Football short stories what do Brazilian and Argentine women write?

Abstract

This study proposes a reading of five football short stories written by women in Brazil and Argentina, examining the formal role the game occupies within the narrative architecture of these works. The corpus is organized according to the categories of intrinsic and extrinsic demands proposed by Edônio Alves Nascimento, which distinguish between narratives in which football directly structures the action and those in which the game operates in a displaced, mediated, or discursive manner. The first group comprises stories in which football organizes the narrative scene and its conflicts, such as “Amistoso,” by Rachel de Queiroz; “Fútbol era el de antes,” by Ana María Shua; and “O sucesso,” by Adriana Lisboa. The second group includes texts in which the game does not function as the central sporting action but instead emerges through memory, orality, media representation, or fandom, as in “La camaradería del deporte,” by Selva Almada, and “Matosas,” by Esther Cross. By projecting female voices onto football, these stories problematize scenes of violence, forms of surveillance both on and off the field, and the gender asymmetries that permeate the relationships depicted.