Negotiating femininities and belongings through Football: flows, boundaries, and practices in women's sports

Abstract

We analyse the potential of community football as a space where adult women, at the beginning of their legal careers, negotiate a sense of belonging to their professional category and the right to leisure. Understanding the senses of belonging and the barriers faced by women when playing football in adulthood highlights the obstacles and opportunities that the sport presents during a period when female participation tends to decrease due to competition for time with careers, work, and domestic responsibilities, demonstrating intersections of gender and class in their experiences. Playing football in this context is to challenge the expectations surrounding the femininity of women lawyers, while at the same time reaffirming aspects intrinsic to the professional field they occupy, reasserting values related to meritocracy and discipline, composing an "empowered" femininity. With this, they navigate and redraw through professional spaces, drawing attention to the regimes of power that operate within the post-feminist neoliberal rhetoric.