The Beautiful Game? Hegemonic Masculinity, Women and Football in Brazil and Argentina

Abstract

The practice of football by women in Latin America is an integral part of historical patterns around the performance of gender roles and offers insights into how power, both symbolic and political, is subject to ongoing processes of negotiation. A study of women's involvement as spectators and players in Brazil and Argentina since the early twentieth century sees football emerge as a field in which the construction of gender identities, both personal and national, may be contested. More recently, a growing presence of female players, writers and academics suggests that female agency through football in Latin America is an increasingly realistic goal.