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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.