Within binaries instead of beyond? Thed...

Given its near-global socio-cultural significance and prominence, football represents a promising epistemological site to (linguistically) explore how a contested cultural space is discursively negotiated in the first quarter of the 21st century and how gender (ideology) – as one of its key social constructs – is implicitly and explicitly (re-)produced and organized, but also challenged by people involved. Following Francombe-Webb and Palmer’s (2018: 180) call that there is need to “focus on the day-to-day, lived experiences of adolescent girls as they become involved in football” to better understand the “becoming” of female footballing identities, this chapter documents and critically analyzes how young female players experience, negotiate, and criticize exclusion from football as a male and masculine space, but also how they (re-)produce forms of (self-)exclusion in their own discourses. To this end, and as part of a larger research project on female football in Austria, we conducted two in-depth focus-group interviews with young players from a Viennese U16 girls’ team in 2018. The interviews are analyzed in two steps, via Thematic Analysis (Braun et al. 2019) followed by a critical interpretation of the findings using Critical Discursive Psychology (Wiggins 2017). Considering recent egalitarian developments in female football (in the Western hemisphere) as regards its prominence, visibility and organizational advancements, our analysis (re-)addresses the following questions:

RQ1: How do female football players experience and make sense of their (excluded) status? What forms and instances of (self-)exclusion emerge in the interviews?
RQ2: How do they discursively (re-)produce and maintain, but also challenge and possibly overcome exclusion on the basis of gendered (football) discourses? What ideological dilemmas emerge?
We first discuss football as an “(extremely) gendered organization” (Bryan et al.2021), and “cultural field” (Schirato 2013), as both concepts allow for specifying what exclusion means for women in football and what constitutive roles language and discourse(s) play therein. This is followed by a literature review that summarizes the most relevant research on the lived experiences of (young) females on the pitch.
Next, data and methodology are described, and our findings are presented in the final Section, followed by a critical interpretation and a conclusion, which includes
possible practical implications of our research.