 I just have to start by saying that I wasn't actually going to come out here dribbling because I thought I'd be too nervous, which I was. And then at the last minute, I thought it would be cool to enter juggling. So an hour ago, I ran across the street and I thought, where am I going to get a football? And there was a waiter standing outside the restaurant and I ran up to him and I asked him, do you have a football or does anyone have a football? And he said, hold on one minute. And he ran inside and he went back into the kitchen and spoke to the chef, spoke to someone back there. He was outside of the kitchen with a football in his hand and he handed it to me and he said, go, go, go, go. So I said, I stand here tonight before you, representing the voice of one among many female football players in Brazil attempting to carve a space for ourselves within a historically male sport. I also stand here as a carrier of many of these voices and it's a privilege to be here. I first came to Brazil eight years ago to play professional football for Santos and it quickly became evident that the nation of football was not the nation of women's football. We wore the jerseys of the men's team from seven years prior. We walked 45 minutes to get to practice, no bus, often tired feet by the time we got there. We stayed up late at night washing our uniforms by hand in the outdoor sinks. We were fed different food than the men's team. The only thing we had in common with the men's team was our team name. My teammate shared stories with me of the struggles they faced to be accepted as female players and I soon learned the word preconceito or prejudice around the women's game. Although the ban that prohibited women from playing the sport in Brazil was lifted in 1979, female players continued to struggle with cultural stigma. Female players were marginalized and discriminated against, marked as other. Female bodies acting in this space were seen as gender deviant and thus met with lots of cultural disapproval. But recently we've been seeing a shift starting to occur. The women's game in Brazil is starting to move in from the margins to the mainstream. Silver medal at the last two Olympics, Marta, the world's best player, a Brazilian, has now become a national icon. New women's pro teams springing up across the nation, media coverage increasing, fathers encouraging daughters to play, more fans. I went back to Santos recently and walked down the street with our team jacket on and I had men running up to me asking for my autograph. The same streets where we were once entirely invisible or worse yet laughed at and trivialized. It appears as though women's entrance into this historically male space has started to dislodge gender stereotypes and we see signs of progress. But when we look more closely, we see something else occurring. As women are being accepted into this space, they're also being expected to take on a new image or rather a traditional image of femininity. I reconnected with a lot of my old teammates recently and was surprised to see that the entire team had grown their hair long. Even Fabiana, who always had short hair. And I turned and I said, what happened? Did somebody tell you to grow your hair long? And she said, no, no, I started growing it long and the other girls started encouraging me saying that it looked really pretty and that I should keep letting it grow because it would be good for the image of our sport. She said the club even tried to get us to wear tighter uniforms but it didn't work because we couldn't move our arms to run. So although the cultural stigma and so I said what's happening and what's happening is the women's game in Brazil is being feminized. We're in only a feminine version of the game is being accepted and only this female player is being allowed inside if she recreates her identity in this manner. So although the cultural stigma is starting to fade, the exclusion of the preconceito is reconfiguring itself and imposing itself on the only place left, the female body. The body of the female athlete is being policed. It's being shaped, regulated and controlled by the intensification of feminine expectations. So although we see new roles, gender roles emerging here, old gender norms and ideas are finding ways to persist under the surface. Shall we conclude then that women's football in Brazil is not serving as a source of empowerment for female players? Well no, not exactly because the interesting thing about oppression is that it's always rife with contradictions, tensions, ambiguities and resistance. Female players are experiencing their bodies and identities in complex ways and developing a diverse array of strategies for navigating these tensions. She expresses agency through the labor that she exerts and embodies on the field and she develops a sense of solidarity with those around her. But she works just as hard simultaneously at another form of bodily labor, performing the appropriate balance of femininity within this still suspiciously masculine arena. Hair, nails, gestures become her tools. She crosses her legs for the interview but not on the bench. She wears eyeliner for the televised game but not off the field. I recently turned to one of my teammates and I asked her and I said, what's happening? The image with the image of the game is shifting around women's football. She said to me, yeah, Katie, we're taking on a more feminine image because it's helping us. It's helping our sport and us become more popular. But she said, this femininity doesn't necessarily say anything about me. We use it. I use it too. But what are the sacrifices involved here? How much identity is being lost? How much exploitation is present? The deeper structures aren't changing so the individual maneuvers around them and changes herself. Well, at what point do we need to start thinking about changes in the deeper structures? Changes that will truly loosen up space for individual expression. It starts now and it starts here by problematizing our thinking on gender indifference. And this is why I'm here. This is the Gehres Project and now you're part of the dialogue. Thanks.