Kadın Futbolcuların Futbol Alanındaki Deneyimleri

Abstract

The purpose of this ethnographic research was to analyze the structure of a women’s football team, Umutspor, by contextualizing it as a social field in which power relations were in play in forming the field, agents were positioned according to power relations and competed for capitals and position-taking within the field. Theoretically, I based my research mainly on Bourdieu’s field theory and feminist interpretations of the theory. I conducted the research throughout the 2014-2015 football season in Turkey. Based on the participant observations, field notes, official documents, fotonovela and individual interviews with 14 footballers, both parents of 10 footballers and 4 technical assistances, I analyzed the data with thematic analysis. That the Turkish Football Federation structured women’s football as a social project has formed the field’s illusio and doxa, the structural characteristics of Umutspor and agents' practices. While physical and social capital held by agents enabled the agents to gain access to the field, their class habitus has formed their taste and disposition to football. As there was no a structure in which economic capital could circulate in the field, there were scarcely any opportunities, financial resources, interest or support at the administrative level nor visibility and representation in media. In addition to being under the administration of and excluded from the men’s football club, the field was also shaped substantially by gender regime. Discourses around masculinity and femininity and practices attributed to gender, so to speak gender capital were in play in shaping the agents’ habitus as well as the power relations and the field itself. Meanwhile, these gendered discourses and practices were reproduced perpetually by the agents both in and out of the field. Taken together, women’s football which was considered as a social –responsibility- project by the structure and shaped heavily by gender regime were pushed to the periphery of football, and it set the limits of agents’ expectations from the (football) field.