Futbolera

Futbolera is a welcome contribution to the growing scholarship on sports in Latin America, which has only recently begun to afford attention to women's athletics. As Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel say in the book's introduction, despite clear evidence that women in the region played football and other sports for more than a century, popular memory has tended to neglect their activities. Because of the significance that Latin Americans have invested in sporting practice, this neglect has had profound consequences, not least in “serv[ing] to naturalize gender differences in society more broadly” (p. 2). Elsey and Nadel begin to provide the necessary corrective, telling the stories of many women athletes, outlining the patterns of prejudice that have marginalized women in Latin American sports history, and posing questions that scholars must take up.The authors' approach is at once geographically broad and chronologically long; the chapters, focused on Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Central America, cover much of the region and narrate the history of women's activities from late nineteenth-century physical education programs to twenty-first-century professional football teams. While acknowledging distinctive histories, the authors emphasize the fundamental consistencies that characterized women's sports across Latin America. Among these is the tight link between physical education and women's participation in sports, with the gendering of the former helping to exclude women from many organized sporting activities. As the authors say of mid-twentieth-century Brazil, “Women's increased participation in physical education was not inherently a feminist achievement,” because for women these courses focused not on sports but on “beauty” and their duties as future mothers (p. 111). Another phenomenon the authors emphasize is the importance of the press, especially its influence in narrating the meaning of women's sports, sometimes helping to normalize them and often working to discourage participation.In highlighting the importance of physical education and the press, Elsey and Nadel indicate the essential connections between the development of women's sports in the region and the history of men's activities. Of even greater importance, the authors suggest, has been the contingent nature of institutional support for women's activities, which goes a long way in explaining what they describe as a sports history characterized by “brief periods of effervescence followed by long periods of apparent inactivity” (p. 245). Thus, when institutional actors saw advantage in promoting women's sports—for example, to promote diplomatic efforts—athletes were likely to receive support, but that support tended to vanish in the quotidian moments between international athletic events or if athletes demanded benefits or organizational responsibility. Utilizing the periodical press and key interviews, the authors provide numerous examples of this pattern, from the collapse of a successful football league in Mexico when its players demanded payment to the case of the Chilean national team, which slid into dormancy in the mid-2010s despite a recent record of success.The comparative approach allows Elsey and Nadel to demonstrate that the importance of physical education and the press and the contingent relationship between women athletes and male-dominated institutions have been more than the product of particular circumstances—they have been patterns of experience. The approach also presents the authors with challenges, as they acknowledge. The first is that of coverage, for as ambitious as the authors are they cannot cover the entire region or period in one volume, and though some sections touch on sports like basketball and volleyball, as well as fans, coaches, and organizers, the authors' clearest interest is in women who played football.The book's breadth also means that there is an uneven quality to the authors' treatment of the subjects, people, and places that they do cover. There is great depth and detail in certain sections, especially in the two strongest chapters, on women who played football in mid-twentieth-century Brazil despite official prohibition and on the “boom and bust” of Mexican women's football in the 1960s and 1970s. Other sections feel less well developed. Thus, for example, how football has been situated within the larger landscape of women's athletics is left implicit here; one would like a sense of how futboleras and other athletes interacted with one another, especially given the transgressive character of women's football and Latin Americans' much readier acceptance of women swimmers, runners, and volleyball players. Similarly, while in some sections the authors draw from an array of documentary sources, other sections depend on a limited set: in covering Brazilian sports in the 1920s and Mexican physical education in the 1930s, they rely on a single publication for each topic.This is a reminder of Futbolera's most significant contribution. Elsey and Nadel have not designed the book to be an authoritative treatment but a beginning; they have afforded readers a framework for understanding women's experience with sports, a set of questions to pursue, and spaces both geographic and substantive to fill. As such, Futbolera is an invaluable contribution to the study of Latin American sports and, therefore, to understanding the region's history beyond the playing field

Football · Latin Americans · Neglect · Pedagogy · Physical education · Political science · Prejudice (legal term) · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Physical Education and Sports Studies · Psychology · Sports and Physical Education Studies · Sports, Gender, and Society

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