‘Scissoring? I can do that!’ Play, alternative place-making and nested sexual normativities in Dutch women’s amateur football

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the way in which female players of “traditional” amateur football clubs in the Netherlands manage to create their team as “open” and “inclusive”. Drawing on the notion of playfulness and linguistic perspectives on humour, we show that women players engage in shared sexual joking and embodied performances that centre around gendered and sexual stereotypes and norms. In contrast to a reading of the persistence of norms as limiting anti-normative agency, a focus on play shifts attention to the active recontextualisation of norms in localized interaction and their “nested” quality – thus suggesting that norms are always imbricated in their alternative. It is through the subtle recoding of gendered and sexual norms and stereotypes Independent scholar accomplished in interactional forms of verbal and spatial play that team members recreate traditional club spaces, albeit transiently, into alternative sportscapes nested within otherwise strongly (hetero)normative spaces.

Introduction

This article focuses on women’s amateur football teams in the Netherlands, and the way in which women amateur footballers collectively craft football club spaces into alternative sportscapes¹. As we will show, lesbian desires were explicitly discussed (and practiced) during convivial team gatherings, and training sessions were larded with playful references to lesbian stereotypes and sexual practices. Surprisingly, these transgressive practices did not take place in clubs that explicitly self-define as gay or are otherwise associated with progressive politics. Instead, they took place within mainstream “traditional” amateur football clubs.

As elsewhere, amateur football clubs in the Netherlands are largely male-dominated and heteronormative spaces, which is reflected in pervasive homophobia with regard to male homosexuality, as well as in their aesthetics and gender binary institutional structure.² Many such traditional clubs, however, have had women’s teams for some decades. These functioned as safe spaces for (butch) lesbians or gender non-conforming women,³ but were also stereotyped as such. In recent years, the rising popularity of women’s football in the Netherlands, as well as the feminization⁴ of football more generally, seems to have attracted a wider variety of women to its amateur practice. The experiences of women footballers in traditional amateur clubs within this changing context have received little academic attention. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews in two such clubs, we aim to address this gap by examining how, within the “microcosm”⁵ of women’s teams, women’s interactional performance produces alternative sportscapes within mainstream clubs.

As the broad body of literature on gender and sport⁶ has demonstrated, sport produces a powerful normative system that reproduces and controls hegemonic notions of femininity and masculinity⁷. However, precisely because the embodied performance of sport brings out gender norms, sport also provides a social arena for people to act on and challenge hegemonic discourses and stereotypes.⁸ Studies of gender and women’s football⁹ tend to place particular analytic emphasis on the persistence of gender and sexual normativities and stereotypes, and on the “limits” and “boundaries” of norm subversion in women’s¹⁰ football, including in queer or gay clubs.¹¹ Although such limitations are important, this focus foregoes the equally important question of how women actually manage to craft an alternative microcosm or “counterspace”¹² within otherwise strongly (hetero)normative spaces.

Drawing on the notion of playfulness¹³ and on linguistic perspectives on joking¹⁴ we suggest that play and humour provide a useful theoretical angle for bringing into focus the agentive recasting of gendered and sexual norms and stereotypes that women collectively engage in as a “community of practice”.¹⁵ It is through playful interactions and embodied performances, that team members simultaneously negotiated their own and other’s gender and sexuality, and remade traditional club spaces, albeit momentarily, into an alternative sportscape. We suggest, moreover, that the spatialization of these practices as simultaneously situated within, and challenging of, heteronormative traditional football club spaces, parallels a (linguistic) understanding of norms and their enactment beyond a normative/antinormative binary.¹⁶ While we trace the persistence of particular dimensions of dominant discourses of gender and sex in women footballers’ transgressive place-making practices, we argue that this is more fruitfully and precisely conceptualized as the “nested”¹⁷ quality of (sexual) normativities than as discourse’s limit to subversive agency.

Theoretical framework

The findings presented in this article are situated within a broader theoretical orientation in the literature on gender and sports, that draws on feminist post-structuralist understandings of gendered and sexualized power relations and discourse. Underlying this approach is Butler’s¹⁸ theory of performativity, which denotes that gender, as well as sex and desire, are constructed and produced through individuals’ reiterated acts that are scripted and shaped by dominant cultural discourses.¹⁹ Butler’s approach critically highlights the reproduction and normalization of dominant (hetero)normative discourses of gender, sex and desire as these are repetitively enacted in everyday life through the arrangement of spaces, the way people hold their body, dress, and move. However, she also points out that the reiterative and performative nature of gender and sex creates what she calls a “terrain of signification”, in which individual actors have the potency to disturb and subvert dominant discourses by performing and embodying gender and sex in ways that resignify heteronormative associations of gender, sex and desire.¹⁹ Post-structural feminism thus understands individual agency as ambivalently shaped by power and discourses. On the one hand, and building on Foucault,²⁰ individual agency and desire are viewed as generated by power, so that, “individuals are immanent of power and as such can exercise power”.²¹ On the other hand, individual agency is viewed as shaped by existing power discourses in the sense that it is also delimited by discourse’s boundaries and norms.

This feminist post-structuralist approach has proven to be a productive lens on gender and sports,²² as the embodied, performative and spatialized nature of sports enables an in-depth consideration of the way in which heteronormative discourses materialize and are reproduced. Despite the increased participation of girls and women in football and women’s football current commercialized popularity, several authors have argued that this has meant not a subversion, but has continued and reinforced a normative focus on sexualized femininity.²³ In her study on footballing girls’ gender identity construction, for example, Jeanes²⁴ concludes that, although girls challenge traditional gender norms by simply participating in football, they adjusted their play to fit with dominant notions of “sexy” and “sporty” femininity. Like Harris,²⁵ she concludes that hegemonic discourses “prevented football from providing a site for alternative performances of femininity”.²⁶

Even though “football spaces are where power is materialized and where women’s bodies are controlled and regulated”,²⁷ numerous studies have also shown that women’s football,²⁸ like other sports that are strongly identified as masculine,²⁹ frequently function as “safe spaces” for lesbian or gender non-conforming women. These studies detail how women engaged in such sports performatively embody gender and sexuality in ways that extend and “destabilize the compulsory order of woman-feminine-heterosexual”.³⁰ Combining a conceptualization of gender as spatialized with a Lefebvrian theory of space as socially produced, Sanders³¹ points out that through such “gender manoeuvring” women sporters in masculine sport spaces can craft the latter into a microcosmic “sportscape” that offers a refuge from and alternative to heteronormativity. Similarly, research in clubs explicitly identifying as “gay” or “queer” has demonstrated how women’s interactions on the football field “create and produce footballing space counter to popular cultural representations”,³² inverting dominant norms to the extent that (butch) lesbian sexuality in these sportscapes “is discursively constructed as ‘normal’”.³³

Although this line of research provides important points of entry into the creative and agentive place-making capacities of female football players, it also perpetuates a critical analytic lens to how “seemingly transgressive”³⁴ football spaces may also reproduce or redraw normativities and boundaries rather than overcome them, and thus “may be regarded as normative, as well as transgressive”.³⁵ Drury and Caudwell³⁶ for example show how the recoding of lesbian and butch gender and sexuality as uniquely authentic and the footballing norm in lesbian-identified teams, inevitably leads to the devaluation and marginalization of other articulations of sex, gender and desire on the football field, most notably those of bi-sexual, heterosexual, femme and transgender identities. Such power dynamics in alternative sportscapes, Sanders argues, “sugges[t] the enduring legacy of the binaries of the sexed body, and the limitations of this [alternative] sportscape to support diversity and inclusion, despite its strength in advocating for and supporting gendered performances and desires outside of heteronormative ideologies”.³⁷ Like the body of literature on heterofemininity in women’s football discussed above, the transgressive or anti-normative potential of women’s footballing practices is understood here as ultimately delimited or cross-cut by “evidence of normative practices”³⁸ and power dynamics, rendering them “subversive, but not necessarily transgressive”.³⁹

This reading of women’s footballing practices along an implicit binary of transgression and normativity, however, sits uneasily with the complexity of the reworking of norms and stereotypes that these studies make apparent. Caudwell, commenting on the “multi-layered” nature of the rearticulations of sex-gender-desire she examined, adroitly remarks that “it is difficult to identify normative, anti-normative and queer presence”.⁴⁰

We suggest that notions of play and humour help to rethink normativity and agency away from such a binary evaluation of practices as anti/normative. Van den Bogert’s⁴¹ concept of playfulness is useful here. Drawing attention to the way in which Moroccan-Dutch girls strategically incorporate the stereotypes people may have of them in their street footballing practices, she argues that playing football “not only refers to ‘non-serious’ acts of leisure or recreation, but also the playful and performative acts of gender, race/ethnicity, religion, space, and citizenship”.⁴² The role of stereotypes and (inverted) norms in verbal play and humour are long standing objects of ethnographic research in linguistic anthropology,⁴³ including in relation to gender and sexuality.⁴⁴ Similar to van den Bogert’s approach, linguistic anthropology is less concerned with how norms rule the social, and focuses instead on what people do with norms and stereotypes in specific contexts. Studies of the often ambiguous and parodic humour shared within marginalized groups,⁴⁵ for example, view the deployment of normative discourses and stereotypes in such joking as an artful “poetics”,⁴⁶ that provides a critical commentary to structures of power and oppression. Linguistic studies of social identity insist on the complex and subtle identity work that people do when working through stereotypes in joking interactions.⁴⁷ Rather than necessarily reiterating normativities, the interactional exchange of stereotypical or generic jokes between group members allows for differentiated stances and subtle indexical positionings in relation to these stereotypes.⁴⁸ As a result, “generic forms of humour take on non-generic meanings within moments of interaction”.⁴⁹

In their call for a queer linguistics, Hall, Levon and Milani use this attention to interactionality and creative recontextualisation to critique the investment in “antinormativity” in much queer criticism.⁵⁰ From a linguistic point of view, pinpointing and distinguishing normative from antinormative practice is complicated by two structural qualities of norms. First, social life is traversed by multiple normativities, so that “we cannot speak of a singular ‘normativity’ organizing social practice”, causing people to move “athwart normativity as opposed to moving against it”.⁵¹ Hall,⁵² for example, shows how LGBT communities in India deploy formulaic ethnic jokes of rural backwardness that are inscribed in a normative discourse of urban progress. They do so, however, to redefine their own anti-normative sexual subjectivity as a sign of sexual modernity. Second, many normative binaries, including those of gender, operate as “fractal” or “nested” distinctions.⁵³ They do not have a fixed reference or meaning, but are used to categorize and recategorize any social practice or space in a recursive pattern, so that it is “nested” or repeated within itself at various scales. The distinction male-female, for instance, can be applied to categorize men versus women, but can also be used recursively inward to distinguish between “masculine” and “feminine” women, or outward to categorize “masculine” versus “feminine” professions. As Gal shows, this allows people to creatively deploy the fractal possibilities of such normative binaries to create new subjectivities and meanings while seemingly remaining within the normative fold.⁵⁴

We draw on these understandings of linguistic play as entailing the creative use and recontextualisation of norms and stereotypes in localized interactions, and ask how such moments of verbal play are spatialized and connected to the emergence of amateur women football teams as transient and “nested” alternative sportscapes through team members’ (playful) embodied performances of gender and sexuality.

Methodology

The article is based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork among female, adult football players from two Dutch amateur football clubs, complemented with semi-structured interviews. In the Netherlands, women’s football has become one of the most popular sports in recent years. Although girls and women have gradually gained more access to the traditionally masculine terrain of football over the past decades, dominant gender discourses continue to persist both in the informal and formal structure of football today.⁵⁵ Nonetheless, a shift in hegemonic gender discourses towards less stereotypical and negative renderings of women’s football is discernible which might be seen either as a cause or as a result of the increasing popularity of women’s football.⁵⁶

Dutch policy makers consider organized amateur sports and sport programmes as crucial aspects of civil society, with the potential to bridge differences and foster cohesion and citizenship.⁵⁷ However, there is also a persistent policy worry about ethnic segregation of sports spaces, and, especially in (male) football, persistent homophobia, racism and gender inequality.⁵⁸ There are several policy efforts to strive towards more (LGBTQI+) inclusivity in amateur sports clubs,⁵⁹ but the teams and clubs we researched did not actively promote or partake in such programmes. As elsewhere, homophobia in (amateur) football is a highly gendered issue: whereas homophobia was and is pervasive in male football contexts, amateur women’s football has functioned as a space where alternative gender and sexual identities could be enacted and performed. Interestingly, as we will elaborate, this is also the case for traditional local football clubs.

In contrast to previous studies on women’s football and gender, which are mainly situated in either highly institutionalized or professional football⁶⁰ or in non-institutionalized or “queer” football spaces at the margins of institutional sports landscapes,⁶¹ this research was conducted at two local amateur football clubs located in the provincial or suburban regions in the east and south of the Netherlands. The two amateur football clubs represent “traditional” clubs outside the metropolitan area. They are traditional or ordinary in the sense that similar clubs exist all over the Netherlands, united in the Dutch amateur football body of the KNVB (Royal Dutch Football Association). They are also traditional in their masculine, working-class aesthetic and male-dominated organizational style: club canteens were donned as traditional pubs; teams were gender segregated, and our respondents described that, to their dismay, club resources were commonly focused on men’s teams, positing men’s football as the norm.

During the research period, Manon Klarenaar⁶² conducted regular participant observations during training sessions and other events at the football clubs. She participated in seven training sessions with three differing (senior) women’s teams, joined one team during their match, and attended one of the parties in the canteen. These participant observations were particularly interesting and relevant as they provided empirical data about the practices and interactions of female amateur football players and the way these were, or were not, explicitly (e.g. conversations and jokes) related to gender expressions and sexual identities. Moreover, it allowed to experience first-hand how women enact and generate, through their practices and interactions, openness, accessibility and approachability of (women’s) football in these clubs.

To complement, compare and discuss the findings of participant observations, nineteen semi-structured individual in-depth interviews, and one group interview, were conducted with players from varying (senior) women’s teams, which ranged from 20 to 90 minutes in length. The age of the participants ranged from 19 to 53 and they identified with different sexual orientations. The semi-structured characteristic of the interviews left room for the participants to talk about other topics that seemed relevant. Moreover, based on the training sessions, new topics were added which were reflected upon with the participants during the interviews. With the permission of the participants, the interviews were recorded. Later, they were transcribed verbatim in their full length, because the participants’ precise terminology revealed the way they expressed and constructed gender. It also allowed us to highlight the subtleties and ambivalence of how participants related to hegemonic discourses. In this article, all participants’ names are anonymized.

By combining these qualitative research methods, the research encompassed the wider experiences of female football players within their football club, attending not only to the negotiation and performance of gender and sexuality within teams, but also to respondents’ motivation to play football, the ambiance within the football club, and the structural and institutional inclusivity of the clubs of which they were part.

Our research participants often emphasized the importance of the space of the football club in their lives during interviews. They often described their teams as an “open” and “convivial” space. To better explain this openness, the comparison with field hockey was frequently made. Laura, a 27-year-old woman, had played hockey since she was little. At the age of 26 she started to identify as lesbian. Although a lot of lesbian women played at her former hockey club, she said the following:

I don’t think that I’ve ever really had the space to consider being attracted to women or being open to it … . The [name football club] is a really nice club, because the ambiance is very pleasant and everyone talks to each other during the discos.

Clearly, the football club and team provided an alternative sportscape, one where Laura felt free to explore non-heterosexual identities and desires. How does this “nested” alternative sportscape come about and what makes it possible?

Results

‘There is a pot for every pot’: sexual joking

The football teams in which author 1 participated during the research functioned as typical “communities of practice”: groups whose existence and interactional dynamics emerge in and are tied to a recurrent, shared enterprise (trainings, matches, recreational moments in the football club). The joint engagement of members in these practices involves “the construction of a shared orientation to the world around them – a tacit definition of themselves in relation to each other, and in relation to other communities of practice”.⁶³

Suggestive humour, and sexual jokes in particular, were often used in the interaction between female team members both on and off the football field. As Queen demonstrates in her linguistic study amongst a female feminist group and a women’s softball team, attending to such jokes and conversational teasing provides insight in how women “[contextualize] complex relationships between sexuality, sexual practice, sexual identity, and gender identity and d[o] so through the manipulation of identity-based stereotypes”.⁶⁴ In what follows we present three recurrent types of verbal play and joking: verbal play that involves explicit inversions of heteronormative expressions, invented formulaic jokes that ambiguously resignify sexual stereotypes, and the fractal use of localized gendered categorizations. Discussing these types of verbal play, we argue that sexual joking works to collectively construct a tacit definition of the teams as “open” or “alternative” sportscapes as opposed to other (sports) contexts and to the heteronormative masculinity of the clubs of which they were part.

The following excerpt demonstrates a moment of conversational joking between two members of a senior women’s team. During this playful interaction, team members reveal the heteronormative subtext of common Dutch expressions and alter them so that they come to reference lesbian desire.

In the midst of an exercise there was a short conversation between Sophia, a lesbian woman, and Anouk, a heterosexual woman. When Manon joined the conversation which had started earlier, Anouk finished her sentence, “That pot has to close”. In response, Sophia said, “Close? Close? That pot must remain open!” The two women continued to joke around, and Sophia concluded that “there is a pot for every pot” - thereby distorting the saying “there is a lid for every pot”. Accompanied by much laughter from the two women as well as other team members who listened in, Anouk and Sophia discussed what to fill the pot with, after which they concluded that it must be a plant. Anouk laughed loudly and said, “a finger plant!”

In Dutch, the word pot has a variety of meanings depending on the context used. It can refer to a kitchen tool (pot with a fitting lid), a plant pot, as well as a lesbian woman, or more specifically a dyke. By playing on these multiple meanings, the team members explicitly subvert and recast the well-known and heteronormative (Dutch) saying “there is a Jack for every Jill” to “there is a Jill for every Jill” (pot for every pot). A further lesbian sexual connotation is added, first, by the new (sexual) connotation of “open” pots, and, second, by simultaneously shifting the meaning of pot to that of plant pot and indexing lesbian sexual practice through the double entendre of “finger” in finger plant as an appropriate way to “fill” an open pot.

The suggestive humour of this interaction, and the way it adds lewd, transgressive meanings to otherwise unremarkable expressions shows how humour can function as a form of moral and political navigation for non-conforming groups.⁶⁵ The team members, both heterosexual and non-heterosexual, collectively and agentively redraw normative discourses with two effects. First, these transgressive linguistic interactions normalize and legitimize lesbianism, “offer[ing] opportunities for the subversion of normative constructs of gender and sexuality and the production of ‘dykescapes’”⁶⁶ that are implicitly marked off from the wider context of the football club. Second, this verbal play also constitutes “a subversive critique of the unmarked realms”⁶⁷ of, in this case, heteronormativity. Importantly, these sexualized and stereotypical jokes are by no means exclusive to non-heterosexual women, as can be seen in the interaction between Anouk and Sophia. The jokes and the laughing responses did not emerge from nor refered to team members’ individual gender or sexual identity, nor did they operate to define the team as a whole as “lesbian”. Instead they evidenced the specific “social knowledge” shared within this team, within which the play with the double entendres is immediately meaningful and up for interactional improvisation. Precisely because the joking exchange and the laughing response from the other team members happened across individual differences in gender and sexual identification, these jokes indexed a shared critical outlook onto dominant gender norms and the desires they normally make invisible, rather than that they defined and fixed the group’s identity as “lesbian”.

Linguistic anthropologists have emphasized that shared social knowledge is equally important to understand the meaning of formulaic jokes and the stereotypes they involve.⁶⁸ Formulaic jokes are “generically framed stories, anecdotes, and turns of phrase that have been repeatedly rehearsed and performed”.⁶⁹ When taken up in particular communities of practice, formulaic and generic jokes gain a specific localized meaning that people need to be “in” on to understand. During the training sessions of a senior women’s team, it became apparent, within the context of the group, that a formulaic sexual joke had been invented that was repeated and performed by various team members in slight variations:

On Monday evenings, a diverse group of women in terms of their age, sporting background, and gender and sexual identity set foot on the football field. As these women play football just for fun, the mood was very playful and jovial. Whilst demonstrating the first exercise of that evening, Jenna, the trainer, explained, ‘we practice the scissors movement’, after which Sophia, a lesbian team member, laughed loudly and said, ‘scissoring? I can do that!’ – thereby referring to a (stereotypical) lesbian sex position. A similar sexual joke was made during another training session where one lesbian team member shouted, ‘what are we going to do tonight? Fingering?’ The other team members, both heterosexual and non-heterosexual, engaged with these jokes with loud laughter.

The humorous effect of the first joke operates on various levels simultaneously. By way of its boisterous performance and the suggestively playing with the dual meaning of the term scissoring, the joke in fact reconstitutes what is a common football training (and therefore associated with male sporting capacities in dominant discourse) into a lesbian sexual act. The success of the joke depends on “in-group” knowledge shared by other team members, consisting of a familiarity with (stereotypical) lesbian sex positions, a critical recognition of dominant perception of football as a male sport, as well as an ability to pick up on the boisterous tone as a sign of sexual joking. The formulaic potential of the first joke is picked-up and realized by the second joke. The latter no longer builds upon a suggestive in-group meaning of a specific football term, but indexes the previous conversational interaction itself while generalizing its premise. By reconstituting football training practice in general to a random female/lesbian sexual practice, the second joke brings out another layer of meaning, namely that it playfully exaggerates dominant associations between women’s football and lesbianism (including heterosexual imaginations of lesbian sex) and brings this association to its extreme conclusion: women’s football=lesbian sex.

These jokes thus “function to create and maintain ‘in-group’ and ‘out-group’ boundaries”.⁷⁰ Like the generic ethnic jokes exchanged in the Indian LGBT-communities described be Hall, they “[…] enabl[e] tellers and recipients to display sexual expertise and thus claim membership in broader communities that are centrally constructed around sexual identity”.⁷¹ Crucially, within the women’s team studied, the “in-group” consisted not only of non-heterosexual women, but also of heterosexual women who laughed along and were involved in making the jokes. The sexual expertise and membership that is generated within this women’s team by way of formulaic jokes is therefore not one grounded in a shared sexual identity, but in a shared stance towards sexual and gender normativities. This is a stance in which knowing and expressing non-heterosexual desires is normalized, and which presupposes the critical ability to expose and loosen-up dominant norms and mainstream assumptions about sexuality and gender.

A last example of verbal play is the localized version of gendered labels that team members used to distinguish between different types of “footballing bodies”.⁷² Their categorizations juxtapose “flower pickers” [bloemetjesplukkers; who appreciate the ambiance and conviviality of football, but do not commit themselves to developing football skills specifically] to an unspecified “footballers” or “those who play football well”. These labels showcase a complex example of “fractal play”.⁷³ The labels reinscribe a binary gendered division that links differential inclinations to engage “seriously” in sports to masculinity and femininity, so that normal or good football comes to be equated with men. Although team members sometimes seem to deploy these labels in this way, they more often draw on the fractal nature of the gender binary and use them “recursively”. For example, during interviews participants used these labels to categorize their team members according to footballing style, thus distinguishing between “flower picking” women players and women players who “football well”. Some, moreover, mentioned that boys can also be “flower pickers”, thus extending these labels to recategorize footballing youth into more competitive and more leisure-oriented players irrespective of their gendered bodies.

Like the first two forms of sexual joking, these labels reiterate the gendered binaries of dominant normativities and stereotypes. As Gal explains, however, “the definitions [of the gender binary] are partially transformed with each nested dichotomy – each indexical recalibration – while (deceptively) retaining the same label and the same co-constituting contrast”.⁷⁴ Rather than evidencing the power of normativities to limit subversive agency, these reiterations are a creative deployment of the fractal possibilities of such binaries to accomplish nuanced contextualized shifts in meaning.

‘You were provoking it, right?’: spatial and embodied play

Through sexual joking and verbal play, women amateur footballers tacitly construct their team as defined by a shared willingness and capacity to playfully comment on, and resignify, heteronormative assumptions and stereotypes so that their arbitrariness is exposed and alternative expressions of desire and gender are normalized. This tacit, interactionally performed outlook gains its meaning and salience in the contrast to other contexts in which non-conforming desires and gender expressions are abnormalized, including the male-dominated footballing spaces of the teams’ clubs. How are these instances of verbal play connected to the embodied inhabiting and re-making of football spaces into alternative sportscapes?

Because “language is rooted in the body”,⁷⁵ conversational joking is not only a corporal performance for the one telling the joke, but also involves embodied engagements of those responding to jokes, whether by laughter, eye-rolling, mock indignation or otherwise.⁷⁶ In other words, instances of verbal play are not purely linguistic, but are part of interactional modes of inhabiting space and (re)coding spatialized norms. As in the transgressive sexual joking through which Mexican migrants comment on their racialized oppression in the US described by Chávez, the joking in the teams often “centred figuratively on the body and [was] produced by the body”.⁷⁷ The joking by team members involved not only references to sexual practices, but also to actual bodies in relation to normative images of femininity, sexiness and fitness. The following excerpt shows an instance of such a joking comment and the dual embodiment it entails, entailing corporal performance with the body, as well as a critical commentary on bodily norms:

When the end of the training of the senior women’s team approached, we were divided into two equal teams, one of which had to put on yellow training bibs. Laughter burst across the field when Lynn, one of the more plumpy women, put on the bib which was too small for her. While putting on the bib with great difficulty, she said, ‘is this size small or extra small?’ The laughter continued as she counted her own rolls of fat as a form of self-mockery.

In contrast to the desired embodiedness of heteronormative femininity which is associated with “being small, delicate, fragile and passive”,⁷⁸ Lynn’s “masculine” gender embodiment including her strength and aggression were valuable characteristics on the football field. The collective response of laughter shows that this is an interactional accomplishment, as it affirms the normalization of women’s bodies outside feminine ideals. The acceptance of other gendered embodiments and performances within the context of the team is shared and supported more widely than just by Lynn. In an interview, Saskia explained, “I’m not on the football field to look cute”. Similarly, Charlotte stated, “I don’t come [to the football field] to walk a fashion show”. This can be linked to the concept of “gender manoeuvring”, which is “a collective effort to negotiate actively the meaning and rules of gender to redefine the hegemonic relationship between masculinity and femininity in the normative structure of a specific context”.⁷⁹ In other words, as embodied interactional performances, moments of joking construct the team simultaneously as defined by a shared (critical) outlook towards normativities of gender, sex and desire, and as a space where such alternative performances and embodiments can be enacted and validated.

Although we have focused so far on instances of (embodied) verbal play, these are paralleled or combined with moments of non-verbal embodied play, related to the corporal performance of playing football.⁸⁰ In her research on Moroccan-Dutch girls engaged in street football, van den Bogert argues that her participants strategically incorporate racialized and gendered stereotypes in their embodied gender and football performance, so as to fool their opponents. Eploying such strategies to win the game, they lay a claim on neighbourhood public spaces that are usually constructed as masculine and white.⁸¹ Non-verbal, embodied forms of play may thus involve the playful and critical deployment of stereotypes in a way that is quite similar to the operation of sexual jokes described above. Although it pertains to different sets of stereotypes (about sexuality rather than ethnicity and gender), a similar strategic incorporation of stereotypes in their football performance was echoed during the following conversation with four women of a senior women’s team.

“You were provoking it right? You were cultivating [the stereotype]”, said Nina to Kim when talking about her former football team which was labelled as “the lesbian team” by other footballers. Whilst elegantly touching Manon’s arm, she continued, “Coming close to the opponent for example”.

According to Bing and Heller, stereotypical lesbian jokes can be considered as deployed to play with male fantasies about lesbianism to “ultimately undermine attempts by the mainstream culture to define lesbians”.⁸² Like the Moroccan-Dutch research participants of van den Bogert, these women players thus do not flatly “resist or oppose these norms and expectations but incorporate them into their spatial embodied competitive performances on the field”.⁸³ “Playing” as “the lesbian team” in their spatialized and embodied footballing performance, the team members interactionally exaggerate the stereotype of women’s football as a lesbian sport. Such embodied play not only unsettles and recontextualises the meaning of the stereotype as it causes confusion among the opponents and onlooking public, but also constitutes a momentary re-appropriation and transformation of the spatialized normativities of the sports space in which this happens.

Here, van den Bogert’s⁸⁴ use of Puwar’s notion of “space invaders”⁸⁵ is instructive. When women, ethnic minorities or other marginalized groups enter spaces in which they are normally construed as “out of place”, their very bodily presence becomes an invasion of that space in the sense that it changes, even if momentarily, the normativities that regulate it.⁸⁶ The notion of space invaders highlights that marginalized groups, in particular queer or LGBTQIA+ communities, often have very little choice but to invade and make use of spaces that normally are homophobic or heteronormative.⁸⁷ Having no space of their own, they cannot but “nest” their alternative performances and practices within heteronormative spaces, temporarily revising or recoding the latter in the process. They do so, however, “not simply by being present on and invading in the football space, but also through specific spatial and embodied practices and tactics”.⁸⁸ Such tactics may include the strategic incorporation of stereotypes, but may also consist of non-normative embodied interactions or expressions,⁸⁹ or more explicitly collective spatialized practices such as creatively rearranging the lay-out of a space or changing its feel and meaning by redecorating it.⁹⁰

The following example of a disco organized in one of the clubs’ canteens illustrates what we could call the “spatial play” of such space invading tactics and how these can produce an alternative sportscape out of a traditional football space.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon in early February the first so-called “disco” took place in the canteen of the football club. Varying football players entered the canteen, some were still wearing their sportswear, others were already dressed up for the party that started not much later. In the meantime, the DJ had taken place behind his booth and turned up the music which alternated from Dutch/Carnival music to pop music and back. As the party continued, the dance floor was slowly occupied by loudly singing and dancing women from a variety of teams. In the midst of the largely female crowd, lesbian couples were kissing and hugging. You had to stand on tiptoes to spot a group of men in the back at the bar. Some others were sitting at a table on the left side, and did not seem surprised by the setting that seemed to deviate from the normative image of the football club as a male domain.

This excerpt demonstrates how during the disco, men in the canteen were spatially de-centralized, relegated to the sides of the space as the women filled-up the space’s centre with their bodies. The embodied play of dancing, flirting, hugging and kissing combined with the verbal play of gossip and out-loud discussions of lesbian desires and relations. Like the lesbian women surfers in the study of Roy and Caudwell⁹¹ who create transient, mobile alternative sport spaces out of common beaches through their bodily practices (holding hands, kissing), the disco is a moment in which women footballers temporarily recoded and recontextualised the traditionally male-dominated, heteronormative football canteen into an alternative sportscape. Just as linguistic play constitutes a shared alternative outlook and identity through the creative deployment rather than explicit contestation of norms and stereotypes, this alternative sportscape is not produced outside or counter normative spaces but through the redeployment and resignification of spaces through embodied performances nested within them.

Conclusion

In talking about the aforementioned party and the ambiance at the football club in general, Jill was beaming with joy. She described the club as very open, meaning that while in other situations it is assumed that someone is heterosexual, one’s sexuality is not predetermined within the football club. Jill continued,

Sometimes younger girls in their early twenties who are going to college enter the team and, when I look at myself, at that age you just want to fit into that mainstream picture. My surroundings gave me little room to think about other possibilities, that wasn’t stimulated at all. And I think the [name football club] provides this open space, so that more people experiment with it at a younger age. […] It can be considered a safe space in terms of trying new things. Not necessarily with each other, but if someone says, “Gosh, I once kissed a woman in a bar”, no one is going to judge. That’s why a lot of those girls just give it a try. Some will say, “No, that’s not for me, but at least I tried”.

As the quote shows, the various forms of verbal play and embodied, spatialized performances we have described in the paper are not a side-effect, but a conscious effort of women footballers to craft their team as an “open”, alternative sportscape. We have suggested playfulness and linguistic anthropological perspectives on humour and play as a useful analytical lens for understanding how women footballers manage to do so, even as their teams are situated in traditional, heteronormative football clubs. Linguistic anthropological accounts of verbal play point to the inescapable and creative entwinement of norms and their alternative, “compell[ing] [us] to acknowledge not just the homogenizing effects of normativity but also normativity’s involvement in the discourses that oppose it”.⁹² The forms of verbal and embodied play we encountered in the teams, revolved around the creative and often ambivalent or multi-layered deployment of dominant norms and stereotypes. Rather than understanding this as women’s football failure to function as a space of resistance or transgression, we have argued that this is more fruitfully and precisely conceptualized as the “nested” or “scaled” quality of (sexual) normativities than as discourse’s limit to agency.

First, the focus on verbal play provided insights into how women footballers strategically incorporate norms and stereotypes in jokes to create a group identity which is not grounded in a shared sexual identity, but in a shared critical and playful outlook towards heteronormativity. Moreover, by drawing on these understandings of linguistic play we highlighted the creative use and recontextualisation of norms and stereotypes in localized interactions which are beyond the normative/antinormative dichotomy.⁹³ Second, we have shown that the “nested” recontextualisation of (sexual) normativities in verbal play is mirrored by the “nested” transformation of sport spaces and their meanings through embodied performances and spatial play. These collective and playful embodied spatial performances of women footballers are “ways to transform and give new meanings to locations for communal purposes”,⁹⁴ which craft football club spaces into transient and “nested” alternative sportscapes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’; Roy and Caudwell, ‘Women and surfing spaces’.

2. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’; Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’; Prange and Oosterbaan, ‘Vrouwenvoetbal in Nederland’.

3. Caudwell, ‘Women’s Experiences of Sexuality’; Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’.

4. Caudwell, ‘Gender, feminism and football studies’; Elling, ‘Feminisering van sportieve ruimten’; Prange and Oosterbaan, ‘Vrouwenvoetbal in Nederland’.

5. Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’.

6. Blinde and Taub, ‘Falsely Accused Deviants’; Prange and Oosterbaan, “Vrouwenvoetbal in Nederland”; Van den Bogert, “Playing Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity”.

7. Haltom and Worthen, ‘Male Ballet Dancers’.

8. Caudwell, ‘Women’s Experiences of Sexuality’.

9. Butler, Bodies That Matter; see also Jeanes, ‘I’m into high heels’.

10. Caudwell, ‘Women’s Experiences of Sexuality”, Harris, “No You Can’t Play You’re a Girl”; Jeanes, “I’m into high heels’.

11. Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’; Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’.

12. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’.

13. Van den Bogert, ‘Spatial performances’.

14. Chávez ‘So ¿te fuiste a Dallas?’; Jones, ‘The Only Dykey One’; Queen, ‘How Many Lesbians’.

15. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, ‘Think practically’.

16. Hall, Levon, Milani, ‘Navigating normativities’.

17. Gal, ‘Public/Private Distinction’.

18. Butler, Gender Trouble.

19. Jeanes, ‘I’m into high heels’.

20. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

21. Caudwell, ‘Women’s Experiences of Sexuality’, 26.

22. Blinde and Taub, ‘Falsely Accused Deviants’; Cameron, ‘Dedicated Athletes, Deviant Women’.

23. Caudwell, ‘Gender, feminism and football studies’; Harris, ‘Playing the man’s game’; Jeanes, “I’m into high heels’.

24. Jeanes, ‘I’m into high heels’.

25. Harris, ‘Playing the man’s game’.

26. Jeanes, ‘I’m into high heels’, 402.

27. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’, 188.

28. Mennesson and Clément, ‘Homosociability and Homosexuality’; Caudwell, ‘Sporting Gender’; Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’.

29. Cameron, ‘Dedicated Athletes, Deviant Women’; Ezzell, “Barbie Dolls”; Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’.

30. Caudwell, ‘Sporting Gender’, 383.

31. Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’.

32. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’, 188.

33. Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’, 437.

34. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’, 184.

35. Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’, 425.

36. Ibid; Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’.

37. Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’, 699.

38. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’, 193.

39. Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’, 437.

40. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?’, 193.

41. Van den Bogert, ‘Playing Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity’.

42. Ibid., 211.

43. Bauman and Briggs, ‘Poetics and Performance”; Managan, ‘Words to Make you Laugh?’; Petrović, ‘Political Parody’.

44. Queen, ‘How Many Lesbians’; Jones, ‘The Only Dykey One’.

45. Chávez, “So ¿te fuiste a Dallas?”; Hall, ‘Middle class timelines’.

46. Bauman and Briggs, ‘Poetics and Performance’.

47. Bucholtz and Hall, ‘Locating identity in language”; Hall, ‘Middle class timelines’; Managan, ‘Words to Make you Laugh?’; Queen, ‘How Many Lesbians’.

48. Bing and Heller, ‘How Many Lesbians’; Jones, ‘The Only Dykey One’.

49. Queen, ‘How Many Lesbians’, 242.

50. Hall, Levon and Milani, ‘Navigating normativities’.

51. Ibid., 484.

52. Hall, ‘Middle class timelines’.

53. Gal, ‘Public/Private Distinction”.

54. Ibid.

55. Prange and Oosterbaan, ‘Vrouwenvoetbal in Nederland’.

56. Ibid.

57. Van den Bogert, ‘Playing Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity’.

58. Ibid.; Veldboer et al., ‘De mixfactor van sport’.

59. Mulier Instituut, ‘Monitoring sportakkoord’.

60. Blinde and Taub, ‘Falsely Accused Deviants’; Jeanes, ‘I’m into high heels’.

61. Caudwell, ‘Queering the field?”; Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’; Van den Bogert, ‘Spatial performances’.

62. The contribution of the two authors to this article was divided as follows. Manon Klarenaar conducted the research and the initial data analysis, and wrote the body of the text. Anick Vollebergh supervised the data collection and subsequent analysis. She elaborated the analysis by adding a queer linguistics lens and edited and revised the text.

63. Eckert in Jones, ‘The Only Dykey One’, 721.

64. Queen, ‘How Many Lesbians’, 254.

65. Doering-White, ‘¡Qué mamada!’.

66. Drury, ‘It seems really inclusive’, 425.

67. Chávez, ‘So ¿te fuiste a Dallas?’, 151.

68. Queen, ‘How Many Lesbians’; Hall, ‘Middle class timelines’.

69. Queen, ‘How Many Lesbians’, 242.

70. Ibid.

71. Hall, ‘Middle class timelines’, 498.

72. Caudwell, ‘Sporting Gender’.

73. Gal, ‘Public/Private Distinction’.

74. Ibid., 83.

75. Chávez, ‘So ¿te fuiste a Dallas?’, 151.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., 160.

78. Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’, 694.

79. Finley, ‘Skating Femininity’, 362.

80. Van den Bogert, ‘Spatial performances’.

81. Ibid., 16.

82. Bing and Heller, ‘How Many Lesbians’.

83. Van den Bogert, ‘Spatial performances’, 11.

84. Ibid.

85. Puwar, Space Invaders..

86. Ibid.

87. Bailey, ‘Engendering space’.

88. Van den Bogert, ‘Spatial performances’, 10–1.

89. Roy and Caudwell, ‘Women and surfing spaces’; Sanders, ‘Sportscapes’.

90. Bailey, ‘Engendering space’.

91. Roy and Caudwell, ‘Women and surfing spaces’.

92. Hall, ‘Middle class timelines’, 494.

93. Hall, Levon and Milani, ‘Navigating normativities’.

94. Bailey, ‘Engendering space’, 498.