Gender, Nationalism, and the Politics of Sport: Turkey's Women's National Volleyball Team as Contested Terrain

This article examines how the Islamist far-right's politically divisive targeting of Turkey's women's national volleyball team and its LGBTQ player Ebrar Karakurt rendered the team a contested political terrain in Turkey. By adopting a cultural–dramaturgical approach to sport and building on research on women's sport and nationalism, I will theorize how the intersection of gender, nationalism, and sport is configured when the international success of female athletes makes their national representative status a point of contention between competing national narratives within a single nation. I will demonstrate that the resulting configuration of sport, gender, and nationalism can provide a semiprotected arena for female and queer athletes in the face of divisive targeting when (1) athletes uphold their national representative status, (2) the salience of nationalism holds for contesting groups, and (3) athletes achieve national glory in the international arena. Through the case of Turkey, I will show how dramaturgies at the intersection of gender, sport, and nationalism simultaneously enforce and disrupt boundaries of national belonging.