From courts to bars: leisure of lesbian women in an LGBTQIAPN+ team

Abstract

Leisure as a social and cultural dimension, and as an organizer of everyday life, has been widely debated in the field of physical education. We can understand this phenomenon from various approaches, whether as a constitutional right, occupation of free time, rest, social development, among other perspectives that have been the subject of discussion. When we look at leisure from a constitutional rights perspective, we notice that historically excluded groups do not have equitable access to this right. Research that discusses leisure from the perspective of markers of difference seems to be scarce, and recent studies have demonstrated the need for works that engage with the LGBTQIAPN+ community, especially with lesbian women. Based on this gap, this article investigates how gender and sexuality shape the leisure practices of lesbian women in an LGBTQIAPN+ handball team. The research is grounded in ethnographic principles, in which the first author followed and participated in training sessions, games, tournaments, and social moments in bars with the Gaúchas team from Porto Alegre/RS, also involving field diaries, a questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. Drawing from gender and sexuality studies, the analysis of this work is supported by the experiences lived during fieldwork, giving prominence to scenes on the court and in bars, to the voices and dialogues in situations in which the lesbian women of the team participated. This set of processes indicates how gender and sexuality traverse and produce elements in/of the everyday leisure of these lesbian women. Thus, drawing on the notion of ontological politics proposed by Annemarie Mol, which understands realities as multiple and performed, gender and sexuality are analyzed as organizing elements of the leisure practices and culture of the team.