Bloomsbury Academic Street Football, Gender and Muslim Youth in the Netherlands: Girls Who Kick Back (Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality)

Based on original ethnographic research in a multicultural neighbourhood in The Hague (the Netherlands), this open access book gives detailed insights into the challenges, negotiations, and resistances girls with Moroccan-Dutch and Muslim backgrounds face in the world of street football, one of the fastest growing sports in the world. Kathrine van den Bogert traces the experiences of teenage girls who play football in the public playgrounds in their neighbourhood, as well as in a girls’ football competition the girls have set up themselves: Football Girls United. She addresses how race, ethnicity, religion, and gender are entangled in the access to and construction of the public street football spaces, such as football courts, urban playgrounds, and public squares. While often Muslim girls in football are stigmatised or excluded based on their religious and ethnic backgrounds, this book emphasises their street football practices as critical and creative ways of inclusion and belonging, both in football and in wider Dutch society. By focussing on a domain largely absent in religion and gender research, namely sport, this book brings to the forth new and innovative perspectives on religion, Islam, gender, and difference.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Review "Kathrine van den Bogert brilliantly explores the relationship between space, embodied practices and belonging in this cutting-edge study of Moroccan-Dutch Muslim girls playing street football. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this book empathetically shows how these girls navigate spaces for public sports that are gendered, racialized and based on secular norms, and how they 'kick back' to racism and sexism through their playful, performative acts." --Margaretha A. van Es, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands About the Author Kathrine van den Bogert is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.