When Football is Feminine!

This book examines the evolving relationship between women and sport, a growing area of study in the 21st century. The connection between women and sport can be understood through three major perspectives: women and sport, women in sport, and women's sport. Within this framework, the book focuses on the rendezvous between women and soccer, exploring this dynamic across global, transnational, regional, national, and local contexts. It delves into extant literature, contexts, categories, methodologies, and key themes, issues, roles, and questions to uncover her stories in the history of soccer. The authors provide documentary, discursive, and analytical perspectives on the connection between women and soccer, addressing some of the most critical themes that shape women's engagement with the sport in different societies. These themes have influenced not only the women's game but also women's diverse participation and roles in connection with soccer - both women's and men's. The book explores themes such as professionalization, migration, talent, leadership, networks, agency, empowerment, gender, femininity, motherhood, sexism, lesbianism, masculinity, resistance, and identity. Covering broad subject areas such as gender studies, women's history, sports history, sociology, and cultural studies, this book is an essential resource for academics, researchers, students, and enthusiasts seeking to understand the multifaceted dynamics of women's involvement in soccer and its broader societal implications. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society and are now accompanied by a newly updated Introduction.

Kausik Bandyopadhyay is Professor of History at West Bengal State University, Kolkata, India. Formerly a Fellow of the International Olympic Museum, Lausanne, and of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, he is also Executive Academic Editor of Soccer and Society (Routledge).

Introduction: soccer, women and society 1. Dimensions of professionalization: a comparative analysis of women's soccer in the United States and Poland 2. Bonsucesso Futebol Clube, undefeated youth champion of 1983: Rio de Janeiro's suburbs as breeding grounds for women's soccer in Brazil 3. Professionalization of women's football in Brazil: perspectives and challenges in athletes' working conditions 4. Soccer, women, society: contextualizing women's football growth in East Africa 5. The talent pathways of professional and international female soccer players in the United States 6. Multi-club networks in women's soccer: reproducing hierarchies under the promise of integration 7. Sport as migrant work: transnational athletic migration and belonging in English professional women's football 8. Beyond the pitch: migration, communication, culture, and chastity in Nigerian women's football 9. The Australian Matildas at FIFA 2023: spurring social change, sports policy and soft power diplomacy 10. Game changers? The Matildas and 2023 Women's World Cup 11. Thirty-two years of inequality in coaching at the FIFA Women's World Cup (1991-2023): do gender, race and region matter? 12. Coaching expectations among women in Germany's amateur soccer leagues 13. Women in club presidency: masculinities and power in Brazilian football politics 14. Disrupting the doxa: how women leaders in soccer facilitate other women on their career paths - a Bourdieusian perspective 15. Sport, society, and gender: a Confucian perspective on North Korean women's football 16. Soccer, society and motherhood: mothers, daughters and tackling gender norms 17. Mexican women's football philosophy: lesbian visibility, public motherhood and collective effervescence 18. Five dollars and a dress: gendered dynamics and the politics of funding Zimbabwe's 'Mighty Warriors' 19. Plain sexism or misogyny? gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and a non-consensual kiss 20. Do Brazilian women football players consider themselves feminists? Approaches to gender equality and empowerment 21. Women's football in Iran: resistance through circumstances