By Sarah Oxford
In a crowded chic restaurant in Bogota, I sat across from Urcela, a young woman in her mid-twenties who identified herself as class three. She had begun a master’s in sociology and gender at a prestigious public Colombian university, but had to stop for financial reasons. Her dark hair and face piercings reflected a personal protest against the spectacularly feminine image that comfortably rests in hegemonic contemporary Colombian culture. The fact that she lived outside her parent’s home as an unmarried woman also signaled that her independent thoughts manifest into actions regardless of others’ judgements.[1]
“I love Chévere,” she said after our introduction. “You’ve been?” I asked, shocked. For the first time in my six months in Colombia I was speaking to someone from the middle class who did not work in Chévere but who had been there, multiple times. She said she loves the ambiance and culture and that so many people live so closely together. She realized in her statement that the people who live there may not feel the same and looked up at me for my response. It is necessary to point out that if coloniality were in her favor, she would be conducting this research project, not me.
Despite her personal frustration with sport, which began in middle school physical education – “they made us change into shorts and show our legs, we all hated it” – she has great appreciation for programs that encourage female participation in sport. She also draws from a strong theoretical foundation in gender studies. For example, I had recently returned from Bacano where interlocutors regularly gendered sport (i.e., football for boys, roller skating for girls). Apparently, I gained a bad habit in my interviews because I used Costeño phrasing. In conversation, I mentioned the phrase girl’s sport. She paused and corrected me, asking, “what’s a girl’s sport?” I felt like I had been teleported into another world, which was often the case when crossing class boundaries.
Together we discussed the reality that social change and employing gender equity in sport is a long messy road. She noted:
I know that the girls are doing something that socially or historically girls did not do as it was reserved for men, men are implicated, especially with public space, on the courts, in the neighborhoods...Usually you see a woman in public space and her relationship with space is that it does not belong to her. And people then believe I can do with you practically what I want, or tell you what I want, because the public space is not yours (hers). I feel that [girls playing sport] is a re-appropriation of public space, and that is very cool. They are there and they are admired and observed from another point of view. So, it is not what is sought, but it is what happens. That is to say, they are only there doing something, but the spaces were not always there, or it was not organized to happen [for them] or certain things were given.
Urcela highlights the dynamic process of altering gendered space that is transformed by girls’ participation in these programs and how it can be a mechanism to engender social change beyond the idea of physical space. Although Urcela endorses the idea of the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) organization including girls and is encouraged by the social processes enacted by this inclusion which drastically contradicts social norms, she alludes to an issue that is void to the SDP organization and has remained with me from the beginning to the end of analyzing my data: the cultivation of young women’s agency in terms of overcoming normative psychological repression and physical participation. In other words, we must continually question how much control does the organization have in terms of socially including girls and young women? How much control do the female participants have in terms of their access to participation? Finally, what can the organization offer girls and young women growing up in volatile spaces if the social inclusion of girls is not an explicit goal?
[1] When I mentioned to my homestay mother that I met Urcela, she immediately and politely condemned her non-conforming way of being.