It seems safe to assert that, for many of us, the dailiness of life holds a certain amount of imbalance, self-reflection, risk-taking (desired or not), and loss (of many kinds). Living in these bodies is not what it was a mere 3 years ago, and many more of us now understand the depths of life-endangering differences in access to resources for keeping these bodies moving. As we pen this introduction to this important special series in this crucial space for pondering the experiences of girls and women in sport and physical activity, we also take note of several events shaping the lives of all women. The Supreme Court of the United States has struck down a nearly 50-year precedent that recognized a woman’s right to privacy relative to her health care decisions, including the right to terminate a pregnancy (Totenberg & McCammon, 2022). The International Swimming Federation has banned transgender women from elite competition (Futterman, 2022), possibly in a retaliatory response to the DI championship performance of Lia Thomas. U.S. states and school districts are attempting to ban nonbinary identities for children, while also penalizing educators for teaching more accurate histories of this nation’s rise to power on stolen lands, worked by enslaved people. Underresourced communities and nations continue to struggle with COVID and other life-endangering illness, as the economically and politically privileged move about the planet as though they are unaware of the harm they are doing in more vulnerable sites. Indeed, international sport federations elect to hold global competitions that put the most vulnerable among us at far-more risk than the privileged, vaccinated athletes, coaches, and fans who trek to various locales.

Yet at the same time, we observe women who have made new achievements. Amely Moras has been appointed as the first female referee chair of World Taekwondo (Palmer, 2021). Three women—Stéphanie Frappart (France), Salima Mukansanga (Rwanda), and Yoshimi Yamashita (Japan)—become the first women to referee at the men’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar (Goulding, 2022). In addition, the U.S. women’s national soccer team finally receives equal payment as the men’s (Hernandez, 2022). We suggest that, sport-specific or not, these are all issues that are shaping the way girls and women move—the way they move in and through their communities, the ways they move toward and envision life goals, and the ways they emerge as leaders in sport and beyond. Clearly, we are all undertaking great life shifts beyond our imagining, sometimes out of our control, and perhaps unlike anything we thought we desired. This instability across the globe takes up residence in our whole beings, in our bodies, mental states, spirit senses, and intellectual capacity. It is always hard to do the hard work, and uniquely challenging right now. We all could use a break. We also could use a revolution! We must persevere in our squad care, self-care, and in our actions toward our collective aims to understand and enhance the lives of girls and women through careful, cogent, timely analyses of wide-ranging experiences in sport and physical activity.

One of the aims of this special series is to recognize, reflect on, and link early leaders in establishing spaces for girls and women in sport with new ways of imagining our futures. Early career and emergent scholars need spaces to cultivate new framings of the field, while also creating new links to underexamined histories in the evolution of physical activity and sport for girls and women: It is our intention to create one such space in and through this special series. The guest review team for Engaging Conversation in Women’s Sport and Physical Activity: Traversing Generations sought to build upon the well-established community of scholarship facilitated by the Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal (WSPAJ). Our goal was to illuminate the many cross-generational aspects, relational components, and orienting points that make possible the varied spaces for girls and women, all girls and women, to engage in sport and physical activity. In short, we see WSPAJ as an important space in which to explore a range of cross-generational framings, understandings, and visions for sport and physical activity in the lives of women across diverse and intersectional identities. While WSPAJ has often done well to underscore the vast array of positionality and subjectivity for women and girls finding their way to meaningful engagement with sport and physical activity, any universalist framing of “girls” or “women” will interrupt such strong efforts toward an expansive framing (Gano-Overway, 2021; Ratna & Samie, 2017). Indeed, in this era of often unactualized calls for “equity, diversity, and inclusion,” we cannot merely count the representative “Others” in the room, nor can we rely on corporate institutions in sport or academia to bring about equity, once and for all. As several authors in the WSPAJ archive have articulated and modeled, it is imperative that spaces are made for multiple storytellers and varied types of storytelling in order to more fully depict and understand physically active lives at the intersections of shifting power, identity categories, and access to resources.

Accordingly, this guest review team sought to invite creative, analytic re/tellings of possibly messy journeys in, through, and to meaningful sport and physical activity engagement. Taking intellectual, cultural, and activist cues from publications such as Carpenter’s (1993) essay entitled “Letters Home: My Life with Title IX,” as well as non-sport-specific analyses of women, embodiment, and navigating everyday spaces, such as This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga & Anzaldua, 2015), Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism! (Hernandez & Rheman, 2002), and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Taylor, 2017), authors were invited to submit papers that put seldom-seen communities, erased ancestors, and others into conversation with the experiences and/or scholarly visions of girls and women in sport and physical activity. As a community of scholars and practitioners, we are engaged in an ongoing struggle for more capacious definitions of “women’s sport and physical activity,” and we see this series as one way to clarify and advance that struggle. One aim is to recognize and reconnect to practitioner and scholarly leaders in the broad field of women in sport and physical activity whose contributions feature experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and to link their work to current experiences and demands for early career BIPOC professionals involved in women’s sport and physical activity.

Moreover, as Moraga and Anzaldua (2015), Hernandez and Rehman (2002), and Taylor (2017) so clearly indicate, conversation is a crucial component of cross-generational re-membering and mentoring, as well as a strategy for moving beyond White/ned, corporate institutional questions of access, equity, and productivity. In the same way that This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga & Anzaldua, 2015) draws attention to political work being done in the so-called “domestic sphere,” Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism! (Hernandez & Rheman, 2002) illuminates a multitude of ways that women are speaking back and claiming power related to their own embodiment, and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Taylor, 2017) reanimates the personal and the political through conversations with organizers whose work pre-dates and deeply informs the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (https://blacklivesmatter.com/). These works may not feature organized sport, but they draw our attention to the ongoing struggle to liberate women from the externally imposed boundaries and definitions of their own embodiment and potential, and they do so through various types of dialogue. As we write this introduction, we also recognize the ways social media, at times, offer new platforms for girls and women in sporting spaces to organize, gather, and broadcast ideas. It is our intention in this special series to create a space for analytic dialogues about partial truths in our origin tales, about previously hidden histories, and about BIPOC leadership in sport and physical activity. As well, in full recognition of the important work being done in social media spaces (see Norman et al., 2019), it is expected that this special series will illuminate a range of crucial conversations that will keep us moving toward more equitable sporting spaces.

Perhaps as one example, the poignant chapter by Carpenter (1993) serves as a timeless model for such engaging conversation across generations, as she literally maps out the circuitous route of finding support for Title IX/women in sport throughout a series of letters to her older brother. One cannot read this work without being moved by both the content and the methodology as Carpenter (1993) offers descriptions of the highs and lows of the struggle for equity in ways that a reader cannot help but feel viscerally. The chapter strategically brings (presumably cisgender) masculinity into the conversation by tracing this sibling sharing of her work prior to and throughout the early enactment of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX). We must read this alongside the differently framed, but similarly motivated serial report on implementation of Title IX (Acosta & Carpenter, 2014) that would be the institutional accountability piece resonating with the epistolary ethnography of her own experience with Title IX. While our collective guest review team holds a range of temporal relations to Title IX, we all can relate to the power of sharing stories, linking previously delinked stories (Levins-Morales, 1997), and expanding the diversity of our perspectives on the range of sport and physical activity experiences available to girls and women.

Gano-Overway goes on to suggest that WSPAJ expects scholars to consider intersectionality, not by merely locating difference in sport settings, but more intentionally through considering one’s own deployment of methodology, as well as one’s analytic attention to power and privilege in the ways that histories and tales of progress get told about girls and women in sport and physical activity.

What we see in this call for increased actions for valuing diversity in content, and content makers, is an invitation to move further and further away from relying on gender as a unitary and universal category. This special series goes even further to invite intersectional analyses that expand our knowledge of difference without using one category as an alibi for others, and without letting sport governing bodies narrowly define difference relevant to expected performance outcomes (Cavanagh & Sykes, 2006). We are reminded here of Jaime Schultz’s (2011) invitation to surround our questions about competitive “fairness” (if we are to believe in such a concept) with all the sciences that inform our work as kinesiologists, rather than over-relying on medicalized and/or sociocultural framings of what counts as equal womanhood in elite competition settings. Indeed, we have many tools at our disposal for telling increasingly nuanced and expansive stories about the experiences of girls and women in sport and physical activity. Samantha King’s (2009) analysis of gender, sexuality, race, and ability in her study of media framing of WNBA athlete, Sheryl Swoopes offers one such expansive and intersectional critique of the preferred ways in which stories of difference so often get told in sport contexts. In a rich, descriptive analysis of organizing by undergraduate students, Davis Brooks and Knox (2022) illuminate the power of students linking their athletic and Black Student Association commitments toward local activism in alignment with the BLM movement. Rita Liberti (2004) expands our knowledge of women’s collegiate sport by drawing our attention to women’s basketball in an all-too-often overlooked Historically Black College and University context. These and so many other analytic efforts indicate the ongoing need for truly intersectional and decolonial approaches in the study of girls and women in sport and physical activity.

Ratna and Samie (2017) explain further Western exceptionalism still orients much of the current research on girls and women in sport. To the extent that “studies continue to purport the positive influence of Western sport in liberating such groups of women, overlooking in turn the complex and unexpected ways in which power operates and circumscribes the life chances of different groups of people, at any given moment in time, in and across different societies,” the core intersectional analysis has been missed (Ratna & Samie, 2017, p. 2). What all of these scholars have in common is a commitment to increasingly intersectional analyses—analyses that realize and attend to legacies of structural inequities, inherited conditions, and privileged erasures of whole experiences. In addition to recognizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (Cho et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 1989) theorizing as a crucial orienting point in the ever-expansive application of intersectional analyses, we also must read, know, cite, and extend intersectional analyses by and about girls and women in sport and physical activity (see Carter-Francique, 2017; McDowell & Carter-Francique, 2017; Ratna, 2011).