Soccer and the politics of identity for young Muslim refugee women in South Australia

Abstract

This study explores the ways in which a group of young Muslim refugee women in Adelaide, South Australia, draw upon their experiences of playing in a soccer team as a way of establishing and embellishing a particular cultural identity that both affirms and challenges many of the traditions of Islam. Based primarily on qualitative interviews with the players, this study examines some of the ways in which they construct notions of self, sameness and difference as young Muslim women growing up in Australia’s fifth largest capital city. The study is centrally concerned with the ways in which these young refugee women articulate their social identities through the traditions Islam and the resources of western popular culture. As is argued in the following pages, the soccer team provides a unique site through which to explore the politics of identity for young refugee women in contemporary Australia.

Notes

1. Strandbrau, ‘Identity, Embodied Culture’, 28.

2. Dagkas and Benn, ‘Young Muslim Women’s Experiences’.

3. Palmer, ‘A World of Fine Difference’; Palmer, Evaluation of the New Arrival.

4. For example, Balboul, ‘Sporting Females in Egypt’; Morgan, ‘Hassiba Boulmerka and Islamic Green’; Walseth and Fasting, ‘Islam’s View on Physical Activity’, Hargreaves, ‘The Muslim Sports Heroic’; Hargreaves, ‘Sport, Exercise’.

5. Hargreaves, ‘Sport, Exercise’, 74.

6. The Parks’ takes its name from the five suburbs in Adelaide’s north‐west which comprise the estate. It was constructed by the SA Housing Trust between 1945 and 1964, as part of an overall economic development strategy that sought to provide low‐cost rental housing for workers and their families which was close to the manufacturing and automotive factories in the area at the time. Economic changes in The Parks and other public housing estates, coupled with shifts in family structures and progressively tighter restrictions governing access to public housing have ‘resulted in tenants who increasingly experience problems of unemployment, low‐income and poverty and, in some instances, increasing incidences of crime and violence’ (Palmer et al., ‘Challenging the Stigma’, 412).

7. Arthurson and Jacobs, ‘A Critique of the Concept of Social Exclusion’.

8. For example, Drummond, The Young Males; Crabbe, ‘A Sporting Chance’, Morris, Sallybanks and Willis, Sport, Physical Activity.

9. Much research has documented the positive impacts of recreation programmes for ‘at‐risk’ youth (see Wilson and White, ‘Tolerance Rules’, for a summary). However this has tended to focus on the experiences of men. In a related vein, many of the classic sociological and cultural studies of ‘youth’, such as those undertaken in the mid 1970s by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (e.g. Hall and Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals; Hebdidge, Subculture; Willis, Learning to Labour) have been critiqued because the experiences of female youth were largely absent from the empirical research.

10. It has been noted elsewhere that women from culturally diverse backgrounds are less likely to participate in sports activities, engage in physical activity or be sports spectators (Acosta, ‘The Minority Experience in Sport’; Armstrong, Bauman and Davies, Physical Activity Patterns; Collins, ‘Social Exclusion and Sport’; Taylor, ‘The Rhetoric of Exclusion’).

11. All names have been changed to protect the identities of the players involved.

12. While it is beyond the scope of this study, it is worth noting that this created some conflicts between the families within the Somali community.

13. Walseth, ‘Young Muslim Women’, 75.

14. Hargreaves, ‘The Muslim Sports Heroic’, 47.

15. Pfister, ‘Doing Sport in a Headscarf?’.

16. Nakamura, ‘Beyond the Hijab’, 22.

17. Hargreaves, ‘Sport, Exercise’, 74.

18. Driscoll, Girls; Bloustien, Girl‐Making.

19. Ahmed and Donnan, Islam, Globalisation and Postmodernity, 12–13.

20. Hargreaves, ‘The Muslim Sports Heroic’, 49.

21. Sideris, ‘War, Gender and Culture’.

22. Beishon, Modood and Virdee, Ethnic Minority Families; Menski, ‘South Asian Women in Britain’.

23. See Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam; Hargreaves, ‘The Muslim Sports Heroic’.

24. Bourdieu, The Fields of Cultural Production.

25. Kay, ‘Daughters of Islam’, 370.

26. Markovic and Manderson, ‘Nowhere is as at Home’.

27. A number of feminist scholars have discussed the importance of these sorts of ‘physical moments’ as a means of empowering women through physical activity. See Bell, ‘“Knowing What My Body Can Do”’; Brace‐Govan, ‘Looking at Body Work’; Gilroy, ‘The EmBody‐ment of Power’; McDermott, ‘Towards a Feminist Understanding of Physicality’.

28. Walseth, ‘Young Muslim Women and Sport’.

29. Douglas, Purity and Danger.

30. Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs “Identity”?’, 4.

31. Hargreaves, ‘Introduction’, 1.

32. Hargreaves, ‘Sport, Exercise’, 74.