the Philippines during U.S. colonialism. So the comment that Jeff made earlier about like Filipinos on a pound for a pound, best basketball players in the world, we could look to how and why based on the U.S. colonial process of the Philippines, the Philippine Basketball Association is the second oldest professional basketball league in the world, right? And so I think about Kathleen Yips, book that talks about Chinese American communities playing basketball in the early 20th century, there have been basketball leagues sporting tournaments in California in the early 20th century. And so to assume that Asian Americans have been just introduced to sport is simply false. And it's the fact, it's, it's important to recognize this long history that's connected to colonialism, to immigration, to settlement in the United States that allows us to see that Asian Americans have always been part of this popular cultural practice, that they're not the exception that that rather they have been part of this notion of claiming a certain kind of Americanist for centuries. Constacio, there isn't a lot of talk in the U.S. about colonization of the Philippines. Can you just very quickly explain that and why you say the U.S. And then, and maybe if possible, use that to transition into a little bit more discussion about the different Asian leagues that are exist right now. Right, so when the U.S. colonized the Philippines in 1898, part of the process involved institutionalizing sport. And the idea was that sport would enable Filipinos, colonized Filipinos to quote unquote assimilate as good colonial subjects. So I'm citing Linda Spaniard, Linda Spaniard Merrim's important book, Creating Masculinity, where she talks about this, the colonial process in the Philippines. So American soldiers introduced Filipinos to boxing, the YMCA introduced Filipinos to volleyball, the baseball and basketball. And the idea was that if Filipinos can learn these civilizational imperatives of sport, then they can eventually be, they can engage in self-rule. So the idea was that sport can transform the so-called inferior Filipino body into good colonial subjects, and then eventually not need the U.S. colonists. They didn't need U.S. colonialism anymore if they actually assimilate into what it meant to be colonial subjects and gain independence. You know, if I can just jump in really quickly right here, this is not unique to the Philippines. And people might not realize this, but Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the British Empire, very famously wrote the poem The White Man's Bird, and it was about the U.S. conquest of the Philippines. We don't often recognize that, but my father had the exact same experience with sport in an American Indian boarding school. The idea that Indian boys, their bodies and their sense of self was, their masculinity was a failed masculinity because it wasn't the same as an Anglo-American. And so that in football, especially boxing in many of the schools, was used to masculinize these Indian boys so they could become U.S. citizens. But yeah, go ahead, Stan. Yeah, and I love Kansanchu's point, and this is why his work is so important. So Kansanchu, could you also describe as, you know, when Jeff and Jay brought up this point, what it also means at this point of U.S. colonialism after the Spanish-American war, that fellow Filipinos are being considered by the U.S. nation-state as little brown friend, and what that does to think about sport? Yeah, thanks for that follow-up question, Stan, so Filipinos were imagined as these little brown brothers, right, that they needed, they were seen in a really paternalistic way in which our little brown brothers, our little brown friend, need our paternalistic colonial advice or colonial, I'm stumbling across my words, but they needed, it was a paternalistic way in which Filipinos were imagined and seen. And so if we think about the little brown brother as a racializing term or a racialized term, we can see how Filipinos were never seen on equal footing with the Americans. That in fact, Uncle Sam, right, would see Filipinos as diminutive, small, right, little, and that sports would be a way in which they could even grow 3 inches through the YNC. So it was a really problematic racist way in which American colonists viewed Filipinos, Filipino bodies as little, as brown, and the need of colonial uplift, but sports would be that vehicle through which they can actually become independent. Okay, so I actually want to go back to the question of the various different Asian sports leagues today, you've both done research in those spaces. Can you sort of talk about how sporties used across a different Asian communities? Because again, we really want to emphasize that there is a tremendous difference across Asian communities because in the US, we have this construct of Asian that really makes no sense. What is the relationship between a person living and from Siberia and a person living in Syria? Right? It's absurd, but still. So there are these leagues and we have this idea of Asian and Asian leagues. So yeah, bring that down a little bit for us. So growing up as a kid in India, we always imagine ourselves as Asian. Then coming to Atlanta, I was told I was not Asian. That East Asianers were Asian, right? And so once you see is that the Asian, Asian American community actually absorbs US-centric geographies of race and nationhood and identity categories that don't always align with how people back in Asia might imagine them, right? And so when I came here, I was told I was white, and I never thought of myself as white, right? And I said, "I'm Asian." Even though you're not East Asian, I was like, "OK, I don't understand this," right? And so the political movement by people from Syria, as you mentioned, from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, places in the Middle East or the Swansea region, they've now started to label themselves as West Asia, right? And for us in India, as South Asia, to mean Pakistan, Bangladesh, Tibet, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, right? And what then happens is when you see these warning leagues form in the US, they're often stuck within these US racial categories where Asian America is confined based on a US imperial understanding of space, right? And so within that, you see how there are Japanese-American leagues, South Asian-American leagues, even within my research, there are Sunni Muslim leagues versus Mishmai-li-Sia leagues, right? So there are even these breakdowns and religious leagues that really tear apart and deconstruct the idea of Asian America or Muslim as a singular thing, right? So what I've seen is the ways in which some of the folks who came as refugees, so when I looked at the Asian ballers league, which has its base in Atlanta, but has tournaments for people across the US, being founded by a Cambodian-American, coming on a refugee passage, they were much more open because of their working class background and living with many communities of color to have Asian America be a much broader category than some of the Korean leagues that I got to know or the South Asian league with the ways in which it really profiled people who were Afro-South Asian-American versus white South Asian-American, the policing of those. So you see like the differences in the migration stories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders tell us what the possibilities of Asian-American Pacific Islander America can be as a broad category for coalition and broad world building versus ones that get caught up in the same racial logic that the US demarcates as Asia. Maybe it's us you can talk a bit about Filipino flag football players and some of that research that you've done. Yeah, thank you for asking about that. So in chapter, one of the chapters in my book, chapter 3 I believe, I write about predominantly Filipino American flag football players with a couple of Asian American flag football players. And so I would practice and play with Filipino American flag football players in tournaments in college and these tournaments were primarily Asian American and/or Filipino American flag football tournaments. But in the chat and so I would practice and play with them and I saw how incredibly athletic they were and how tough they were and committed to playing flag football. But there was one tournament in particular that they would always talk about. So when I was doing these interviews, they would always talk about this one flag football tournament that they would play and they would be invited to until they were excluded but we could talk about that later. So they would bring up the fact that they would play in this flag football tournament against these white women's sororities. And initially white women did not think that they were actually that good. So they would make these comments about Filipino American flag football players like not being athletic enough. They probably only know martial artistry. They're not very good. So the trope of them being the forever foreigners and they didn't take them seriously. So they're not very good. We're not going to take them seriously. But in fact, first tournament these women whooped on them, they beat the white women flag football teams the first year, the second year, the same thing, third year, the same thing. So it got to a point where the competitiveness was heightened, the physicality was heightened, a Filipino Americans were ballad and they were scoring touchdowns, they were juking their white counterparts, they were intercepting their passes. And so eventually the white women got fed up and they stopped inviting the Filipino American flag football players to the annual tournament. So much so that at the end, every year the team names get engraved on this trophy. And the trophy serves as a reminder of who the champions were. So four years in a row, Filipino Americans would win, but they were never, they never got their team name engraved onto this trophy. And so that was a point of contention that some of the players talked about was that here, you know, you didn't take a seriously in the first place and then we get excluded. And so during this process, I think it's important to point out that there are stereotypes about Asian American women, right? That they're fragile, they're hyper, hyper feminine, they're hyper sexualized. But in this flag football tournament, Filipino Americans and the Asian Americans were challenging these stereotypes. They weren't being hyper feminine, they weren't performing a certain kind of hyper femininity, they weren't the lotus blossoms, they were performing a certain kind of female masculinity. They were challenging the ways in which Asian American bodies could move, could function in a flag football space. And so they were incredibly athletic and brilliant in the way they profiled the game, studied the game, and eventually they dominated this annual flag football tournament. That's incredible. And again, it connects to a lot of other experiences in sport, but racialized people have when they engage in sports and so the sporting contest is racialized. But to me, even more so, connecting to your earlier points, they become like a mini-colonial struggle that plays out on the sporting pitch. And maybe you could address that a little bit, either Stan or Kostasio. I mean, yeah, I think I talk about as a crucible of competition, right? So part of what is also important is that it's not the black, white, racial, and gender paradigm. It is now an Asian American white contest. Lettinas were, I think they appeared in one tournament, but that was it. Black women never appeared in the tournament. And so I'm not sure why, but I think part of the reason why Filipino Americans were invited is because of race and gender. Well, I think we'll invite them because we don't think that they're very good. And I mean, big mistakes there because they were actually really dominant. And so yeah, I think part of it is them engaging in a certain kind of racial and gendered battleground on the football field, a flight football field, that broadens our understandings of race beyond the black, white, and male racial paradigm. And forces us to think about how these played out in a seemingly pleasurable site in flight football, but that these pleasures become highly politicized. Yeah, thank you for discussing this because you're providing a narrative on a perspective here that doesn't often get represented in discussions of race and ethnicity and sport and gender. So, this is something that's very important for students to understand, and especially in terms of their own relationships. if you're a white student and you see this happening in connection with the experiences of particular Asian American men or women, you know, you can intervene and serve as an ally. And I think that's kind of an eye-opening option for white students and black students. You know, as you mentioned, so that can provide a form, a foundation for cohesion that doesn't exist in most circumstances. Yeah, and what would Consoncio also brings up with this incredible chapter on women's like football, which is also an amazing article found in the Journal of Asian American studies, is what is it about our anxiety, about the exclusion of Asian American men from sporting cultures? There's so much anxiety about the experiences of Asian American men and the particular racialization of them that emasculates them, that we go silent on our examination of Asian American women. So his chapter is so vital to thinking about what is it that also allows us by looking at these moments like the basketball leagues or flag football to think about how our national sports gendered, that basketball, football, and baseball become gendered as respectable heterosexual masculine, that for men who feel emasculated and who feel marginalized like Asian American Pacific Islander men, that it is through these sports that we regain our masculinity at the expense of excluding Asian American women, that women who participate in these spaces are still sexually stigmatized and sexually slurred as butch that negates the possibility of Asian American femininity and athletic ability to come together, that they're always imagine outside the realm of respectability when women, Asian American women play the mainstream American sports, right? And so what this tells us is that individual sports where we see a huge presence of Asian American women like tennis and golf and then with gymnastics with Sunni Lee as a great great example, we don't see that same type of entryway into mainstream American sport, right? And that's because it's not just that our communities don't want to do that, it's because national sports are incredibly policed and the gatekeeping is so firm that women no matter what race or ethnic background have a much harder time entering the realm of national sports, like women might be able to play cricket in the U.S. much easier than they would be able to play cricket in India, because cricket is the national sport and seen as very masculine in India and for men. And this is where like Constancer's work, the work of women performing sporting masculinity is completely dismissed and worse refused as even a possibility. So in the way that you're both talking about marginality and even marginality within the category of Asian, particularly in a North American context where we think of East Asian, you know, Korean, Japanese, Chinese as definitional of Asian, but you know, Kandasio is Filipino, stand your South Asian, but you're also talking about your research. And so I want to connect this to your research and how you approach your research. So as a South Asian and a Filipino scholar within Asian studies, but you're marginalized within a marginalized category, how does that help your scholarship and the questions that you ask in your research? I mean, I hope people don't get mad at me for saying this, but in Asian American studies, sports, studying sports is still not seen as a worthy topic of study. I remember reading the research and trying to see, okay, who in Asian American studies has written about sports? I can name them on my hand. Linda Spanya Miram, Christina Chin, Kathleen Yips, Dan Gharaj, right? I don't know if I'm missing anybody. Nicole Wilms writes about Japanese American basketball leagues. So even in the field of Asian American studies, sports is not necessarily taken up as a serious scholarly topic. But to answer your question about how it's helped my scholarship, I don't know that I mean, it's great to be like one of the only well-known scholars of sports in Asian American studies, but it's also disappointing. I think it's important to look at sports not just as like some whimsical activity, but in a critical and productive way that also can kind of talk about these long histories of colonialism, that challenge these stereotypes, and it takes into account the diversity of the Asian American experience, right? Sports for many Americans is something that's a part of our everyday lives, even if we don't take it as we don't really write about it as a serious scholarly topic in Asian American studies, like Asian Americans are somehow and in some way engaged in sports, right? Whether it be in their schooling system or as casual fans. So I'll just leave it there. I have probably have to like think about that a little bit more, but I want to kind of let's stand, take it over from here and see what else he has to add. Yeah. Just a quick note, I can never take it from there because Kansanju's so fast on the basketball court, I'm never catching up, right? I just hope that he misses something so I can get a break down and get a stat line checked right there, one rebound. But for how I understand this question, I think it's really, really important because what Kansanju and I have endured is marginalization within critical sports studies where the talk of race refuses Asian America. We are not a realm of study, critical realm of study, and only recently have a couple of books been, you know, awarded for their work. But within Asian American studies, sport is not a form of engagement, like critically, you know, embraced form of engagement, like there's so much work on art and literature and drama and film, but it refuses to engage with popular culture, right? And so what that means is Kansanju and I are operating in realms where there are always silence. So that silence has been really important for me in thinking about my own research project. So how would help me with my research project is it gave me a methodology to look for the silences and the absences of who is not there when I'm doing research. If they're not there, it means there are larger structural forces of power based on gender, sexuality or class that prevents certain South Asians from being there, like certain gay men who are not there, certain women who are not there, how working class, South Asian communities are depicted as problematic within these spaces, right? So I wanted to always look at the silences and to see what the silence is mean rather than looking at who's always there, because at times that becomes the majority voice, the dominant voice. So what I've I've tried to do and what Kansanju does brilliantly is to to center messiness and not look at Philophenics America as a monolith and I don't look at South Asian America as a monolith because we differ based on caste, religion, ethnicity, national origin, class, sexuality, right? And so what we wanted to do in our work is to while we center pleasure, look at those pleasures as a site for the contradictions that make South Asia not a knowable thing. And so what I do in my book, which Jeff knows and we've talked about this, is I make sure South Asian America is not something you can actually put your hands on, right? Because it's that diverse, but rather these are categories that are politically informed, but our academic research was not fall into these political categories, but rather deconstructed. them. Yeah, and that's a very important point for our listeners, especially those listeners who come from a sport management program because if you end up working in areas where there are diverse Asian populations, you can break that silence and create forms of community that don't exist at present. And I don't think that that perspective is often represented. So you know, this is an important one for not just people in the sociology of sport coming from a sociology background, but also people in sports studies and in sport management in particular. So we're going to be running a little bit short on time pretty soon. And Stan, why don't you go ahead and then I've got a question that I've just been I've been so patient to ask this one question and I think you guys know what it is. But go ahead Stan. Well actually, it's not that important. I was just going to say sport management needs to engage much more with deep theory and complex methodologies to not make sure that communities are fit into management metrics. If they're fit into management metrics, then we fall prey to the same type of essentializing logic that does not allow us to see the heterogeneity within our communities. And I will say we do have a an episode scheduled specifically about sport management and and the relationship of sport management and sociology. Because you know, one of the limitations that sport management has struggled with and a lot of the younger scholars are very much struggling with which we'll talk about in the episode is the history in the US of sport management, taking management to mean business management. And that's what you're getting at. There's so much more to how sport is run and managed in the US or any other place than making money from it. That's another episode, but it's it's a fantastic point. So one of the reasons I wanted to organize this episode is to talk about Manny Pacquiao. For those listeners who are not boxing fans, it's important to know that Manny Pacquiao, what he's a champion and I think eight different weight classes. And they're as we say in boxing, there are weight classes for a reason. It's unheard of. It's I think nobody has ever done that to just start at 112 pounds and then go all the way up to I think I think his last belt was at 154 pounds. So that's that's that's amazing. But he is coming out of retirement. He hasn't fought for four years and he's going to have a fight coming up with Mario Baudius, who is the welterweight champ who's a welterweight champion. I should say I mean the guys and he's 46 years old and he's going to come out of retirement to fight. But so Constacio, you've done research on the meaning of Manny Pacquiao in Filipino American communities. So can you talk about about that and maybe even address like I don't know if you're I don't know if you've been following people's responses to this current comeback. And I don't know if that'll change how he's understood. But if if you could just talk a bit about Manny. Yeah, thank you for asking me that question about Pacquiao. I guess I'm known as the Pacquiao guy scholar expert, but he is a really important figure for Filipino Americans. So in my chapter one, I actually open up with me attending a Bible study that was organized by his team in Mandalay Bay's Michael Jackson Theater. So anybody's interested in thinking about or wanting to learn more about the Bible study, read the chapter, but my research has shown that he's symbolically a really important figure. He becomes a national icon, he's become the national icon of the Philippines and the diaspora community. His wins were representative of reversing these longstanding narratives of Philippine national loss. In some ways, he serves as an antidote to colonial gendered subjugation. So Asian men and Asian masculinity has been seen and represented as emasculated. We should be castrated to borrow a term from David Eng, right? So he serves as a foil to emasculation, Asian emasculation. But he serves as and represents a certain kind of Christianized, heterosexual, acceptable masculine. He converted it from being Catholic to Christian evangelical Christianity and the Bible study kind of elaborates on that. And so for Filipino Americans, they claim him has this imaginary figure of a strong heterosexual Philippine nation. And it's not just Filipino American men. Philippine Americans have also claimed him as this national, strong, patriarchal figure of the Philippines. So I was actually, you know, I haven't spoken to anybody that I've interviewed before, like, especially when he came out of retirement. So I was just trying to see get an understanding of how people are searching him on the internet. So I actually looked up Google trends. And, you know, so if you go to Google trends and you type in Pacquiao, it'll give like data about how much he's been searched for. And so a value of 100 is the peak popularity for him. So like, from what was it? June, like more recently, June 8th to now, like he's been at 100. So June 5th, he was at 57. June 8th, he was at 100. June 14th, he was at 100. So it tells you that or it tells us that he's still popular. But I do, I did find folks in the diaspora kind of saying, well, you know, like, it's not really doing much for me. As you said, Jeff, he's an aging superstar. He's 46 years old. The physical body can only endure so much. So in some ways, his physical body is kind of reflective of an aging and less, maybe less popular superstar body. But people still value him and still claim him as the symbol of the Philippines. What I think is important is that yes, he becomes a figure of strength and toughness and aggression as reversing narratives of national laws. But he made some really incredible homophobic comments in 2012 and 2016. And so I think we also need to take into account this contradiction and stand rights beautifully about contradictions in the formation and production and performance of South Asian American masculinity. In that same spirit, we have to take into account the fact that Pacquiao, while he symbolizes a heterosexual masculinity, it's what he said about queer folks, about LGBTQ eye folks that turned off a lot of folks in the diaspora. And so in my book, I interview a couple of queer Filipino, Filipino ex-Americans and they talk about how he's not my hero. We can find other heroes in our community. He's using religion as a cudgel against people like me. And so I'm not interested in a celebratory narrative of Pacquiao. There are folks that love him and adore him and kind of see them see him as a hero. I'm interested in how we can think differently about someone like Pacquiao who has a much more expansive way of belonging expresses a much more expansive way of claiming folks in the diaspora that's not homophobic. So I want to squeeze one last question in here because it's a follow-up to what you were just describing, Constantio, which is in the US, we tend to understand race as some kind of morality tale. There's oppressors and there's victims. There's good guys and there's bad guys. I've had students in classes. I say, let's all tell our racial stories. And the racially minoritized students talk about being victims of racism. The white students talk about being witnesses to the victimization of somebody else. Nobody talks about their own moral ambiguity. And I think part of this is there's a problem with talking about race in moral terms to start with. And neither of you in your scholarship has shied away from looking at ambiguity, looking at contradiction. And so could you talk about that a little bit right now the way that you you address these contradictions and how and in particular how racialized men can be oppressive within their own community. I mean I think about R.W. Connell's work on masculinities and that men, men of color can be simultaneously oppressive but subordinated and so I think part of it is like looking at masculinity and racialized masculinity in tension that yeah race becomes a morality tale and and I'm thinking about this current political moment and like how do we think about masculinity or even like oppression that is shared where we can find moments of solidarity despite differences across humanity and as and I guess as an ethnographer as an anthropologist I have to honor what people tell me when I interview them when when they talk about someone like Pacquiao that I'm also not trying to be the morality police and I'm not trying to tell people what to say or how to think but to honor what they say and analyze it from a place of genuine love and care to not just be like exposing people to their ideas but I don't know trying to be thoughtful about how we make sense of these processes that is that are tied to colonialism right we can't understand race without talking about white supremacy in the oppressive ways in which white supremacy operates in our lives how do we free ourselves from white supremacist thinking from homophobia from racism I think part of it is looking at our shared experiences as oppressed people that when we think about social justice when we think about social justice in sports understanding what the research tells us and then trying to find a way to move forward in ways that is not exclusive to our own ethnic and or racial group yeah I mean I love I love Kansancho's points and one of the things that I think I tried to do in in my work in which Kansancho's book does really is to really look at how power is never clean or absolute right that there are all these fissures and crevices through which you enter these spaces but we never fully account for how structures of power travel and that our practices of resistance do not operate fully outside of power like we're working as a practice of resistance and a practice of pleasure through the very system of power then it can never operate outside of it right and this is where for any student or junior scholar Audrey Lorde's conception of the mythical norm is really really important where she says in America that mythical norm is that your white fit heterosexual affluent male Christian right and so we often think that for us to challenge it we challenge it on one one route so for the South Asian American men in my book they might say oh we're challenging it on the rum that we're seen is not manly enough but by playing into that practice of masculinity they're not understanding the racial contours oh how this then then becomes a way to racialize black and Latino men as out of bounds of sporting respectability to deem queer men as not man enough or to deem women as not suitable for a manly sport right or not having the class respectability to play American sport right and and and so what I think is really really crucial for us to do is we have to attend to power in this foolish realm that is not just top down or down up but that it saturates through all the space that we play in a context of power and we have to address the specificity of that context for us to see how we in the moment of resisting power are embracing it to create our own sets of exclusions and our own sets of hierarchy so for us in this current moment it's so important that we look to the realm of not trying to work through power and to claim power but to dismantle power and this is where practices of love and practices of caring are vital in our current political climate and that's where for Consoncio and myself we have known each other now for almost two decades and those two decades are built through like sharing and being vulnerable with each other sharing our work with each other and we look to each other as ways to better our work our friendship and our brotherhood is one built of love not one built of power is not built of the sense that I finished my PhD first let me tell Consoncio what to do that this is the only way to approach Asian-Americans supporting cultures and that's where I've been lucky in that process to then have a pathway to meet someone like Jeff who has been a dear brother to me who's worked on American national identity masculinity and sport education has been foundational but it's been through a realm where he hasn't been a gatekeeper as a keyer key figure in the North American society for the sociology of sport he's been one like Consoncio who's committed to opening up horizons that we all work together and open up a space of loving constructive work to make our scholarship in service of justice well that is a fantastic wrap-up for our episode today honestly I we we should do this again this was so much fun you guys are so fantastic and so insightful and you illuminate so many different ideas and we've just like scratch the surface of your scholarship there are so much depth to the work that you do but it's a great spot to to kind of wind things up because to leave people with these messages is is really part of what we're trying to do with the podcast and just a quick a quick note I cannot tell the audience enough how incredible innovative and mind-blowing of a book filipino sporting is filipino-american sporting cultures with NYU press by Dr. Consoncio are are not a junior is like if you get a chance to get Consoncio's book either as a resource for your research project or as a book to teach in class I've had the honor of doing both this is a mind-blowing book a horizon bending book this is a book in service of radical transformation you know I might take you up on that Stan and Consoncio because I've had I've a I assigned busy hoop dreams in one of my classes couple of my classes in the past and Stan joined in person he joined remotely and then after that other students that didn't take the class heard about it and they organized a reading group just to read his book so I'd love to you know have you do your book also Consoncio and if you're available will will will have you join the class yet thank you Stan for those kind words I'm really I don't really know what to say I'm humbled by A being invited but just sharing our ideas together and to just echo Stan's point I'm inspired by this notion of ethical manhoods or ethical masculinity by Celine Pagania Shizu and I try to practice that with friends and colleagues and peers and so one of my hopes is that you know the podcast this this conversation will allow folks to think differently about masculinity that's not oppressive that's subordinating that's actually ethical and expansive in loving because if we don't then we're not going to be a good we're not going to be in good shape so I'm thankful and honored to be a part of this podcast and if you're listening to this podcast and you want to join in the conversation jump on the discord server we have a sports and society discord server the link the invite link to that server will be in the description of this episode and yeah what do you think about all of these conversations for all right gentlemen thank you very much and I appreciate you so much for coming on the podcast