Queering Fair Play on the Queer-Feminist Activist-Amateur Football Field in Turkey and Italy

As an insider multi-sited ethnography on an emergent prefigurative organizational field, this research investigates the ethical-political discursive and embodied practices of the queer-feminist activist-amateur football communities in Turkey and Italy. The ways in which queer-feminist movements engage with football are theorized within social movement studies. The research explores the specific organizational and symbolic characteristics of a queer-feminist football field by bridging three relevant research fields, namely sports studies, queer-feminist theory, and social movement studies. While doing so, it also reveals that queer-feminist communities engaging in football practice also engage in conversation with social movement theory (SMT) from three different aspects: (1) The football field functions as a tool for the broader queer-feminist movement. (2) Queer-feminist activists, who also correspond to the marginalized segments of society concerning football, take the field for their right to play. (3) The athlete-activists create a field for themselves to enter the game as they are; in the construction of intersectional football communities, they also prefigure another world. Moreover, this study aims to place sports in the SMT literature beyond being an instrument of social movements for broader causes. While the case-specific question is aimed at the specifics of a queer-feminist football field, the core question is in search of how to theorize the queer-feminist (inter)actions on the sports field from within social movements studies and which SMT concepts can help us to make sense of the actors of sports field as social movement actors. The queer-feminist activist-amateur football field contains several tensions that relate to broader debates such as ethics (normative constructions vs. non-normative communities), fairness (inclusion vs. exclusion), identity (collective identity vs. anti-identitarianism), and borders (safe-r spaces vs. “queer commons”). This research delves into the specifics and core tensions of queer-feminist amateur-activist football communities through three main aspects: “rules of the game,” “limits of the field,” and “values of the team.” The research, by engaging with the multi-scale tensions on the football field, traces the potential of the prefiguratively organized queer-feminist activist-amateur football communities for a radical transformation to achieve “sports for all.” Engaging with community practices through the triangulation of participant observation, in-depth interviews, and thematic analysis, the research question is explored from a comparative and insider perspective.