Women in football in Turkey: Nonworkers out of place

Football (soccer) around the world is predominantly a masculine engagement. Moreover, it is a key practice in the production and reinforcement of hegemonic masculinity. As such women’s football is largely overlooked and trivialized and women are othered through football. In this paper, I demonstrate how such trivialization entails an outlook whereby football is deemed a hobby or a social instrument for women rather than work. Feeding off of this viewpoint, women in football are perceived and treated as threatening “matter out of place.” Through this, I show that women are pushed out of football not only conceptually and symbolically but also quite physically. This paper is
based on four months of qualitative research in 2019 and 2020, mostly in Istanbul when I interviewed footballers, trainers, club and federation administrators, media representatives and sponsors and conducted observation at matches.