Womens Club Football in Brazil and Colombia

The first womens football book on Latin America centring the perspectives of players brings rare interview material that cuts through the clichs to uncover the lived reality of women footballers. It includes the first large-scale survey of South American women footballers views into dialogue with institutional and media perspectives. The early chapters consider the backdrop Latin American women footballers operate in, a media and institutional panorama that privileges a heteronormative athletic femininity whilst ensuring womens football is never portrayed as anything other than an inferior version of the hegemonic (mens) game. Following this, drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in which 33 semi-structured interviews were carried out with players and institutional figures, this pioneering book foregrounds the lived reality of womens football in three strategic locations. Firstly, three months were spent in the Amazon region of Brazil where Esporte Clube Iranduba provides a fascinating alternative model for the growth of womens football. This is contrasted with Santos FC, where womens football tends to be constantly overshadowed by the presence of banal patriarchy, and finally with another fleeting glimpse of how another model is possible at Atltico Huila of Colombia, the surprise winner of the womens Copa Libertadores in 2018.