Cripping Sports Migration: A Personal Journey

Abstract

I am José. I was born in Manaus, and because of a hospital infection, I acquired septic arthritis in my right knee, which left me with one leg 10cm shorter than the other. Growing up with my mother as the only provider, I faced multiple surgeries before I even turned 18. I decided to ‘quit’ my medical treatments and study social sciences in Manaus. This is how I ‘came out crip’. I chose to live with my disability and refused normalization. The study of social sciences led me on a journey to Europe that began in 2009 when I went to Porto, Portugal, as an Erasmus Mundus exchange student. I then took a Master’s program at Lund University in social studies of gender, and returned to sociology for my PhD. In 2022, I presented my thesis at Charles University in Prague. That year, I discovered that I had a classic Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I am still fighting cancer. In 2024, I published my first book. On the surface, it has nothing to do with my personal life. It’s not about crip theory or disability studies, but sports migration. It presents a multi-sited ethnography of Brazilian professional athletes who migrated to Central and Eastern Europe for better salaries and working conditions. As my fieldwork developed, I discovered that injuries and pain affect athletes’ decisions to engage in transnational migration. Brazilian football and futsal leagues do not respect FIFA’s calendar, and professional athletes there often complain about working conditions. In this personal account, athletes’ constant need for medical assistance throughout their careers inspired me to think about the usefulness of queer and crip theories to understand both my own trajectory and sports migrants’ lives more broadly.