This is the first book to survey the participation of women in sport and physical education across Asia, from the Middle East and South Asia through to the Asia-Pacific region. Covering sport and physical activity at all levels, from school-based PE and community sport to elite, high-performance sport, the book provides an important overview of developments in policy, theory and research across this complex and dynamic region. It has a strong focus on gender equity but is informed by important intersecting influences that affect the lives of girls and women and their participation in sport. Including contributions from leading scholars from across the region, the book draws on multi-disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and history, and makes an important contribution to global understanding of diversity, challenges, and achievements in the sporting lives of Asian Women. This book will be a fascinating read for any student, researcher, or policy-maker working in sport studies, gender studies, women’s studies or Asian studies.

Although socio-cultural issues in relation to women within the fields of sport and exercise have been extensively researched, this research has tended to concentrate on the Western world. Women, Sport and Exercise in the Asia-Pacific Region moves the conversation away entirely from Western contexts to discuss these issues with a sole focus on the geographic Asia-Pacific region. Presenting a diverse range of empirical case studies, from bodybuilding in Kazakhstan and Thailand, karate in Afghanistan, and women’s rugby in Fiji to women’s soccer in North Korea and netball in Papua New Guinea, the book demonstrates how sports may be used as a lens to examine the historical, socio-cultural and political specificities of non-Western and post-colonial societies. It also explores the complex ways in which non-Western women resist as well as accommodate sport and exercise-related sociocultural oppression, helping us to better understand the nexus of sport, exercise, gender, sexuality and power in the Asia-Pacific area. This is a fascinating and important resource for students of sports studies, sports management, sport development, social sciences and gender studies, as well as an excellent read for academics and researchers with an interest in sport, exercise, gender and post-colonial studies.

Drawing on Chinese sources hitherto unavailable in the West including official documents and interviews with top athletes, the author explores the rise of Chinese super sportswomen and their relationship with politics, culture and society before and during the Cultural Revolution and through China's transition to a market economy.

"Modern sports" were introduced to Asia in the late nineteenth century as an innovation from the West, concurrently with the development of modern society in Asia. This book traces the historical developments of sporting cultures in Asia in specific local contexts – including Singapore, China, Myanmar, Taiwan, the Philippines, and India – and their intersections with larger social developments of colonialism, postcolonialism, nationalism, and the building of modern Asia and its place in a globalized world. The case studies herein present the social history of modern team sports with standardized rules such as basketball and cricket, and less familiar sports such as fives and chinlone, as they vacillate between global and local perspectives. This book also shows that modern sports have had an important influence on the makeup of everyday life in Asia, and the essays here also consider sports’ impact on gender, body culture, and celebrity culture, among other concerns. This book painstakingly bridges the gaps between Asian Studies and Sports Studies in a way that reflects the historicity and multiplicity of sports in Asian societies. By adopting multi-disciplinary approaches, this book innovatively offers significant intersection between sociology, cultural studies and Asian studies of sport in Asia. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Linking sport to the emergence and growth of modern Asian society this collection of essays offers a lucid, original and highly readable history of politics, culture and sport in the world's most populous region.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. In 'Japanese Women and Sport', Robin Kietlinski sets out to problematize the hegemonic image of the delicate Japanese woman, highlighting an overlooked area in the history of modern Japan. Previous studies of gender in the Japanese context do not explore the history of female participation in sport, and recent academic studies of women and sport tend to focus on Western countries. Kietlinski locates the discussion of Japanese women in sport within a larger East Asian context and considers the socio-economic position and history of modern Japan. Reaching from the early 20th century to the present day, Kietlinski traces the progression of Japanese women's participation in sport from the first female school for physical education and the foundations of competitive sport through to their growing presence in the Olympics and international sport.

A detailed study of sports' arrival, spread and advance in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. A selection of articles addresses critical issues of nationalism, communalism, commercialism and gender through the lens of sport. This book makes the point that the social histories of South Asian sport cannot be understood by simply looking at the history of the game in one province or region. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it would be wrong to understand sport in terms of the exigencies of the colonial state. Drawing inspiration from C.L.R. James' well-known epigram, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?' the findings suggest that South Asian sport makes sense only when it is placed within the broader colonial and post-colonial context. The book demonstrates that sport not only influences politics and vice versa, but that the two are inseparable. Sport is not only political, it is politics, intrigue, culture and art. To deny this is to denigrate the position of sport in modern South Asian society. This volume was previously published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.