Mapping the field: contextual background

The cisgender white heterosexual male embracing “hegemonic masculinity” has been the main character in the domain of sports since the earliest efforts to ensure that modern sports have universalized standards wherever they are played, to ensure a level playing field. Under these conditions the mere participation of gender non-conforming people in sports indicates a constant effort to exceed the constituent borders that keep being reproduced through sports institutions, discriminating discourses by sports authorities, and misrepresentations in the media. ^{Footnote 9} We regularly witness ruptures and non-linear changes in the participation level of women in certain sports, both in the careers of individual athletes and in mass exclusions.

Besnier et al. claim that “the exclusion of women from a particular sport is often more a result of cultural definitions of a sport as ‘masculine’ and less a result of women’s physiological inability to compete,” though the latter is also used as a justification for exclusion. The authors add that this dualistic understanding is a constitutive element of modern sports, with reference to how Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, was against women’s participation in sports. ^{Footnote 10}

Even though the beginning of modern football for all genders dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century in many parts of the world, predominantly due to colonization and overseas commerce, the progress of women’s football has been quite intermittent. Including some of the leading countries of today’s football such as Brazil, Germany, and England, the institutional organization of women’s football was halted for many decades due to the sexist and hostile attitude of football federations toward women playing football. ^{Footnote 11} At the beginning of the 1970s, developments in women’s football accelerated again.

In Turkey, entering sports fields, as is the case with many other public spaces, has been much easier for men; in the early Republican period the limited number of women in sports included those from non-Muslim minorities or the daughters of elite supporters of modernization. The motivation for allowing women in was related primarily to attempts at regulating women’s bodies in harmony with modern gender roles, securing the reproduction of healthy generations, and demonstrating a harmonious and healthy society through mass sports events such as Gymnastics Fest. ^{Footnote 12} The first women’s football teams in Turkey, İzmir Women Football and İstanbul Women Football Team, were formed in 1954; ^{Footnote 13} nevertheless, the Women’s Football League only started in 1994. The league is just another example of the interrupted journey of women’s football around the world since the teams in the league and even the league itself shut down from time to time for various reasons, including mismanagement, corruption, rumors of lesbianism, and not winning enough games. ^{Footnote 14}

According to FIFA’s Member Associations Survey Report, ^{Footnote 15} more than thirteen million women were playing association football in the world as of 2019. These players experience numerous problems such as financial difficulties, sexual abuse, homo/trans/biphobia, and institutional sexism. These problems are also shared by women football players in Turkey. ^{Footnote 16} Öztürk states that the TFF has considered women’s football to be a social project since 2006. While this has led to a remarkable increase in the number of women football players and has inspired women’s teams in many cities, Öztürk problematizes this institution-level attitude of the male-dominant football domain, arguing that the athletic skills of the players, the quality of the game, and international competitions become of secondary importance. Moreover, describing women’s games as a social responsibility project reproduces the gendered structure of the field and limits the expectations of players. ^{Footnote 17}

Outside the institutional borders of football there is another football scene in Turkey where LGBTI+ people come together and form amateur teams. There has been a remarkable increase in the number of independent leagues and teams in the last couple of years. With the significant influence of the Gezi Uprising on the coming together of a variety of political opposition groups, gender-mixed alternative football leagues ^{Footnote 18} have emerged in the last couple of years. Around the same period, queer-identified amateur teams were also formed one after another inside these leagues or independently of them. Today there is a growing number of queer-identified teams in many cities. ^{Footnote 19} Among them are Lezyonerler, Atletik Dildoa, and Queerpool in İstanbul; Sportif Lezbon in Ankara; Muamma in Mersin; and Lolitop in Kocaeli. ^{Footnote 20}

Besides the obvious crucial struggle against sexual discrimination in football, the queer-identified amateur football teams deserve particular attention because they intervene in the taken-for-granted rules and configurations of the game itself to open up new possibilities. Concluding this section, I feel the need for a clear analytical distinction. This recently emerging queer-identified amateur football field shows that football is no longer an exclusive space for cisgender straight men as women’s experiences in the professional field have demonstrated for decades; therefore, I find it crucial to start from women’s football to historicize and describe my research field. Despite this recognition, it should be clear that women’s football and queer football are two different categories and one should not interpret the former category as the precursor of the latter given the extensive and ongoing homophobia in the TFF. ^{Footnote 21} Therefore, while my research acknowledges the struggle of women footballers in the professional field and its overlapping aspects with my field, my focus is entirely on the sexuality politics of queer-identified amateur football teams. I find it extremely important to pursue the footsteps of these gender non-conforming people on the football field, claiming that those who cannot follow the predetermined path are the ones who can find new ways, methods, and communities that are otherwise forgotten or thrown aside. ^{Footnote 22}

Methodology: being in the field

This study is based primarily on twelve in-depth interviews with the players of five different queer-identified amateur teams from İstanbul and Ankara, along with my first-hand experiences and observations as an insider. Three teams that are currently active in Mersin, Kocaeli, and İstanbul have been formed after I completed my interviews; therefore their players are not represented as interviewees in my study. Nevertheless, their contributions to queer athlete-activism and their individual experiences have undoubtedly enriched this study. My position as an insider smoothed the way for me to reach out to players who would be willing to be interviewed. As expected, it was easy to arrange meetings with my teammates. I reached out to players from other teams either directly or through intermediary personal contacts, rarely through mobile or social media profiles but mostly by asking face to face in sports events where we came together. Another positive aspect of being an insider was that we could have intimate and deeper conversations during the interviews. As I have changed my interviewees’ names for the sake of confidentiality, all the names I provide here are pseudonyms.

Since the first day of this study my researcher self and my everyday self have been intertwined in a way where I found myself observing every move that other players and I made on the football field through an ethnographic lens. A significant amount of the ethnographic data came into existence through the effortful processes in which I also took part as a football player. This enabled me to access a first-hand account of events, but at the same time it raised the question of whether I could interpret the context from a distance. Similar to my feeling of being in my ethnographic field whenever I entered the football field, I often thought about how my research, the statistical data that I came across, and my arguments could contribute to our community. I shared my new insights plenty of times with my teammates and also with anonymous people via our team’s Facebook page; we sometimes used this information and arguments in our public announcements and press bulletins.

While it is common, especially in the research done by marginalized communities, for an outsider to see no harm in intruding on people’s private lives and asking the most intimate questions with no ethical concern, being a native in the field might also result in a variety of problems mainly due to what O’Reilly calls “over-rapport.” ^{Footnote 23} As I have also seen in my case, an insider position provides several advantages such as gaining trust and acceptance more easily; creating a space of dialogue for further co-operations within the community; and being attentive to nuances, and thus more likely to prevent biased stereotypes. It is undeniable that “shared marginalization” provides the researcher with easier access to the field, however this per se does not promise an accurate analysis or a politically correct ethnography. ^{Footnote 24} In addition to these factors, an insider researcher is more inclined to feel overburdened with ethical contradictions, and responsibility for and commitment to the community, since they are too involved in the field, whereas an outsider might protect their assumedly neutral position.

Throughout my research I had to modify the scope of the field and to update the content several times since I was moving inside such a brand new and fast-growing field. Although I can foresee certain shortcomings of studying a very recent phenomenon, it has been quite an eye-opener for me to witness every moment of the process of how a field creates its own rules, limits, discourse, ethics, and humor in relation to changing external dynamics.

The way I use the word “woman” in the text is not limited to the hegemonic and normative womanhood which has the characteristics of being white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied, feminine, and belonging to the middle-upper social class. This image represents only one of the combinations among many diverse forms of womanhood and I, on the contrary, use the word with all the possible meanings one can attach to it in their self-identification process. If so, why do I use phrases “women and queers,” “women and LGBTI+ people,” and “women and gender non-conforming people” in the text? Do I intend to say that the categories of “women” and the other terms are mutually exclusive so that someone who defines herself as a woman is no longer queer? Furthermore, do I mean that the gender non-conforming body is never a woman and all women always conform with the norms? Of course not. These would not only unfairly exclude countless experiences of womanhood but also would fail to notice where these categories overlap. The reason why I specify both categories in all these phrases is to avoid sloppy clusters that would erase certain particularities, especially when the study is mostly about the particularities which are located at the intersection points of these categories.

The field of critical studies on sexualities has already made remarkable contributions to our way of thinking on gender and sexuality and it is undoubtedly a vital channel for looking at sporting people. ^{Footnote 25} Nuhrat problematizes the fact that women in male-dominated sports fields have been analyzed only through their relations with hegemonic masculinity, whether they embrace masculinity or femininity. ^{Footnote 26} This criticism is followed by the suggestion of a pluralistic understanding of masculinities and femininities: there are multiple and elaborate ways in which women struggle for their space in sports, and they should be meticulously approached. I take this suggestion seriously in my research since the sexuality politics of gender non-conforming footballing people is an intricate field of analysis of which interpretation through singular and fixed categories of sexuality remains insufficient.

A (new) site of resistance

Football, often defined as “the opium of the masses” for being highly influenced by state and market regulations, ^{Footnote 27} has been perceived as a social sphere in which sexism and homo/trans/biphobia were inherent. The structural exclusion of gender non-conforming people and sexist and discriminating discourses that prevail even in the moments of resistance have impeded many people from entering the field to play football let alone claim it as a site of resistance. It is a “sport that everyone knows but which we cannot play,” says Funda, ^{Footnote 28} speaking about the widely accepted patriarchal environment of football. Even though sports, and football in particular, have always had the potential of being a site of resistance as a contested space, in Turkey it is the first time that such diverse political opposition groups have organized to play together and raise their voices on the football field.

A new site for queer happenings

Popularity and accessibility of football were two of the most common answers from my interviewees to the question of why the football field has been adopted by women and queers as a site of resistance. The intriguing paradox of the field was another reason suggested in the interviews: as one of the spaces where performances and discourses of toxic masculinity, sexism, and homo/trans/biphobia are circulated the most, it also provides a relatively comfortable environment for the masculine performance of gender non-conforming people.

Adding the temporal dimension has led me to several other answers. The increase in the influence area and visibility of the LGBTI+ movement in Turkey, as well as the interactions in the Gezi Uprising, made queers one of the main actors of the newly emerging alternative football field. In Gezi, where the fan clubs of three big football teams of İstanbul came together under the name of Istanbul United, interactions and solidarity among different groups were established more than ever. Feminist Tent and the LGBT Blok, as two of the most visible groups in the park, held a workshop with the fan groups and thus intervened in the sexist discourses circulating in the resistance language: slogans that position the rival (opponent team or the state power) as “penetrated” (feminine) and themselves as “penetrator” (masculine).

Several gender-mixed amateur leagues and many anti-sexist teams emerged after Gezi, mainly in İstanbul and Ankara. The argument that the Gezi Uprising was an impetus for people to head for the football fields found a voice in my interviews. Funda: “I started going to matches right after Gezi and I thought a lot about it. This desire was always there but until Gezi told me ‘come on, you are going there,’ I didn’t care about it.” Ediz ^{Footnote 29} claims that the increase in the popularity of LGBTI+ community during Gezi might have facilitated the entrance of queers to the football field: “Think about the people who joined Pride March to take a selfie. It was kind of an advertisement and I think that it was a result of Gezi.”

The Gezi Uprising was also significant because it furnished a large part of society with abundant knowledge and the instruments necessary to create alternative ways and spaces of collectivity and resistance. Nilgün ^{Footnote 30} ironically interprets the dispersion of political activities as related to the fact that “our state taught us to be political in every sense […] They do not allow us to be in a certain space, they do not allow us to be in Taksim Square or Kızılay Square. Then we will meet in neighborhoods, be it a football field or a park, not necessarily a square.” The call for the 2016 Pride March, after the violent police attack of the previous year and the most crowded marches in the LGBTI+ history of Turkey in 2013 and 2014, was witty and controversial: “We Are Dispersing!” ^{Footnote 31} It was an unusual resistance that had no central point and it undoubtedly carried the traces of Gezi memory.

Before 2013, the male-dominant atmosphere of the football field, including the left-wing fan communities, was not challenged in such an organized manner. Here the case of Halil Ïbrahim Dinçdağ stands out as an exception. In 2009, his license as a football referee was not renewed because of a health report which exempted him from compulsory military service: the Turkish army considers homosexuality a psychosexual disorder. ^{Footnote 32} When Dinçdağ lost his job he filed a lawsuit against the TFF, and in the process he became a public figure. In 2015, he finally won the case and interpreted this result as a victory for the struggle against homophobia in Turkey. ^{Footnote 33} During that period, solidarity matches and discussions on football and homophobia were organized. ^{Footnote 34} This is worth noting as a significant event for LGBTI+ people, who have long considered football as the field of the perpetrator.

Categories of resistance: against, through, for

In parallel with all the above, I argue that the football field has emerged as one of the alternative spaces, especially for gender non-conforming people, in the process of dispersion and proliferation of resistance after Gezi. Doing research on the struggle of women and queers against structural obstacles in the field showed me that the ways in which political opposition groups take to the football field vary and thus they should be analyzed in different categories. I propose three non-mutually exclusive forms in which political opposition groups treat the football field as a site of resistance: resist against football, through football, and for football. By “resist against football,” I mean that there are groups that oppose the current manifestation of the football field. By “resist through football,” I argue that there are teams that use the football field as an instrument for conveying their political claims to the wider public. As for the last category, “resist for football,” it refers to the desire and struggle for being able to play football, which might be claimed to be the most fundamental one. After I elaborate on the first two categories, I particularly focus on the distinct orientation of queer-identified amateur football teams in the last one. I investigate why the first two categories remain insufficient in explaining the relationship between gender non-conforming people and the football field, drawing upon the relevant literature on the link between corporeal, sexual, and spatial orientations.

Space-making and sexuality: football as a sexual orientation

Space today is “understood to play an active role in the constitution and reproduction of social identities and, vice versa, social identities, meanings, and relations are recognized as producing material and symbolic or metaphorical spaces.” ^{Footnote 43} This reciprocal interaction also manifests itself in the production and reproduction of sexualized bodies and spaces. Rejecting the idea that the material characteristics of spaces predetermine internal power relationships is important because “it denaturalizes the presumed heterosexuality of everyday spaces.” ^{Footnote 44} Ahmed, through the concept of a “straight line of life,” draws an analogy between the linearity of life and being straight/heterosexual by claiming that a straight person’s body is aligned with the progression of everyday life. This alignment erases the history and the effort behind straightening the things or “holding” them in place; things, aligned on the vertical axis, look like they were always straight. ^{Footnote 45} In light of all these, I argue that it is possible to speak of the presumed heterosexuality of the football field.

If a person, who is not a cisgender straight man, proves to be good at football they often encounter stereotypical assumptions and interventions about their sexuality and its expression on the field. As Öztürk states, the TFF makes efforts to highlight the femininity of women footballers, and the unwritten criterion of “having good manners” is required to be picked for the national team; these institutional efforts started with the restructuring process of women’s football after the suspension of the league in 2003. Quoting the statements of administrators that refer to the “bad behaviors which ended women’s football,” Öztürk argues that there was the intention of breaking the equation between football, lesbianism, and masculinity. ^{Footnote 46} Leaving aside the futile efforts of seeking the truth in these stereotypes, I argue that our concern should be the effects that these stereotypes create in the lives, aptitudes, and decisions of women and gender non-conforming people. Most of my interviewees had childhood memories in which families or schools were afraid when the child had a liking for football. Yağmur ^{Footnote 47} said:

The stereotypical relationship between football and lesbianism not only creates anxiety in a child’s surroundings but the children themselves sometimes move away from the football field for their heterosexual performance to be approved. Doğan ^{Footnote 48} remembered a moment from her adolescence during our interview. She stopped playing football in adolescence and also started to realize that she is not straight. In that period, she says, whenever a ball came toward her in the schoolyard she did not want to control it with her feet. She instead kneeled down and picked up the ball with her hands. She intuitively felt that if she revealed that she knew how to interact with the ball with her feet, she would also reveal her lesbianism. She described this feeling “as if my clothes would suddenly fall off.” Ahmed states that “the directedness of the body toward an action (which we have discovered also means an orientation toward certain kinds of objects) is how the body ‘appears’” and, drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s “habitual body,” she claims that “the body is habitual insofar as it ‘trails behind’ in the performing of an action.” ^{Footnote 49} Doğan’s expression seems to be in line with habit given the fact that the word “habit” means clothing in Latin as well as condition and appearance; she performed the appropriate bodily action not to reveal what lies behind the habitual body.

The link between sexual and spatial orientations shapes the domain of what a body can do, both in terms of normativity and capacity. What Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe as “sedimentation” ^{Footnote 50} and Bourdieu as “habitus” ^{Footnote 51} refer to the argument that histories of bodily (inter)actions inside a field affect the further possibilities, orientations, and tendencies of bodies. The resistance of queer-identified amateur football teams in Turkey reveals that the heterosexuality of the football field is neither natural nor ahistorical; the history behind its constitution makes it home for certain individuals while positioning the others as guests. Those who do not feel at home regulate their bodies accordingly, try to negotiate with the requirements, or disclaim those spaces. The sexuality politics on today’s football field matter because they self-determine their spaces and this creates a shift in the ostensibly neutral and straight line. Miran ^{Footnote 52} describes the shift with these words: “Think about all the features attributed to genders, attributed to us. Similarly, football, which is actually just a game, has a lot of things that are constructed. And what we do through these teams is deconstructing them.”

Queering the field and border-making

The straight line of life targets success and happiness and the act of straightening this line renders it rough for queers to relate to what is presumed to be desired at the point of arrival. ^{Footnote 53} Halberstam argues that failing under certain conditions as well as losing, forgetting, and not knowing can offer much more creative, collective, and surprising ways of inhabiting the world. ^{Footnote 54} Heckert problematizes the same situation reversely: “What visions, what possibilities, what lives remain hidden when the mind is focused on, driven toward, success?” ^{Footnote 55} It is possible to adapt these words to the norms and regulations dominant on the football field. A score-oriented team draws a line with a clarified destination –regardless of the complexity of their tactics – which restricts the range of possible movements as well as the area they occupied on the field. The queer-identified teams analyzed in this study are also significant because they intervene in the value system of the game. Funda expresses her opinions about the notion of failure in general and states that the queer football field helped her relate to this notion differently:

The name of the football tournament held in Pride Week 2016 was “The Tournament of Those Who Like to Concede Goals” (Gol Yemeyi Sevenler Turnuvası) and almost all the queer-identified teams that existed at that time participated in the tournament. Many players emphasize that they act against a common enemy (i.e., ciscentric, heteronormative, and sexist structures of the field) in solidarity instead of rivaling each other. Ediz states: “as a team, we are not interested in scorekeeping at all; we don’t even know the score most of the time. What matters for us is to play a good game, to have fun, to create a space for a woman to liberate herself.” In Queer Olympix, ^{Footnote 56} an annual sports event organized by one of the queer-identified teams called Atletik Dildoa, ^{Footnote 57} the winner of football matches is defined by five criteria: equal distribution of passes (team play), reckless and aggressive game (harsh tackles, hard shots, etc.), discriminatory language, scores (regardless of the number of goals scored, the side which scores most receives two points and the other side receives one point), and the points that teams give to each other. To make a fair assessment, each match is observed by two players from another team that is not playing. As can be seen, these scoring criteria reduce the importance of winning in a typical way almost to the level of zero, which is an intervention that shakes the ground of the field and thus the movements and orientations of the bodies inside.

These experiments are worth discussing because they pave the way for a new value system in the game. ^{Footnote 58} As Bourdieu stated, “a new way of practicing an already established sport […] causes a restructuring of the space of sporting practices and a more or less complete redefinition of the meaning attached to the various practices.” ^{Footnote 59} While these lively interventions in the conventional rules and values of football enable us to problematize the concept of “fair,” it is necessary to be mindful of whether another set of values is proposed by them and thus some appropriate and inappropriate behaviors are defined. The concept of “queer commons” is crucial to insert at this point, which is defined by Özbay and Savcı as “a radical rethinking of self and community, and thus a radical rethinking of belonging and the concept of commons itself.” ^{Footnote 60} I consider it crucial to further reflect upon the processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities, on whom we are welcoming and whom we leave aside, to be able to cultivate ethical ways of sharing the commons and of living together.

Conclusion: contributions and promises

Referring again to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of “field,” it can be claimed that the football field is one of the countless other fields in which people are constantly mobile and thus struggle never ends. ^{Footnote 61} The football field cannot be described as oppressive or emancipatory in itself. Considering the aspect of sexualities, instead of perceiving this field as a static environment where prediscursively fixed identities locate, I prefer to perceive it as a playing field that offers new spatial orientations and creative and unconventional (inter)actions for the bodies inside. That of queer-identified amateur football teams is not a struggle primarily to be included in the conventional football field but rather to deconstruct the centralized regulation of the game and to proliferate its potential for queer happenings that are only possible by setting the convenient conditions for the entrance of those who have been marginalized.

I conceive of this research as an attempt at disrupting the assumptions of football as a straightening tool and assumptions of the football field as a site of masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality. Consideration of the football field as a site of queer resistance and consideration of footballing bodies as resisting bodies can hopefully evoke unconventional ways for bodies to orient themselves on the field through which this space can become a site of queer happenings. A spatial analysis of gender non-conforming footballing people and the non-linear paths that these bodies follow presents the football field as a new spatial orientation that might carry the potential to disrupt and transform the game itself while creating new lines, new objects, and new spaces for the marginalized sexualities in Turkey.

The anthropology of sport is directly linked with debates on the limitations and potentials of the individual body. Since my research locates where this literature overlaps with sexuality studies, its contributions go beyond the football field. The analysis on the relationship between sexual and spatial orientations denaturalizes the heterosexuality of everyday spaces, challenges dualistic and stable gender categories, and problematizes antagonistic and success-oriented structures as obstacles to solidarity and creativity. The debate on queer commons and scalable inclusion probes the possibility of an ethical and non-hierarchical coexistence. With a cautious approach to processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities, it investigates the means and methods of self-determination of places, interactions, and bodies.