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Tafadzwa Blessing Choto is a Lecturer in the Department of Community Studies at the Midlands State University, in Gweru, Zimbabwe. He is also a final year PhD Student in the Department of Community and Social Development at the University of Zimbabwe, focusing on the gender inclusion of women in Football in Zimbabwe. He has published on football rivalry and fandom in Zimbabwe ; Gender and the politics of football admiration as well as on gendered transnational football fandom.
ABSTRACT:
“Ladies in the centre?” Exploring the experiences of female football referees in Zimbabwe
Tafadzwa Blessing Choto, Department of Community Studies – Midlands State University.
Football has been described as an active site for the construction of a masculine identities, and as a result the very presence of female football officials creates a sensitive gendered conflictive space. In the context of Zimbabwe and Africa in general there is a relatively dearth of research and literature on female football referees on which to base policy and best practices. The focus of the paper is to analyze the experiences of ten professional female football referees in Zimbabwe, a patriarchal context punctuated by “ideologies of domestication and heteronormativity” that construct the ideal female as being hetero-sexual submissive and confined to invisible domestic spaces Methodologically the paper utilizes a phenomenological qualitative research design, predominantly life history interviews that sought a deeper and naunciated understanding of the perspectives of each selected female football referees regarding their experiences and agency in navigating hegemonic gender narratives and regimes in various stages of their lives. The major argument in the paper being that football in Zimbabwe is an important site of gendered confrontation. On one hand it is a space of resistance where alternative forms of femininity are constructed that challenge dominant emphasized femininities and ultimately hegemonic patriarchy. On the other hand, it is site where hegemonic patriarchy seeks to re-asserts itself through policing the gendered performance of female football referees.
