Qualitative film analysis reveals how skateboarding transgresses caste and gender boundaries for Dalit girls, highlighting the transformative potential of action sports.
Dwelling upon the broader frames of the caste question, particularly within the women-centric popular sports films in India, this paper situates Dalit girls’ subjectivity and access to action sports, skateboarding through Netflix sports drama, Skater Girl (2021). The critical design of intersectionality unravels Dalit women’s unique social location and patterns of systemic subjections within the sporting zones that are substantially different from those of both Brahmin women and Dalit men. The paper delves into the journey of a Dalit girl, Prerna, and her inclination towards action sports (skateboarding), which unsettles not just the casteist spatial markers in the village but also challenges the gendered and masculine sporting norms. Prerna’s stint with skateboarding calibrates into Dalit children’s acculturation into skateboarding, and its subcultural praxis that re-appropriates ‘dead spaces’ of village contours into liberating ‘skate spots’.
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Malhotra et al. (2026) studied this question.
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