Breaking the Rules: Islam, Marginality, and Agency within Senegalese Women’s Soccer

• In Event: 390 - Section on Race, Gender and Class Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. Race, Gender, and Class in Sports

Abstract

In Senegal, where soccer is a privileged site of hegemonic masculinity, women’s soccer has developed as a subculture of pariah femininity. The gender-bending practices associated with Senegalese women’s soccer are extremely stigmatized by urban youth culture, mainstream media, state institutions, as well as public and religious discourses. Yet, despite the stigma of women’s soccer in Senegal, most members of this group, the footballeuses, actively adopt a gender ambivalent aesthetic in public, which signals a negative social judgment and labels them as social outcasts. In this paper I draw on a year of ethnographic fieldwork with women soccer players in two large urban areas of Senegal, to explore how these Muslim women reinterpret the hegemonic discourses of piety and citizenship, which exclude them. In doing so I argue that they both challenge oppressive gender ideology and carve out a space within these dominant cultural discourses. Through the lens of women’s soccer, I explore how marginalized subject positions can become a source of creative agency, making new forms of political subjectivities possible. Following the lead of transnational and postcolonial feminist scholars who are critical of western “liberal” notions that reduce agency to questions of individual autonomy and physical capacity to secure this personal freedom, I examine agency in terms of both internalized and social capacity for action.

Author

• Beth D. Packer, École Des Hautes Études En Sciences Sociales