Sport, migration, and gender in the neoliberal age

At home in Tonga, there is barely enough money to support the national team, whose members are for the most part employed by teams overseas, let alone a sport infrastructure. In this chapter, the authors seek to embed the dynamics in a broad social, political, economic and ideological context. Migration exposes these dynamics in whole new ways, nuancing our understanding of success, failure, and everything in between, as social relations, selfhood, and life perspectives are transformed by the hope and the reality of migrating for sport. As they pull the readers in the lives of athletes and people who surround them, the authors demonstrate how sport migrations can serve as a means to explore consequential questions about the world in the neoliberal age. The most immediate effect of the macro-level changes described is a reorganization of gender in general and of masculinity in particular.