“El fútbol era una cosa de machos”: Las masculinidades en las “fut-ciones” peruanas contemporáneas

Abstract

In “Atiguibas”—a short story originally published in 1992—Peruvian writer Julio Ramón Ribeyro describes the soccer atmosphere he experienced in Lima as a child in the late 1930s. The narrator portrays the old National Stadium, where lower-class soccer fans used to eat, drink, and smoke what walking vendors offered in the tribunes while watching all types of games. These spectators were all men, the narrator adds, for “in this time, no woman attended games at the stadium. Soccer was just for machos.” (Ribeyro, 1995, p. 271, my translation) Eight decades later, things seem to have changed in Peruvian society as the number of female soccer fans attending games has increased exponentially in recent years. However, regarding the representation of soccer in Peruvian literature and cinema, this macho scenario is still similar to what Ribeyro describes in his short story. If we examine Peruvian contemporary films and novels that use soccer as their main topic, we can see that this sport is still just for machos. Nevertheless, the macho (an individual embodying what Australian anthropologist Raewyn W. Connell has defined as “hegemonic masculinity” in diverse publications) is not represented through a monolithic perspective but rather it has multiple faces: the “pendejo,” an immoral man who utilizes the corruption in soccer for his own individualistic benefit; the foreigner who arrives in Peru to make businesses by tempting a talented but illiterate Andean young man with unrealistic propositions; the old man who, despite not occupying an hegemonic position, believes that he can humiliate other men just because he possesses a knowledge about soccer that they lack; among others. Additionally, these pages will show that despite the predominant representation in these narratives of what the Peruvian elites conceive as an ideal version of what a man is, other configurations of masculinities emerge in these texts as well: the outcast who is ridiculed because he cannot practice, understand, enjoy and benefit from the beautiful game; the marginal who cannot climb socially and is discriminated due to his dark skin color and low socioeconomic class; the complicit servant who applauds and supports the abuse hegemonic men exercise on other men and women.