IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ctwqxx/v41y2020i5p842-859.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Fighting for the right to play: women’s football and regime-loyal resistance in Saudi Arabia

Author

Listed:
  • Charlotte Lysa

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarship on women and social change in Saudi Arabia through the case of female football players in Riyadh. Officially, there has been no women’s football in the kingdom, but beneath the surface women have been playing for more than a decade. The women are actively promoting and engaging in change and women’s opportunities to practise sport by building organisations, creating awareness, and negotiating norms and regulations. They are not in opposition to the regime, but supportive of reforms in favour of increased rights for women, while seeing conservative elements in the society as their opponents and the royal family as their allies. They are thus engaging in what O’Brian and Li termed ‘rightful resistance’, by deploying the language of the rulers to express their perspectives and aims, and are engaged in a three-party game with the rulers and conservatives, where divisions within the state and elite allies matter greatly.

Suggested Citation

  • Charlotte Lysa, 2020. "Fighting for the right to play: women’s football and regime-loyal resistance in Saudi Arabia," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(5), pages 842-859, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:41:y:2020:i:5:p:842-859
    DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2020.1723075
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2020.1723075
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01436597.2020.1723075?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Naif Albujulaya & Clare Stevinson, 2023. "Exercise Promotion in Saudi Arabia: Understanding Personal, Environmental, and Social Determinants of Physical Activity Participation and Well-Being," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(4), pages 1-13, February.
    2. Huda Al Mulhem & Khadija El Alaoui & Maura A. E. Pilotti, 2023. "A Sustainable Academic Journey in the Middle East: An Exploratory Study of Female College Students’ Self-Efficacy and Perceived Social Support," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(2), pages 1-15, January.
    3. Maryam Aldossari & Thomas Calvard, 2022. "The Politics and Ethics of Resistance, Feminism and Gender Equality in Saudi Arabian Organizations," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 181(4), pages 873-890, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:41:y:2020:i:5:p:842-859. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ctwq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.