Who said soccer is for men -
What about soccer queens?

Edited by Sabine Neidhardt for WISER SOCCER SYMPOSIUM

July 19, 2005: Most recently, and in conjunction with Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), FEW kicked off a two-day symposium on soccer by organizing and facilitating a roundtable discussion entitled Who said soccer is for men? What about the Soccer Queens? The point of the roundtable was to bring to light the challenges faced by women, and specifically lesbian, soccer players in South Africa. Since it is estimated that nearly 60% of all female soccer players in South Africa are lesbian, and since FEW has its own all-lesbian soccer team—The Chosen FEW—we felt that it was necessary to be part of a symposium that advertised itself as dissecting the political, social, and cultural meaning of soccer.

The symposium, which was well attended by academics, sports journalists, and soccer enthusiasts, thus served also as a platform of education for those who believe that the world of soccer is only for men and about men (and straight men at that!). Zanele Muholi and Phumla Masuku presented an analysis of how patriarchal and heterosexist mainstream soccer is to the exclusion and detriment of women soccer players. Highlighted were the issues of sexual harassment and abuse that women soccer players face at the hands of their (almost exclusively) male coaches.

After consulting with, and interviewing lesbian-identified soccer players from Johannesburg, Muholi and Masuku found that a large number of them have experienced situations where their ability to play and be given a chance to succeed even marginally as a female soccer player, they had either to hide their (homo)sexuality, or to give sexual favours to coaches. Unfortunately, when they exposed the harassment publicly, they were neither supported by the other team mates who were also afraid to rock the boat, or by mainstream soccer organizations and service providers who were lesbophobic and sexist.

An extreme example of lesbophobic service providers was the call by Ria Ledwaba who is the know SAFA prominent rep. (refer to article) in March of 2005 for women soccer players “to act like women” by dressing like women. In other words, she suggested women soccer players must wear skirts to play! This is a deliberate attempt at hiding and silencing the presence of non-feminine, non-gender conforming lesbian soccer players. What is at stake here, and what we must begin to address as a community of soccer players, women, lesbians is why it is so threatening when women stray from their traditional constructed roles as women?

Zanele and Phumla also brought to light was also the issue of how gendered and heterosexualized sponsorship can be, also to the detriment of women soccer players. Due to systemic heterosexist, patriarchal notions of how ‘women’ and ‘men’ are supposed to perform their genders and their sexualities, and in what spaces, women are structurally discriminated against and prevented from establishing a successful, professional national women’s soccer league (PSL). This means essentially that while women play soccer, the majority do not get paid. In fact, even those who are fortunate enough to ‘earn’ some small change for playing, it is not enough to provide even a basic living wage.

The inequalities of this heteropatriachal system and its lived realities and experiences for men and women soccer players can be showcased in the very simple example of entrance fees to soccer matches. For instance, when professional men’s soccer matches take place, fans and spectators usually pay an entrance fee in order to for them to be entertained by the sport. However, when women’s soccer matches take place, there are hardly ever entrance fees.

At other times, women’s soccer matches may be used as ‘curtain-raisers’ for the ‘real’ entertainment that was advertised: a soccer match between professional male players. So while fans and spectators pay entrance fees and are entertained by both male and female soccer players, the fees paid will not be evenly distributed. Instead, the male soccer players will gain the largest slice of the financial pie from these fees.

The result has been that while professional male soccer players earn large sums of cash, advertising contracts, and prestige in the eyes of the nation, women soccer players are extremely poor, most are unemployed, and unable to pursue their dreams for the most basic of gendered material reasons. We must remember that nearly 60% of women, especially black women in South Africa, are formally unemployed and lack the educational levels to challenge this cycle of unemployment. Moreover, skills development for women is under-resourced and under-funded, and almost non-existent in the field of sports. Therefore, while institutions and funding do exist to train and develop male athletes and soccer players in particular, women do not have access to these same resources.

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The consequences of this are that without access to the necessary institutional and financial supports and resources that will pay for proper equipment such as soccer kits, an adequate space to train, access to proper medical care, or even just healthy and nutritious food, women are systematically kept from pursuing their dreams as soccer players.

Gloria Hlalele and “malestream” soccer
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, women’s participation in mainstream soccer began not within their own female headed, female dominated soccer leagues and teams, but within mainstream/malestream soccer. Gloria Hlalele (known as ‘Sweet 16’ due to her young age then) was the first black woman to represent women’s entrance into the world of soccer in this country and yet she did not play for a woman’s team. She was ‘discovered’ as a soccer star by playing with and on a men’s team. In fact, Gloria was once in serious negotiations to play for a professional male soccer team, however, because she was classified as a “woman” in a gender binary world, she was ultimately banned from joining the team. The ‘woman’ Gloria, however, continued to train ‘men’ to play professionally, and some of those are even the soccer heroes we speak about today.

Gloria’s presence in the 1980s and 1990s proved that there were real possibilities for the growth of women’s soccer as the talent, passion, and determination was there from women to participate as equals. Yet, because dominant power structures in our society (in both the apartheid and our current post-apartheid world) construct women/femininity and men/masculinity in direct opposition to each other, soccer was established as an exclusively male domain. This meant that while men and masculinity were constructed as both natural and necessary parts of soccer, the potential for women’s soccer to flourish was severely limited, as women place was constructed to be in the private sphere—in the home, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom (behind closed doors!).

Ultimately, when women were “allowed” to participate in the world of soccer, it was only as mothers, wives and girlfriends in support of ‘their’ men. As a result, despite the fact that today, South Africa has roughly about 50 women’s soccer teams, their participation in mainstream professional soccer is still marginalized

In 2004, South Africa celebrated a decade of democracy while at the same time celebrating the country’s winning of the bid to host the 2010 World Cup (which raises the question of whether the women soccer players will be present or not at those games). The absence of women’s voices in the official celebrations of both events, and in mainstream media, is a sign of how slowly change takes place, and how the struggle to change gender and sexual inequalities ‘on the ground’ is still on going. We may have a constitution in place to protect ‘rights’, but it remains, for the most part inaccessible to those of us who do not have the financial resources to claim those rights. It costs money to hire a lawyer to take a coach to court for sexual harassment!

So let us not remain complacent in our new ‘democracy’ but remember that the struggle is not over. A luta continua!

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