Screen and Roll: Transmissions of Embodied Knowledge through Canadian Women’s Basketball History

Analyzing the role of cockfights in Balinese culture, Clifford Geertz argues, “Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education. What he learns there is what his culture’s ethos and his private sensibility (or anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text” (449). Geertz’s thesis can be applied to Western sport: particularly in the twentieth century, sport was a place where men went to learn physical skills, values, and sentiments associated with masculinity. In this article, I examine the residue of sport’s male-dominated history through performative writing. I weave together historical quotations, performance theory, and a personal narrative about my experiences as a female basketball player and coach to consider the relationship between female bodies, the practice of sport, and the transmission of embodied knowledge. Ultimately, I argue that embodied repertoire is a significant site for the transmission of sport technique and the study of sport history.