‘Scissoring? I can do that!’ Play, alternative place-making and nested sexual normativities in Dutch women’s amateur football

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article addresses the way in which female players of “traditional” amateur football clubs in the Netherlands manage to create their team as “open” and “inclusive”. Drawing on the notion of playfulness and linguistic perspectives on humour, we show that women players engage in shared sexual joking and embodied performances that centre around gendered and sexual stereotypes and norms. In contrast to a reading of the persistence of norms as limiting anti-normative agency, a focus on play shifts attention to the active recontextualisation of norms in localized interaction and their “nested” quality – thus suggesting that norms are always imbricated in their alternative. It is through the subtle recoding of gendered and sexual norms and stereotypes Independent scholar accomplished in interactional forms of verbal and spatial play that team members recreate traditional club spaces, albeit transiently, into alternative sportscapes nested within otherwise strongly (hetero)normative spaces.