Drawing on embodied experiences from the football pitch, Fisher uses movement, muscle memory, and narrative to discuss navigating a shifting terrain of femininity under the pressures of neoliberal growth. She uses somatic activism to question the enclosure of the market on the women’s game as felt on the flesh and its impact on movements and the connections between us. Powerful mechanisms of conformity take hold and gendered scripts dominate as players are pressured to prove their talent via football labor and their femininity via bodily labor to garner resources and opportunities. Discrepancies between representation and lived experience, what are the implications for agency, self-expression, solidarity and collective belonging? How could a look beyond the market-state to the embodied commons offer routes to emancipation and how we can conceive of a shared understanding about other ways to be together.
Part of Episode XVIII: “Body Next to Body. Gathering Masses in Sport Events”
With Z. Blace, Caitlin Davis Fisher, Michael Gabriel & Florian Malzacher
4. July 2022 – Olympiapark Munich / Germany
In the frame of „Soft Democracies“, a project by raumlaborberlin as part of the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympics
Biography
Caitlin Fisher is a queer artist, community organizer and trainer. She was a professional football player (Brazil, Sweden, USA) before turning to embodied movements from the pitch as tools for somatic activism focused on gender, LGBTQIA+ rights and the commons. She co-founded a gender justice collective in Brazil with her teammates and has spent years as an organizer in the labor union movement of female football players. Now based in Berlin, her work currently involves exploring processes of deceleration through movement research and dance in relation to the felt sense and listening with technologies of mutual care and solidarity. She is a trainer of Emotional CPR, a peer-led approach to mental health support and recovery and is working as part of the Social Pleasure Center community project in Berlin amidst intersectional practices for community connection, peer-to-peer support, and collective emancipation.
Links
- ccSPORT - translocal connective for Creative+Critical work in/on/about the field of SPORT
- Caitlin Fisher: „FIFA’s turf debate part of soccer’s long-standing gender problem”
- “Female game-changers in a field bent out of shape”
- ‘'Female Warriors' are battling for equality on the soccer fields of Brazil”
- “The Struggle for Female Soccer Equality in Brazil”
