Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball

Throughout this book project, I employ the metaphor of the crossover, a spectacular basketball move, to describe how Black women and non-binary athletes maneuver through a sporting industry not designed with them in mind. While it isn’t as flashy as a dunk or as violent as a block, the crossover is about agility, balance, and deception. It demands rapid lateral movement with seemingly little effort. It also requires a particular sense of poise and control to challenge an opponent’s balance, leaving adversaries helpless as they flail, trip, or crash to the ground (referred to on the court as “breaking ankles”). The crossover relies upon an athlete knowing where they are on the court and where they need to go. Shifting from one side to the other rapidly and following an internal rhythm, the well-timed crossover allows one to create space for themselves and their teammates, ultimately allowing for a clear path to the basket.

In taking up the crossover as a conceptual framework centering Black athletes, specifically those who identify as women or nonbinary, I argue that the experiences and strategies cultivated by these athletes provide an instructive lens into the proliferation of basketball as a site of global labor, media, and spectacle. Players, journalists, coaches, and executives navigate, negotiate, and resist countless boundaries and obstacles. Amid institutional and economic inequities and gendered and racialized stereotypes, they create community and generate new forms of knowledge—new means of maneuvering, wiggling in and out and around defenders, sidestepping opponents, and as some would say on the basketball court, "putting the world on skates."