Female Professional Athletes in Morocco: Confronting Gender Stereotypes

Abstract

This work argues that the physical experience of an athletic woman is shaped by the arduous labours of her gender identity construction. Furthermore, the features of this experience are created by the social and cultural environment, which depicts the female body with a specific template and inevitable roles. Secondly, the female body's penetration of a field that assumes strength, toughness, and ‘virility,’ leads to a collision with social representations that stigmatise the woman's body and the idea that she is somehow incorrectly performing her gender, leaving her in a state of constant negotiation with her body as both a biological female and as a performance athlete. The study seeks to discern the foundations of this tension experienced by Moroccan female athletes, as a magnified dimension of the cultural transformations and contradictions that Moroccan society as a whole is currently undergoing.