Playing football like a girl: the phenomenology of being oneself

Abstract

The manner of moving and relation to space are central aspects of one’s bodily and gendered existence. Particularly, since childhood girls often experience their bodily capacities being constrained and molded by cultural norms of femininity. Considering it, this study explores how girls present and shape gender embodiments in a football project in Brazil and the ontological implications of these embodiment processes. This football project aims to promote football for girls between the ages of 9 and 14, and had a total of 50 girls participating in two shifts during 2024, when our research was carried out. The material produced consisted of observations from football training sessions and a reflexive intervention conducted with the girls. Our analytical framework has been grounded in gender theory with influences from existential phenomenology, drawing primarily from Young’s concepts of body comportment, motility, and spatiality. The intervention was analyzed in order to understand the girls’ bodily experiences and perspectives regarding gender embodiments. In the analysis of the material from the observations of football training we revolved around the girls’ bodily experiences in the following situations: controlling the ball, without the ball, and when the ball was approaching them. This theme broadly covered the nature of actions in the football game and presented a set of potentially analytical elements, which we synthesized from both a transversal and a longitudinal perspective. The findings revealed that by moving and interacting through football, the girls were able to continuously reshape gender embodiments that initially limited their bodily experience. In this sense, we propose that by playing football like oneself, which, in our perspective, refers to fully embracing one’s human experience, girls have a starting point for exploring their potential for broad bodily development and meaningful bodily experiences.