Jakiej płci są piłkarzy(n)ki? Żeński futbol i antropologia zaangażowana
What Gender Are Foosball Figurines? Women’s Soccer and Engaged Anthropology

Summary/Abstract: The article concerns the author’s “Foosball Figurines” project – a queer-feminist art intervention and a game facility created with the local community in Poznań. The project emerged following a two-years-long ethnographic research (2016-2018) about the marginalization of female football in Poland. I applied the methodology and theory of engaged anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1995) as well as action research perceived as community arts (Červinková 2012; Bishop 2015; Rakowski 2018), simultaneously subjecting these research trends to critical reflection. This article shows how an initiative that combines research and action helps to capture the voices of discriminated soccer players. This project is a response to the binary gender division and inequality in football, the symbolic violence (Bourdieu, Wacquant 2001), and the unjustified degradation experienced by the female soccer players of the Kotwica Kórnik club. In the paper herein, I put forward the thesis that football is a social lens that shows how the gender order within the Polish society is shaped.

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