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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.