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ACFC: Not Even a Women’s Football Club?

July 8, 2021 by

I pulled the above screenshot from Angel City FC’s “our story” page. How could anyone involved in marketing think “we’re not even a women’s football club” is an OK thing to put on the website for a women’s football club?

Reading this sentence, I recalled a year I spent working at a women’s college in Virginia — this place had no women’s studies program and was run by people who had internalized misogyny and racism so very deeply that the students went into revolt — I remember one student taking the mic at a town hall and telling the college president “You are a women’s college that is ashamed of the fact that it is a women’s college.” When I read “not even a women’s football club,” I remembered the hurt in that student’s voice.

I feel really hurt by this language. It contradicts the club’s too-good-to-be-true branding. Supporters like myself also feel it telegraphs the betrayal we are experiencing as we witness the club reproduce the patriarchal privilege which has marginalized women coaches in the game.

Lots of people new to feminist work struggle with the idea of women-centered organizations and structures, and are also challenged by what it means to center a practice in women and to also practice inclusion within these women-centered spaces. You can’t practice inclusion as a feminist if you hold onto white supremacist, homophobic, transphobic ideas about who and what a woman is—so really digging into feminist work always includes a confrontation with the way the term “woman” is defined. That’s HARD work and it is not a given that people in women’s sports have gotten any real training in that. That is just ONE zone of difficulty particular to feminist work in a women’s centered organization. There are others, like: confronting and working through the degree to which traits associated with toxic masculinity are treated in our society as hallmarks of professionalism and authority: women can and do buy into that system. Another: the sense that because your thing is centered in women, it will be valued less by the world at large. You actually have to accept some parts of that because the work you do is a direct challenge to patriarchal systems of value.

So, fans are nervous.

From where I sit, it looks like some of the people running ACFC are suffering from gendered forms of confusion and ambivalence — how else to understand the mixed signal combo of “not even a women’s football club” and the ultra femme crest and salmon pink ACFC has chosen for itself?

Good god ACFC please strip every layer of apology for the fact that the club is a women’s club from your discourse. And remember that you do not need to feminize the visual iconography of the club to remind people that the club is a women’s club. As the USWNT has shown us again and again and again and again and again and again and again: a great women’s team appeals to sports fans. Women are sports fans. So are other people! And it is really, really fun to experience an alignment between one’s love for the sport and one’s commitment to women. I will never ever forget the feeling that came over me in the stands at the World Cup final, when I understood that the USWNT fan section was changing “equal pay.” NEVER. I have never in my life felt so in love with the game as in that moment. The politics of women’s sports is really dense and intense: it is always best to run towards the white hot fire of that intensity than away from it.

I am guessing that ACFC folks were going for Barça’s “mes que un club” vibe, but good god I WILL WORK FOR YOU FULL TIME if you need an English professor to tell you how to communicate that spirit without treating the women of women’s football as a problem that must be transcended! I will come down there and give you all an intro to women’s studies course! I’m ready to retire from the University of California and make it my job to save you from yourselves because I love this sport and want very much to love my home team.

You cannot market women’s sports as a cause. You have to actually get the cause, and then build your brand around that. Horse. Then cart.


Note: Almost immediately after I posted this, some readers expressed anger on twitter about the lack of a non-binary framework in my writing here. Most people who read me here (and on twitter) have been reading my work for years and I’ve earned their trust (this blog normally sees only a handful of visitors a day). But of course people who are just seeing this have zero reason to trust me on anything.

When I say that in feminist work in women’s centered spaces the category woman should be engaged critically, this is what I mean: it should not be weaponized as we see in trans-phobic legislative violence we are seeing conducted in the name of protecting women’s sports. Women’s sports itself structurally embodies the problem of not only the gender binary, but of an apparatus that enforces radical gender segregation. This leaves no space for non-binary athletes. BUT, and this is a big one: athletes have a really interesting history of defying binarized structures and making space for non-binary athletes. People play across this line all the time and there is a rich practice of making this space within women’s sports. That’s the version of the game I most love.

I apologize to readers who experienced the above as harmfully oblivious to the violence of the gender binary and all of its enforcing structures.

One person criticizing me said that they’d read the ACFC statement as expressing non-binary possibilities. I champion that optimism and would be ecstatic to learn that this is the club’s aim. Perhaps I should apologize to all readers here for my cynicism!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Outer Limit: More Notes on Losers

June 24, 2019 by

Cameroon’s performances in the group matches hinted at the possibility that they might explore the outer limits of the possible. Every game they’ve played in this tournament has been characterized by the sense that anything might happen. They played the edge until it wasn’t playable.

They lost to the Netherlands (3-1) in a match that had the audience riveted. The pace and intensity of that game was glorious. I saw players race around the pitch with a tornado like intensity. They were really good at loosening the ball from their opponent’s intention and exploiting the chaotic episodes of a match. Canada shut them out (3-0), but Cameroon fought from start to finish. They made Canada work. They beat New Zealand (2-1) in a barn-burner, scoring on literally the last touch of the match. One of their players was stretchered off the field at the end of the match: she had collapsed from exhaustion.

At the group stage, they played by tearing the game open — they can appear very emotional but that emotion doesn’t necessarily mean they are out of control. I think they like discombobulating their opponents —  some teams work like that. They’ll push — literally — and how you perform against them has a lot to do with how you respond to the provocation. I don’t think any of their opponents (even the ones that beat them) really played “their” game. It felt like Cameroon was authoring these matches, even from the losing side.

England’s first goal was the direct result of Cameroon’s mistake: Ejangue, in a scramble in front of the goal, kicked the ball into the keeper’s hands — a miserable mistake — Houghton converted the indirect free-kick. Cameroon seemed to feel the call against them was somehow not fair — I would say it was more humiliating than unjust and that the refusal to acknowledge this mistake was a very bad sign.

England scored again just as VAR-enhanced extra-time wound down: the goal was initially waved off as off-side but then awarded after VAR review corrected an indisputably bad call. Cameroon nearly stopped playing; for a good bit, they refused to kick-off.

photo debating the ref.png

Apparently, after all that, at half time, Cameroon’s coach, Alain Djeumfa, told players that the referee wanted England to win.

THEN, at the start of the second half, the truly incredible Nchout Ajara scored — only to have VAR take that goal back because a sliver of her heel (her back was to the goal) had crossed the line. The validity of that call is debatable.

The misery that ensued made me think of the following: When you get a red card, you have to leave the field — not just the field of play. You have to remove yourself from the game entirely. This happens because there is a real risk of fighting if that player doesn’t go to the locker room. It is a very, very bad idea to let a struggling team that feels like they’ve been cheated stand on the field contemplating the injustice of a bad decision while referees commune with the VAR apparatus. A better team, a more grounded team, a team with a stable situation, a team that trusted the refereeing might use that time to center themselves. But this team was convinced the fix was in.*

Cameroon’s coach was dropped into this position in January, after the team’s head coach and goalkeeping coach were unceremoniously fired. Why? Federation politics? Is it related to the political situation in Cameroon (Anglophone regions are threatening to secede)? Is is corruption? Were they cleaning house or the opposite? I would love to know the answer to that.

In any case, Cameroon’s players were not concerned by the question as to why none of them were given red cards — an elbow to the face, a cynical tackle which might have broken an ankle, the shove of the referee’s back, spitting on an opponent, refusing to get off the pitch at half time — the players had been tempting that fate from the start of the game and they were all spared.

And for all but the opening minutes of the second half, England did not let themselves get sucked in by the game’s drama. They very nearly paid for the few minutes they lost that focus.

People who haven’t spend much time with women athletes may find that Cameroon’s combination of attitude, playing style and tactic challenges their ideas about the women’s game. People who only watch the most intensely regulated and produced versions of the sport might have been shocked by what they saw on television. But people who watch a lot of the sport and who have played it will know that things like this can happen — in a way, the game is actually always threatening to fall apart and it takes a lot of effort on the part of match officials, event producers, coaches, support staff and players to give viewers a good game.

When a team starts to feel that the game is fixed, and that all is hopeless, they have to actively fight off the desire to stop playing. So very many national teams in the women’s game must struggle with this.

We might judge the Cameroonian side harshly, but we can do that with compassion—and perhaps use this moment to appreciate the losers who have lost well — to send some good wishes to teams like Nigeria, Thailand and especially to Brazil, who lost their match against France last night. An incredible constellation of stars are rotating out of the sky.

 

 

*a side note: in a very, very corrupt sport we should pause and reflect before dismissing players for feeling this way.

Filed Under: 2019 World Cup, FIFA, Football, soccer Tagged With: , ,

Cris Bierrenbach: The Uniform Shot

February 3, 2014 by

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The artist Cris Bierrenbach dressed in diverse uniforms, photographed herself, and then fired shots at the self-portraits, defacing each. “Fired” (2013) uses the different meanings of that word to provide a disturbing comment on labor, gender and precarity. Wedged into this project is a photograph of the artist in the uniform of Brazil’s national team. A given: women footballers in Brazil are vulnerable in the same way that ordinary women are vulnerable. That is not something you would assume if a male artist made this gesture to the national team. This work has me thinking about the relationship between gender and violence in experiences of/stories about the men’s game, and the violence that women encounter in the world as the background (the given) against which they play.  The artist is from São Paulo.

Filed Under: Art, Football, Sex Politics Tagged With: ,

Jaskirt Dhaliwal’s Anti-Spectacular Portraits

February 3, 2014 by

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Jaskirt Dhaliwal’s photographs are very similar to those I’ve posted earlier by Andrew Esiebo and by Moira Lovell. In researching contemporary art about this sport, I’ve found huge differences between work engaging the men’s game and the women’s. Work engaging the men’s game tends to address men’s football as spectacle – thus Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s cinematic project Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, Jürgen Teller’s film of himself watching Germany lose to Brazil (Germany 0: Brazil 2), Harun Faroki’s Deep Play. One can see Lyle Ashton Harris’s project as a meditation on the politics of the football spectacle (e.g. Blow Up, see earlier post). The televisual spectacle, the crowds, the iconic figure at the center of it all – this is the subject of art about the men’s game. Women footballers are overwhelmingly isolated by the artist’s camera – rarely pictured as a team – and they are frequently photographed in street clothes, off the pitch, in ordinary and fairly anonymous settings. As Dhaliwal writes on her website, “The idea that some of the nation’s best female footballers could pass you on the street and you would not know them is a telling fact in a world where male footballers are ranked as celebrities.” Artists make this statement over and over again about women footballers. Nobody knows who they are. The woman sitting next to you on the train could be an international player, and you’d never know it. You’d never know it because you have to work hard to learn who these women are – trekking out to minor pitches in the outskirts of the metropolis to sit with a few hundred folks watching an untelevised match played between largely amateur athletes. That’s where you’ll find the women Dhaliwal photographed; their images are not splashed across the tabloids, broadcast on your televisions, or peopling advertisements for everything under the sun.

Filed Under: Art, Football, Queer Sport Spectacles Tagged With: ,
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