From discipline to conocimiento : feminist and decolonial readings of elite sport through Gloria Anzaldúa

This article proposes a feminist and decolonial reading of elite sport through Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of conocimiento. Focusing on the experiences of Latin American women Olympic athletes from Santa Catarina, Brazil, situated in contexts of gendered and colonial exclusions, it analyzes how their trajectories embody the seven stages of conocimiento: arrebato, nepantla, Coatlicue, call to action, Coyolxauhqui, the blow-up, and shifting realities. These stages, marked by rupture, ambiguity, pain, recomposition, conflict, and expanded consciousness, reveal that athletic identity is not a stable essence but a borderland process where body, spirituality, and resistance are inseparable. By engaging Anzaldúa’s autohistoria-teoría, the study approaches these narratives not merely as testimonies but as situated knowledge that unsettles normative assumptions of sport philosophy. In dialogue with Foucault’s technologies of the self and Markula’s feminist analyses, we argue that high-performance sport cannot be reduced to discipline or excellence but must be understood as a field where crises and exclusions generate critical knowledge. Philosophically, this article suggests three normative shifts: recognizing the body as a locus of thought and spirituality; incorporating feminist and decolonial perspectives to expose how gender, coloniality, and precarity structure sport; and valuing embodied narratives as sources of theory. The presence of Latin American women in the Olympic arena thus constitutes not only participation but a philosophical intervention, expanding the criteria of justice and excellence toward plural and transformative horizons.