Paper short abstract:

Learning to play sports is not merely a technical issue. It also involves children and adults who negotiate whether sport is an enabling play-modality or an institutionalized constraining of play. Exploring this process can help us understand how playful sporting dispositions shape social life.

Paper long abstract:

Sports are not ready made, but always interpreted and remade. This presentation argues that to get at this process of interpretation –how we experiment, enjoy and play– we must theorize sport as an opportunity structure. Doing participant observation in a Norwegian boys sports-team aging from 7 to 10, I witnessed how children players and adult coaches agreed and disagreed about the playfulness of their activity. These disputes even became a game within the game. In this presentation, I use these data to show how children and adults negotiate the playfulness of sports through a series of counter performances, and to theorize sports as a modality that is generative of social performances. As a result, sports are revealed as stages where actors set sports apart from other activities and then, through social performances, re-enact games either as an attractive play modality or as a constrained organizing of creative play opportunities. To better get at this process, I propose a model inspired by Durkheim’s notion of the negative and positive cult. Yet to avoid the pitfalls of Durkheim’s idealism, his postulating consensus, and undertheorizing change, the model adopts a cultural sociology concerned with diversity, transformation, and contradiction. The result is a model that can contribute to the study of sports by highlighting creativity and by stressing how participants maneuver competition and inequalities in sports and society. The outcome of these sport experimentations, I suggest, is contingent on the how we maneuver the play modality itself.

Paper short abstract:

Examining situations in which Senegalese wrestlers demonstrated a “playful disposition” (Malaby 2009) toward their craft, I show how these moments contributed to both reproduce and to subtly subvert the gendered mythologies of wrestling.

Paper long abstract:

During their training and daily life, làmb (Senegalese wrestling with punches) wrestlers usually embody forms of entrepreneurial and “warrior masculinity”. Wrestlers try to enhance their reputation through a constant work on themselves: They declare on the mass media to follow draconian training schedules; they train intensely showing an unabated ability to endure pain and fatigue when key actors are attending the performance; they organize dancing and wrestling events to rally supporters; they build their public-self by carefully choosing wrestling nicknames, displaying distinctive aesthetic styles and crafting their self-narratives (Hann, Chevé, Wane 2021). For a wrestler to demonstrate total commitment to training and to epitomize the virtues of “warrior masculinity” are major assets in order to augment the number of his supporters, and to be offered a fighting contract.

Yet, fieldwork demonstrated that during less intense training sessions and lulls wrestlers were also irreverent, less disciplined and enjoyed parodying images of “warrior masculinity”. Examining situations in which wrestlers played with masculine stereotypical values and behaviors improvising jokes and pantomimes, I show the partially unintended consequences of these moments in both reproducing and subtly subverting the gendered mythologies of wrestling practice. These gendered ideals work to both marginalize female practitioners and to increase the risks of injury and overtraining for wrestlers.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on gender politics and issues in a rugby team in Athens highlighting on the sexualized bodies and the interconnection of gender, sexuality and pleasure. Critical comments and embodied performances shape Centaurs’ rhetoric challenging the creation for a hopeful future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on gender politics and issues in a rugby team in Athens (Greece) highlighting on the sexualized bodies and elaborating on the interconnection of gender, sexuality and pleasure. The grassroots rugby team Centaurs being the first organized LGBTQ+-inclusive sport initiative in Greece became the motive for focusing on the playful disposition of being introduced the game as well the pleasure for joining a sport team which is self-characterized as inclusive to homosexualities and heterosexualities. The study of different glamourous masculinities and the ways they act in the specific social field through the interaction of the athletic agents highlight different inequalities in sport field as well an alternative rhetoric for sporting sociality. Centaurs parodic performances challenge “normality” of sports. Critical comments and embodied performances shape Centaurs’ rhetoric showing the cracks where informal but popular discourses about sportshood are coming up. These informal discourses weave masculinities and femininities providing different roles that sculpt sport which sets in motion and orchestrates processes of social change invoke the creation of a new era that can include themselves and their dreams for a new hopeful future.

Paper short abstract:

Despite sexism and growing homophobia, and limited opportunities for women to advance their football careers, a number of women in Senegal work to professionalise the women’s game through their own team and association. They reshape, and queer, the futures of women’s football in and beyond Senegal.

Paper long abstract:

In the ambivalent space between tacit acceptance of women’s football and its associated masculine styles on the one hand, and growing homophobia and panics around the supposed abundance of lesbianism in women’s team sports on the other, a group of women in Senegal work to reshape the football sphere. Through an analysis of an informal football team and the work of a women’s football association, this paper shows how women’s football is an arena through which queer futures take shape. Unhappy with the way the Senegalese football competition is organised, providing little to no guidance to the women beyond their (short) annual competition, a group of Dakarois women organise offside. In an informal yet high-level team and an adjacent association that attempt to professionalise women’s football, these women critique the misconduct in club teams that reproduce gendered inequalities in a world that is supposed to provide some freedom from the straitjacket of normative femininity. Through their work, these women at once reveal what’s wrong with women’s football in Senegal and re-shape its practices. They play with gender- and kin conventions as a way to shape their futures as football women while remaining distinct and distant from queer activism and the growing feminist activism in the Senegalese (digital) public sphere; while also using sports play as a way to speculate about the future of a level playing field for women in Senegal and beyond. The result is a challenge to the heteropatriarchal state by making queerness visible in a playful way.

Paper short abstract:

Mainstream sports policies that promote diversity and inclusion are at times counter-productive. This paper shows why this is so and studies how Queer sport organisations in the Netherlands challenge dominant binary, cis-normative and heterosexist logics in mainstream sports and policy-making.

Paper long abstract:

Well-intended policies that promote diversity and inclusion in the domain of sports and recreation sometimes come with unintended consequences. Policy practitioners (PPs) in this policy domain construct certain “diversity dilemmas” that can impede diversity and inclusion. In their attempts of “doing diversity,” they prioritise certain diversities over others, reproduce bureaucratic classifications, and anticipate contestation regarding target groups that they expect to lead to public debate. Situated examples of such “diversity dilemmas” the authors of this paper highlight are instances where PPs consider the inclusion of trans athletes as conflicting with the ideal of “fairness.” By thus grounding a “diversity dilemma” in the constructed tension between the inclusion of trans athletes on the one hand and the principle of “fairness” on the other, PPs reinforce a hierarchical gender binary, strengthen dominant discourses of competition and winning, and, in doing so, put in place barriers for diversity and inclusion in sports. Based on document analysis and in-depth interviewing with Queer sport organisers and PPs in the Netherlands, this paper demonstrates how Queer sport organisations challenge dominant forms of “doing diversity” in sports. The authors zoom in on critical forms of (Queer) inclusivity that the Queer sports organisers draw on in their efforts to support safe(r) and more inclusive spaces for Queer people to enjoy sports. Exploring the preconditions of Queer-led policy-making and the alternative forms of sporting sociality such policy-making may engender, the authors bring to the fore forms of world-making that foster more inclusive and transformative spaces for sports and recreation.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in a multicultural and multi-religious urban neighborhood, this paper focuses on Muslim girls' street football practices in relation to gender, religion and race/ethnicity. Combining 'play' and 'performativity', it emphasizes girls’ creativity, resistances, and agencies in sport.

Paper long abstract:

Women’s and girls’ football is one of the fastest growing sports in the Netherlands (and in the world). Also in street football, women’s and girls’ participation is growing, especially among girls with Moroccan-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch and Muslim backgrounds. Based on ethnographic research in a multicultural and multi-religious neighborhood in the Netherlands, this presentation focuses on the practices of ‘play’ and ‘performativity’ in street football and in relation to gender, religion and race/ethnicity as categories of difference.

While Muslim girls in football are often stigmatized and excluded based on their religious and ethnic backgrounds (and much scholarship focuses on the reproduction of these inequalities), this presentation emphasizes Muslim girls’ street football practices as critical and creative ways of belonging, both in football and in wider Dutch society. In doing so, it combines theoretical insights from the anthropology of play with feminist scholarship on performativity and agency, and develops the idea of ‘kicking back’. ‘Kicking back’ refers not only to the practice of kicking a ball in the football game but also to the performative acts of gender, race/ethnicity, religion and national belonging that are at the same time critiqued and reappropriated through sport and play. I argue that in particular the informal space of street football forms the domain in which girls’ politics, resistances and agencies can be embodied and played. I emphasize Muslim girls’ street football as creative and embodied practices that not only ‘deconstruct’ categories of difference but also rearticulate them differently through the play and performativity of football.

Paper short abstract:

In Luxembourg, sporting subjects involved in interfaith athletic events in the public sphere deliberately engage playful creativity and a focus on building spiritual connections to delineate secular from religious physical activity and, in the process, open up space for new sporting socialities.

Paper long abstract:

In recent decades, interfaith initiatives have grown exponentially in number across Europe. A commitment to dialogue and speaking across faith differences lies at the heart of most of these endeavors. However, organizers and other stakeholders in interfaith relations simultaneously worry about the challenges of talking about and across faiths and dialogue’s potential for failure. Perhaps in response to these concerns, interfaith physical activities, especially sporting events, have become increasingly popular in parts of Europe. In Luxembourg, where the government is undertaking a rapid campaign of secularization that involves erasing religion from the public realm, interfaith groups seem to have a particular interest in sporting events. Often, these activities are organized within larger ‘secular’ sporting events, such as the interfaith run that takes place within Luxembourg’s annual marathon. Participants delineate their interfaith sporting efforts from their secular contexts with activities like collective prayer, religious music, a shared drink or meal, and a deliberate focus playful and creative exchange, spiritual experience, and relationship building, rather than winning, profit, or ‘solely’ physical prowess. In the process, many report building lasting interfaith and international relationships and, at the same time, a sense of spiritual growth through bodily achievement. Based on ongoing fieldwork in the interfaith sphere in Luxembourg, this paper explores the ways sporting subjects engage creativity as key means of cultivating spiritual energy in order to 1) differentiate secular from spiritual physical activity, and 2) carve a space for themselves in the secular public sphere, and, in the process, enable alternative sporting socialities.

Paper short abstract:

Playwork is an evolving academic field which is of increasing interest to multi-disciplinary research with a particular focus on urban childhood and youth in a global context. The paper explores discourses and tensions between playwork and sports organisation as intergenerational practices.

Paper long abstract:

The proposal emerges from an ongoing knowledge exchange project which partners with a third sector community development organization advocating for intergenerational community play and playworkers as researchers (Shaw, 2021). The ongoing auto-ethnographic research takes a post-structural approach to spaces in which play occurs, drawing on the notion of heterotopia (Foucault, 1994), social haunting (Gordon, 2008) and feminist paradigms (McNay, 1992).

The concept of play is taken to mean a complex but everyday enactment which can be applied to ideas, language, sport, science, flights of imagination or just messing about. The seduction and challenge of studying play (whoever the players might be) is that 'A game is never the same twice, even if it has the same name and the same players, in the same or a similar physical space' (Shaw 2023:1).

The presentation questions the ontologies and epistemologies which have defined play as an activity of childhood, which nevertheless seeps into adult consciousness through the disciplining discourses of early education and childhood as a social construct. It therefore contests age based socially constructed dichotomies between childhood, youth and adulthood; play, sport, work and leisure. Instead it turns to the possibilities of eco-friendly spaces shared by children, play/youth workers and other adults as 'Everyday Utopias' (Cooper 2014) and invites others to join in an epistemological playground which intertwines literary text and the sociological imagination, and everyday playfulness (Lester, 2020) into post-structural research paradigms.