ABSTRACT
Girls’ football is the fastest-growing sport in the world. In the Netherlands, street football is especially popular among girls with migrant and Muslim backgrounds, who increasingly occupy Dutch public sport spaces through this embodied cultural practice. At the same time, the presence of Muslim bodies in Dutch public (sport) spaces is highly problematised and debated. Muslim citizens are often seen as not yet embodying the supposedly Dutch cultural norms of women’s emancipation and sexual freedom. In this chapter, I focus on how these debates on Islam, gender, sexuality and bodies play out in the domain of girls’ street football by taking citizenship and embodiment as conceptual lenses. The embodied practice of sport is strongly organised along gendered and (hetero)sexualised lines; Dutch citizenship is constructed through gendered, sexualised and secular notions of the body, thereby excluding Islamic bodies. Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I show how the embodiment of gender and sexuality in sport intersects with the embodiment of religion and citizenship in the football practices of Moroccan–Dutch Muslim girls in an urban Dutch neighbourhood. Firstly, I discuss white Dutch sport and youth professionals’ perspectives on Muslim girls and sport, in which they reinforce dominant and binary ideas on both religion and gender. Secondly, I show how young Muslim footballers themselves embody gender, religion and citizenship in their sport activities. I argue that by playing football, Muslim girls exceed gendered and religious embodiments of citizenship and reconstitute citizenship through embodiments of winning and football.
