Introduction

Abstract

The Hispanic Countries volume of the Women’s Football in Latin America collection conveys to the global English audience a diversity of first-class research on Latin American women’s football that has arisen through the last ten years, with an emphasis on the Spanish-speaking nations across the continent. With chapters written by scholars and experts with a deep familiarity of the varied backgrounds in which women’s football is played and subsisted across Latin America, they look at the social and historical connotations of the embodied representations of gender differences that have been profoundly rooted in the history of Latin American women and football. The contributors’ account on how, in a variety of ways, Latin American women have created places in-between among severe macho structures, to establish and play their football. Furthermore, the studies in this volume show that these patriarchal arrangements are entrenched by intersectional inequalities of race, geography and social class. The researchers bring evidence to reveal that these intersectional oppressions act together to underpin each other, making the work of denouncing, disentangling, and overpowering them a craft that entails constant theoretic and critical refinement energies to expose the numerous levels of domination that girls and women face within these macho structures of football in Latin America. The narratives in this book irrefutably offer an all-inclusive awareness into Latin American women’s football, from historical developments to earlier and existing social challenges, to everyone who reads them. As revealed in each chapter, the football field is surely one of the key spaces in Latin America that can be used to build a fairer gender order in countries that are so diverse but share a strict patriarchal order.