Focusing on queer-identified amateur football teams, this article investigates the potentials of the mobilities and alliances of gender non-conforming footballing people to disrupt the seemingly effortless structure of the football field. While football is arguably one of the sports with the strongest discriminatory attitudes toward gender non-conforming people, it has also become a site of resistance for queers in Turkey as of 2015. How political opposition groups relate to the football field, which is mostly considered as a male-dominant and heterosexualized space where social norms are reproduced, are classified into three groups in my research: resistance through, against, and for football. I give particular attention to the category “resistance for football” as a distinctive way for gender non-conforming people to inhabit the field. I discuss how the link between sexual and spatial orientations shapes the domain of what a body can do, both in terms of normativity and capacity, and I explore what these teams offer in order to exceed spatial and sexual boundaries. Lastly, I present recent queer interventions in the value system of the game through which I reflect upon the concept of “queer commons” and the processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities.
The assumption of sports being a natural and fair competition area has been challenged by scholars and athlete-activists in the last decades. This article, focusing on three periods in the history of -the agones in Ancient Greece, the birth and early development of modern sports, and contemporary sports relation-offers a brief historical analysis of how fairness has been conceptualized in different ways throughout the centuries. By doing that, it sheds light on the changes in the (self-)making of sporting moral subject over time. Drawing upon the broader anthropological debates which problematize the objectivity and neutrality claims of ethics, the article calls for a non-normative and contextualized approach to ethics within the sports field so that we may reach a better understanding of how sporting moral subjects navigate, negotiate, and challenge the existing ethical codes of behavior in modern sports. ÖzSporun doğal ve adil bir rekabet alanı olduğu varsayımı, son yıllarda aktivist sporcular ve sosyal bilimciler tarafından sorgulanmıştır. Bu makale, Antik Yunan'daki yarışmalara (agon), modern sporun başlangıcına ve günümüz spor ilişkilerine odaklanarak sporcu etik öznenin (öz-)inşasında zaman içerisinde yaşanan dönüşümlere ışık tutmaktadır. Etiğin nesnellik ve tarafsızlık iddialarını sorunsallaştıran antropolojik tartışmalardan yararlanan makale, spor ve etik ilişkisine normatif olmayan ve bağlamı dikkate alan bir yaklaşım çağrısında bulunmaktadır. Bu sayede, sporcu etik öznenin modern sporda var olan etik davranış kodlarıyla ne tür müzakereler ve meydan okumalar yoluyla ilişkilendiğine dair kavrayışımızı geliştirebileceğimiz savunulmaktadır.
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