ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the lived experience of Senegalese women’s soccer as a site of transformative politics, at the intersection of queer resistance and progressive Sufi piety, and describes how the footballeuses make sense of their physical suffering on the field through moral discourses of self-formation and suffering in sport and Islam. It shows how they apply this framework in the context of their everyday lives and argues that Senegalese women’s soccer is a site of transformative resistance where gendered subjectivities and Muslim spatialities become possible and emerge. The women confrontationally adopt and wield the symbols of their stigma in public, an act that causes them even more suffering. Therein lies the paradox of their positionality, they need the negative moral judgment in order to cultivate their moral agency. The chapter utilizes women’s soccer as a lens to engage with scholarly debates about the politics of gender and sexuality in the contemporary Muslim world.
