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CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY
A Performative
Feel for the
Game
How Meaningful Sports Shape
Gender, Bodies, and Social Life
Trygve B. Broch
Cultural Sociology
Series Editors
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Center for Cultural Sociology
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Ron Eyerman
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
David Inglis
Department of Sociology,
Philosophy and Anthropology
University of Exeter
Exeter, Devon, UK
Philip Smith
Yale University
New Haven, CT, USA
Cultural sociology is widely acknowledged as one of the most vibrant
areas of inquiry in the social sciences across the world today. The
Palgrave Macmillan Series in Cultural Sociology is dedicated to the prop-
osition that deep meanings make a profound difference in social life.
Culture is not simply the glue that holds society together, a crutch for
the weak, or a mystifying ideology that conceals power. Nor is it just
practical knowledge, dry schemas, or know how. The series demonstrates
how shared and circulating patterns of meaning actively and inescapa-
bly penetrate the social. Through codes and myths, narratives and icons,
rituals and representations, these culture structures drive human action,
inspire social movements, direct and build institutions, and so come
to shape history. The series takes its lead from the cultural turn in the
humanities, but insists on rigorous social science methods and aims at
empirical explanations. Contributions engage in thick interpretations but
also account for behavioral outcomes. They develop cultural theory but
also deploy middle-range tools to challenge reductionist understandings
of how the world actually works. In so doing, the books in this series
embody the spirit of cultural sociology as an intellectual enterprise.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14945
Trygve B. Broch
A Performative Feel
for the Game
How Meaningful Sports Shape Gender,
Bodies, and Social Life
Trygve B. Broch
Inland Norway University
of Applied Sciences
Elverum, Norway
Cultural Sociology
ISBN 978-3-030-35128-1 ISBN 978-3-030-35129-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: imagedepotpro/E+/Getty Images
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Camilla
Series Editor Preface
When teaching about sex and gender the sociologist will typically look
to the anthropological corpus. Examples from cultures where they “do
things differently” are used to decouple biological sex from socially con-
structed gender roles. The Indian hijra and the Navajo nadle are familiar
exhibits in this cosmopolitan tour. With their assistance, western classifi-
cations and behavioral norms that have been inculcated since childhood
are suddenly rendered arbitrary and fungible in the minds of students.
Assumptions are destabilized and, normatively, a space is opened for
rethinking gender, power, and patriarchy.
In this book Broch ingeniously turns the method upon sports sociol-
ogy. It is not our students who are in need of the jolt that might lead to
creative, critical rethinking but the academic field. Over recent decades,
the sport/gender research nexus has assembled a remarkably impres-
sive and internally consistent body of work of monumental proportions.
Hegemonic masculinity is enacted in sport. The sporting values of phys-
ical prowess, toughness, and endurance are coded as male. Sport in turn
reproduces the gender order. Women’s sports are devalued. Women who
excel in sport are trivialized or seen as deviant and dangerous. They vio-
late the cultural codes of womanhood. Few could disagree that this is
the approximate lie of the land. But repetition has somehow naturalized
and familiarized what should be made anthropologically strange. The
connection between the cultural codes of sport and those of the gen-
der order is arbitrary, not necessary. The point is often made but case
study after case study seems to underline in a somewhat formulaic way
vii
viii SERIES EDITOR PREFACE
how they are irrevocably glued together. Now it is the sociological com-
munity that conflates the sports code with the gender code, much as in
everyday life sex and gender are fused. For habitual thinking to end they
need to be taken apart.
Broch’s exhibit is not an “exotic” culture that can be easily seen and
dismissed as “other” or as a dying anachronism outside of modernity but
the prosperous, Caucasian European nation of Norway. He shows how
in the case of Norwegian handball the sports/gender code is flipped.
Women embody resilience, determination, and the capacity to take pain.
It is the men and the boys who are critiqued as wimps, who lack tough-
ness, and who fail to measure up. They have to learn to play like girls.
This is no telescopic reading of discourses but rather a study of how
shared circulating meanings penetrate from the media sphere down to
everyday life. In a deep ethnography of two youth teams Broch shows
just how sport and gender are reconfigured in the micro-details of every-
day life: In ponytails and sports tape; the minibus and the locker room;
in bragging and sandbagging. And if he shows sport is all about gender
he also shows it is not just about gender. It is also a realm of drama, per-
formance, fun, creativity, effort, and excellence. There is an element of
the sacred and of enchantment. All too often sports sociology has rushed
to make sense of the negative social consequences of sports. In so doing,
it has run straight past the socially relevant, sociologically fascinating
meanings that offer motivation and enchantment in the life world. Let’s
face it, reproducing the gender order is probably not the reason anybody
shows up for training on a wet Thursday night. So why do they? This
book has many of the answers.
Gender/sports sociology has been tremendously successful but it has
become predictable and complacent. Like an aging Olympian it is rest-
ing on its laurels. By turning away from the canon of sports sociology
with its somewhat predictable citation patterns and towards the foun-
dational resources of more general cultural sociology, Broch is able to
see and theorize things afresh. And so this book is more than a study
of Norwegian women’s handball. It is a wakeup call to a sleeping giant:
Now is the time to lace up those sneakers and get back to work.
New Haven, CT Philip Smith

October 2019
Preface
The project presented in this book started in 2007 when I was writing
my master’s thesis and later advanced on to the Ph.D. program at the
Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH). Twice I had traveled to UC
Berkeley where courses in feminist theory had tested my naïve imagi-
nary, and Messner and Sabo’s work had brought to life the reproduc-
tion of the gender order of sports. Doing my Ph.D., this perspective was
cultivated in the sociology sessions held by my supervisor Kari Fasting
and her colleague Mari Kristin Sisjord. At NIH, they made an impact
and effort to inspire critical thinking and acting. As a result, my criti-
cal Ph.D. study was presented at the 2009 ISSA conference at Utrecht.
A “Norwegian Big Bang Theory” of the explosive sounds of men’s
handball. A hand in the crowd was raised and its owner asking, “what
if the women playing the game are also aggressive and violent warriors?
Is the gender order still rebuilt?” Yes, I answered him and in a critical
and Connellist fashion I was right. A year later in Oslo, anthropologist
Noel Dyck criticized my analyses in a very similar and polite way, but I
kept returning to my critical theories and the same reply. Yet, very slowly,
these kind questions and indeed my own repetitive answers were becom-
ing more and more problematic. Inspiring conversations with supervisor
and handball enthusiast Lars Tore Ronglan on sport’s micro dimensions
and with Peter Dahlén about media and mythmaking had me wondering
about alternative readings of handball and gender.
The project moved on from media studies to ethnography. In the
field, at the youth sports arena, social life was complicated. As the Ph.D.
ix
x PREFACE
period was winding down, cultural theory embracing ambivalence was

knocking on the project door. I had started rethinking. The compara-
tive potentials in studying both men and women athletes in the media,
boys and girls at the arena, had severely shattered my beliefs in the clarity
of critical theory. I had been wrong and needed to find the right tools
to advance. Spring 2013, I returned to the USA and to the University
of Notre Dame where a sharp and kind reader helped me advance my
thinking and all the same told me to finish the Ph.D. and then look
ahead to cultural sociology. Thanks to the UND Department of
Sociology and Terence McDonnell’s workshop, I had a great time before
I followed Lyn Spillman’s advice to return and defend my Ph.D. at NIH,
October 2014.
Moving on, I explored the epistemologies of critical and cultural the-
ory that had been hidden. Anthropological notions of play were joined
with sport studies in trying to fathom how meaning-making in sports
is carried out—how meaningful sports can shape gender. Lyn had put
me in contact with Jeffrey Alexander who invited me to his Centre of
Cultural Sociology (CCS) to develop my analyses. Håkon Larsen, Åse
Strandbu, Ørnulf Seippel, Kari Stefansen, and Hans Erik Næss allowed
me to think cultural sociology aloud in Norwegian books and journals.
In 2016, with a position at Hedmark University College, Dean Sven
Inge Sunde and Public Health Department chair Linda Lundsbakken
decided to invest in sending me off to the USA once more. A Fulbright
Scholarship realized decisive funds, but also a great moral and informa-
tional support before and during this new adventure. Bags packed, and
regardless of all this backing, there would not have been another US
adventure, now for my family of five, without considerable family sup-
port and the strength of Camilla Broch, the newly made mother of our
twins. I am in great debt and thankful to all who helped me on in various
ways.
Settling in at New Haven, I was poised to rethink, think deeper and
think in dialog with my earlier texts—from a new angle. The compar-
ative potential of the project that had disappeared from earlier critical
texts, in which it was not needed due to the binary thinking inherent
in gender theory, could now be used to the gains of broad cultural
insights. A revised “Big Bang Theory” needed data from women’s
handball. Deep meanings, which had not previously been accounted
for was excavated with the emotion and meaning-oriented theories of
PREFACE xi
the strong program at Yale. The intellectual hub of the CCS center, the
support of the center administrator Nadine Amalfi and Yale University,
Department of Sociology made the icing on the cake. At the CCS work-
shop, primed graduate students, Jeff’s elaborate observations and Phil
Smith’s snapping precision made a perfect ending to each week. Here I
also got to know Jean-Pascal Daloz and be inspired by his great enthu-
siasm for a sociology of variation and distinction. Talks with Anne-Marie
Champagne, Ian Sheinheit, Till Hilmar, Vanessa Bittner, Adam Valen
Levinson, and Pål Halvorsen also influenced this book.
Finally, yet importantly, my family had long nourished an interest in
culture and taken every opportunity to criticize my use of critical theory.
Daily talks, for many years, with my father Harald and sister Tuva Beyer
Broch, both anthropologists, kept inspiring a curiosity for cultural pat-
terns and all its colorful variations. Perhaps long overdue, I realized that
my two Ph.D. supervisors at NIH, Lars Tore and Kari, had placed me in
a fortunate squeeze between a micro and macro sociology of sports. Lyn
Spillman showed me how I could take advantage of this cultural-sociol-
ogy space and incorporate my taste for anthropology in exploring how
meaning-making shapes social life. In the final phase, I am truly thankful
to Phil Smith for taking interest and time in guiding a process of pre-
cision and poetics of a prospective cultural sociology of sports. Thanks
also to Palgrave Macmillan, especially editors Mary Al-Sayed, Madison
Allums, and the two attentive reviewers who sturdily guided the project
to its very end. Through the ups and downs of it all, I am greatly in debt
to all those who supported me. Without all this academic and everyday
support, this project would have not have been. Any inelegances are of
course my own responsibility.
Elverum, Norway Trygve B. Broch

Contents
1 Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender 1

The Challenge of the Critical Theorist: Gender as Perspective 5
Meaning-Making and Sport: Play and Game Theory 9
A Cultural Sociology of Sport: Culture as Perspective 14
Methodology 19
Outline of the Book 22
References 29
Part I Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender
2 Media and Sport Enchantment: Narrative, Myth,

and Games of Modernity 43
This One’s for the Record Books: Game Dynamics
and Storytelling 44
Entering Enchantment: Sensing the Mythmaking Vortex 51
Transcending Time: Handball and Viking Warriors 53
The Generative Grammar: Cognitive Simplifications
that Shapes Sport 61
The Bang: Codes Generating Vocabularies and Iconic
Consciousness 70
References 77
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
3 Enchanted Fusion: Bringing Together Game Play

and Gender 83
The First Sex of Norwegian Handball: The Iconic Women
Warrior 84
The Second Sex of Norwegian Handball: Playing Catch-up? 95
References 106
Part II Socialization, Sport Felicity and Gender
4 Throwing Like a Handballgirl: Performance

and Materiality 113
Handballgirls in the Making, Part I: Performances
Shaping Materiality 115
Handballgirls in the Making, Part II: Sensing a
Meaningful Universe 122
Performative Repetition of Toughness: The Problematics
Kindness 129
Being Snill on the Handball Court: When the Match
Gets Underway 132
Sporting Emotions: How Culture Structures Shape Feelings 135
The Gendered Significance of the Smile 140
References 144
5 Throwing Like a Handballboy: Enchanted Flows

of Power 147
Reimmersion in Youth: Teens and Parents in Dreaming
Disarray 153
Agency and Choreography: Carving Out Stages for Serious Play 159
The Size of a Handballboy: Corporal Materiality and Meaning 166
Moral Guardian of His Rational Actors: Individual Flows in
Culture 173
References 183
6 By Way of Conclusion: A Cultural Sociology of Sports 187

Reconciliation and Looking Ahead 194
References 199
Index 201
List of Tables
Table 2.1 The handball code delineates the sacred and polluted
aspects of the meaningful game 70
Table 3.1 A schematic comparison of the empirically informed
culture structuring of handball (the handball code)
and the theoretical gender structuring dominant
in critical sport and gender research 88
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender
During the 1970s the Norwegian handball federation decided to invest

in their female players. In their talent-pool, women outnumbered men by
two-thirds and the best female athletes were far closer to the top inter-
national level than the men were. When Norwegian handball made its
decisive breakthrough with a World cup bronze in 1986, attention was
focused on the women. Not all the game-parts of this quiet 1980s revo-
lution were televised but the strategy was visibly paying off. 33 years later,
27 medals richer, 12 of them gold, the team draws about 1.6 million view-
ers in their country of about 5 million citizens. Until recently, the men’s
team has resided in the shadow of the women, with only scarce media
attention and still being outnumbered in the federation. Despite their
brave participation on the global stage, in comparison to the first sex of
Norwegian handball the score count remains 27 to 2 medals. Named “the
almost team,” the public imagination has long defined the men handball
as the second sex of the game.
How does the meaning of sports intersect with gender? Critical theo-
rists have answered this question in plenty. They hold that gender is about
inequality, conflict, and the rational pursuit for power. Sports mirror this
social reality, they argue, and proceed in critique. Indeed, sports do cre-
ate inequalities, a ritualistic separation of winners from losers. Contest is
at the very heart of its organization and makes it tempting to forge realism
with criticism. But, sports are also about cultural mastery, of belonging
and emotional impact. Sports carve out worlds filled with magic, drama,
and irrational significances. This enchanted prospect not only shapes its
© The Author(s) 2020 1

T. B. Broch, A Performative Feel for the Game, Cultural Sociology,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_1
2 T. B. BROCH
organized play but also its power over gender inequality and social action.
Sports are part of our projects of solidarity, never fully obtained yet shared
attempts to use codes, myth and narratives to shape moral action. Mean-
ingful sports are the achievements in which actors deal with conflict and
solidarity in ways that can sustain its actions. It is here, in the interpretive
drama of sport that its emergent force to shape the material and gen-
dered life resides. Sports meaningfully intersect with gender at its many
junctures of solidarity and conflict. We need both sides of the story and
document its clashes. Such will be my argument.
Numerous critical theorists have studied sports as narrative, ritual, and
performative. After the cultural turn, they have used these concepts to
stoke “the utopian and dystopian imagination of the reader.”1 In elo-
quent ways, they have got at the polluted inequalities that surround and
saturate sport. Fruitfully so, a wealth of research documents how sports
were historically produced by men, for men, to breed patriarchal mas-
culinity. Today they still often start out and end with this thesis of sports
as male preserves and women athletes as contested terrain. To the point
in which analytic results have become predictable and scholarly efforts
seem to have fading returns. Critical theory or cultural Marxist sociol-
ogy, has thus become problematic and in need of a cultural sociology,
or a new-Durkheimian sociology, to balance the books.2 Certainly not
the functionalist Durkheim postulating ritual consensus but one that is
rebuilt in the light of a cultural sociology of how meaning is, at times, a
messy realization.3 Paradox, dynamics, and contest—variation, creativity,
and breaches must remain central to the study of power. My way to get at
this is by revitalizing a set of modalities used by the cultural theorists of
the past to show how sport, play, and games allow us to question inequal-
ity and shape freedom. A cultural sociology of performance allows us to
study how cultural codes, myth, and narratives enter the sport experience
through play. The result is a deeply interpretive alternative studying how
webs of significance mesh sport and society on the court.
Barthes (2007) argued that sport is a social theatre in which actors and
audiences share in cultural experiences and analysis. Sport is both dead
serious and lighthearted play. Its outcome is unknown. Participants, like
real-life actors, try to balance the tension between social organization and
creative freedom. Universal game rules allow sports to be played glob-
ally, in spite of the national, cultural, and personal diversity of its actors.
Freedom in play permits contestants and observers to give global sports
its local flare and individual dazzle. Classical theorists, from Huzinga and
1 INTRODUCTION: SPORT, MEANING AND GENDER 3
Caillois, to Goffman and Geertz, said that game play allows meaning,
attraction, and immersion by felicity.4 It generates magic and mystery by
giving everyday life a new form. With play theory, enchantment and felic-
ity again become central pieces to how sport puzzles society. Still, we can-
not ensue analyses of sports in some old school humanities drones. Pro-
ceed to theorize or celebrate an ideal human condition by looking for a
universal of our imaginative capacity and wonderful civilizations. The clas-
sics assist our twisting and turning of sport, our looking for contemporary
readings of its bodies and actions. This is where it ends and where a cul-
tural sociology of sport begins. Athletes and onlookers are always taking
account and ignoring, being pulled toward action and pushed away from
another. Driven between the poles of boredom and involvement, we are
seduced and repelled by our conceivable worlds of meaning. Performance
theory allows us to reveal how this happens, how particular cultures elicit
specific passions and guide actual choices by actors and spectators at the
sport theatre. We do not have to prioritize inequalities over freedom or
the social over meaning. If meaningful sports are culturally contingent,
we are left at the edge of our seat to play sociological theatre critics of
how sport shape gender.
Through the empirical lens of Norwegian handball, the global
sport/gender-nexus is twisted in ways that allow us to pursue blind spots
and challenge the alleged universality of prior studies. The critical the-
orist too quickly loses track of possible democratic ambitions in sports.
The non-apologetic, non-gender-bending, tough women athlete is barely
conceivable. Her democratic man colleague has gone missing. In Norway,
handball has the merit of being a women-dominated sport in a country
that makes it a point of honor to place the principle of gender equality at
the basis of democracy. From the 1980s, on swells from the 1979 Law of
gender equality, from the 1981 first women Prime minister and the 1984
male President of Norwegian sports strategizing about recruiting women,
Norwegian handball rode the waves of the women’s movements and the
huge expansion of the welfare state. With an anthropological proclivity, I
am teased to imagine how these cultures can possibly have shaped gender
power. How the image of the triumphant handballgirl , situated in one of
the world’s most gender equal countries, has made her the unapologetic
first sex of the game. How the handballboys , the men’s team, are seen in
the light of this idealized example of woman toughness in pioneering for
equality.
4 T. B. BROCH
I place this nexus of a democratic myth and the daily experience of

handball in Norway at the center of a thick description to reveal how
the culture structures of the sport intersect with social interpretation and
athletes’ embodiment. Two levels of analysis must therefore be articu-
lated and then interwoven. On the one hand that of the media narrative
that participates in building and circulating a certain “public meaning”
of handball in majority ethnic Norway. On the other hand that of body
cultures and how handball practitioners make sense of this “public mean-
ing” in the everyday acts of the sport. In other words, part one of the
book explores gender equality in media texts on women and men elite
handball. I join journalistic interpretations of game play with empirical
and theoretical readings of Norwegian culture. A curiosity for gendered
solidarity and belonging propels the study of how competent journalists
understand and value women and men athletes. In part two of the book,
I aim to bring you along into the youth sports arena to answer if and how
the broad meaning formed in the media flows into the socialization and
skill acquisition in youth sports. Here, we can find out how actors flexi-
bly manoeuvre symbol-systems and myths disseminated by the media. An
interest in how public meaning and body culture fuse allows a study of
how situated action feeds off and feeds back into the maintenance of our
webs of significance.
While most authors either carry out a media study or an ethnography,
this book does both to look at how meaning about sports and within
sports circulate and flow between the two. There are strings attached,
deep existential questions that are attempted answered, and that will
present us with the not yet seized upon prospect of an ethnographic veto.
Sports do not inherently reproduce social and bodily inequality. Sports
also reproduce democratic projects and experiences of flow. Some might
disdain any relevance of the unusual and very Scandinavian case and it
is hard to disagree completely. Yet, a pursuit of thick description reveals
how sport and gender studies also need to deal with how actors ques-
tion inequality and shape equality. How local-national culture intersects
with gender as landscapes of meaning are brought to bare on our use of
sports to reflect on society. The ways in which meaning-making processes
shape gender power should be an empirical question. Cultural theories of
meaning, diversity, and solidarity can turn out to be crucial parts of our
gender-analytic toolbox. For the reader with a curiosity for theory, con-
ceptualizations are next up. For others, I suggest stopping by the one-stop
shop about handball and then jump to the outline of the book.
The Challenge of the Critical Theorist:

Gender as Perspective
After separating biological sex from gender and in the advent of feminist
theory, we could clearly see the meaning of patriarchy in the landscapes
before us. Armed with the gendered perspective, powered by currents
of radicalism in the postwar era, feminism exploded “a social-democratic
imaginary that had occulted gender injustice” and transformed society
root and branch. As its “utopian energy” declined, feminism was drawn
into the “orbit of identity politics” to reveal how difference distorts recog-
nition. These three dramatic acts, as Fraser (2013, p. 1) names them, has
forever changed our view on social life and gender justice.
What the gender outlook does so well is to fuse the intellectual’s polit-
ical philosophies with social life as lived and experienced. These modes of
awareness inform each other with the result of improving theories of good
and bad, and to make practical changes in social life. Yet, the remarkable
political impact of the gendered sight, can be costly for the interpretivist,
Reed (2011) argues. Meaning and action come to be soft variables, best
explained as by-products of the hard variables the scholar is evaluating.
With goals of a non-patriarchal ideal, the gender theorist can go straight
from a political macro-truth to its personal micro-effects, ignore the wills
of actors and the meanings that possibly mediate broad social categories
and injustice.5 The advent of intersectionality theory has indeed made
great gains in pushing the study of diversified injustice.6 By stressing how
various sociological inequality categories stack on top of each other and
add up injustice, meaning structures still do not interfere with the critical
theorists’ train of thought and causal reasoning. This claim needs back-
tracking.
The critical sociology of gender, linking gender to feminist theory,
argues for a universal and inescapable gendered reality of social life. Its
only proper parallel, Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (1992, p. 311)
argue, is found in Marx’s discovery that knowledge—what people assume
to be absolute truths—are in fact the realities of those who economically
and politically rule the social world. Studying gender, men are the power
holders that shape knowledge about masculinities and femininities. This
unifying thesis does not take away from a vibrancy of inter and cross-
disciplinary ways to reveal gendered oppression. A vast methodological
tool kit shows us how patriarchy is endlessly recycled in actors’ negoti-
ation of masculine and feminine stereotypes. Its emphasis on patriarchal
6 T. B. BROCH
power, for any analysis of the social world, has made gender, in and of
itself, a means to perceive social life altogether. With heuristic intents,
I have lumped them together as the gender perspective seeing culture
through the lens of patriarchal meaning and power. Inequality scholars
in general, tend to think in this way as they study how external, objective,
and material forces breed injustice via hegemony, domination, subordina-
tion, Alexander (2007) argues.
While cultural sociology explores how codes, symbols and narrative
allow meaning-making, the gender perspective emphasizes how the social
power relations of gender constrain symbols, narrative, and meaning. For
example, the Scandinavian scholar Nielsen explicates how gender con-
strains social life by creating difference and hierarchy. Drawing on Beau-
voir and Hirdman, she argues that gender scholars “go out looking for
differences and place these differences in a hierarchy in which the mas-
culine is normative, and the feminine is marked as deviant.”7 Indeed,
the cultural turn has spurred an axiom that gendered power is histori-
cally dynamic and culturally diverse. Varied cultural action is, nonetheless,
evaluated by importing empirical evidence into a static model, originating
outside the studied lifeworld, that places masculinity and femininity in this
fixed relation to each other. From every possible angle, the critical theorist
shows how inequality saturates life. Micro scholars West and Zimmerman
argue that actors’ interaction is held hostage by gender.8 The patriarchal
norm set sanctions encounters as right or wrong in light of the interac-
tants’ sex category. Macro hegemony-theorist Connell shows us how cul-
ture aids inequality by bringing reproductive differences into broad social
processes.9 Culture persuades the social dominance of women by men,
by naturalizing unequal masculine and feminine ideals. These works from
the 1980s have later taken up intersectionality trends to show how patri-
archy is realized globally despite of local and social diversity.10 Butler, on
the other hand, gives agency to a performer, but in similar ways, leaves
the actor only to repeat or bend stereotypes that make bodies percepti-
ble as gendered in manners well known.11 This view makes gender the
structuring structure of social life to show how meaning and diversity is
organized by masculine and feminine stereotypes.
To the gender scholar, sport is a crucial example of how universal gen-
der inequality-dynamics works.12 Sports, they claim, prove how culture
sustains masculine and male power. This doxic truth, its seductive clarity
and daring, has bred a subdiscipline of sport sociology, methodologically
varied indeed that powerfully details sports’ cyclical inequality-dynamic.13
The discipline has fused patriarchy and sport to the point that it is almost
impossible to tell them apart.14 Men reproduce male privilege through
aggressive acts, whereas women have to apologize for acting aggressively.
More precisely, boy and male athletes, as well as journalists depicting
them, reproduce male power through authoritative, heterosexual, and vio-
lent acts and challenge male dominance through passive-aesthetic, met-
rosexual, and considerate acts.15 Although women have entered sports
in huge numbers, this only contests men’s numerical dominance. Sport
remains male dominated since also authoritative, aggressive, and violent
women symbolically reproduce masculine values—and thus validate patri-
archy.16 At the same time, aggressive women are found to act apolo-
getic to reinstate heteronormativity through feminine markers such the
ponytail.17 The gender perspective thus reassures us that sports create an
inescapable and double bind dynamic in which competition is synony-
mous with patriarchal renewal. In Theberge’s ethnographic account of a
women hockey team, she argues that the Blades do constitute a power-
ful challenge to masculine sports, but that in doing hockey, “the Blades
accommodate those very interests they challenge on the ice” (2000,
p. 158). While Theberge used hegemony theory, also Bourdieu and Fou-
cault, through notions of doxa and discourse, have inspired analyses that
manifest how meaning and bodies interlock with patriarchy.18 If the the-
oretical notions of masculinity and femininity matches well with data, the
critical theorist has exposed a culture that reproduces inequality. If not,
they have revealed a culture that challenges inequality. Usually, it is hard
to pinpoint if the challenges to patriarchy outweighs reproduction. Crit-
ical theory labels these cultures as ambiguous. Methodological variation
has not challenged this axiomatic truth of cultural Marxism in gender and
sport sociology. In Norway, both the generalist Nielsen cited above and
the sport specialist remain engaged by the evaluative model of patriarchy
in mapping out inequality.19
When critical sport sociologists explore national identity and gen-
der, an even more dreadful picture of an inescapable global patriarchy
is painted. Unconcerned with civil and folkloric inputs, intersectionality
theory turns national identity into an additional inequality form, nation-
alism. Knoppers and Anthonissen (2003, p. 353) argue that the creation
“of (a national) sport as an activity in which (absolute) physical per-
formance is given a central place and that is dominated by males has
8 T. B. BROCH
become a major (global) site of patriarchy, male bonding, and the sup-
port of an athletic masculinity.” Regardless of the many women repre-
sentatives, their almost equal time in the Olympic limelight, the media
are still found to depict nations that exclude women and ethnic minori-
ties or embrace them in ways that support masculine hegemony.20 Wens-
ing and Bruce (2003, p. 390) note that medias “accommodate” success-
ful sportswomen at global events by ignoring their “stereotypical female
inabilities.” Women Olympians are empowered by (polluted) nationalist
ideologies and are always threatened by compulsory heteronormativity.21
Making “women” equal to the symbolism of inability, passivity, and sub-
ordination, critical theorists show that any sign of ability, aggression or
power breed patriarchy through these agreed upon masculine signposts.
The critical analytical circle, now accounting for national identity, is whole
anew, in an even more forceful version. Seeing sports through the lens of
gender breeds the same results worldwide. Capitalism and nationalism
catalyze the patriarchal inequality process. In fights for gender equality,
this daring clarity of the cultural Marxist has made huge gains. Its success,
powered by aims to combat hostile culture-components, has fought dis-
crimination and endlessly strives to make sports a more healthy enterprise
by surgically stabbing at cultural ills.
The problem, perhaps, is not being critical but the limits of the sharp
critical theory criticism proper. Philosopher Gumbrecht (2006) argues
that intellectuals feeling obliged to critique sports as a symptom of the
undesired larger and more powerful systems of oppression have belit-
tled and denounced its aesthetic dimensions. Several anthropologists have
despaired the reduction of sport to inequality categories and to mystify-
ing values in the service of the oppression inherent in universal sociol-
ogy models.22 Sutton-Smith (1995, 1997), claims sport sociologists cre-
ate false binaries as they show us that sport recreates a modern world
of women versus men, of corporations versus workers, of tradition ver-
sus modernity, of freedom versus compulsion. With a different tactic, he
suggests, ambiguity in the reproduction of a priori categories might be
explained as actors’ flexible altering of pragmatic potentials. Sports are not
simply pathological conformism to competition but also about aesthetic
excellence. It is not merely a reflection of social inequalities but a means
to reflect on unequal societies. Its attraction comes down to our flexible
capacities to play out analogies to social life through sports. Ethnogra-
phers that do not define themselves as sport sociologists, argue that sports
are about belonging and meaning. While critical theorists have reported
on the contours of sport inequality, these ethnographers have dealt with

its qualities. What are these qualities? What makes the sports kettle bub-
ble with anticipation? What makes codes fizzle from our cultural depths
to burst out in the meaningful sport experiences that form gendered life?
Meaning-Making and Sport: Play and Game Theory

How should we define sports to allow a meaning-centered analysis? Cul-
tural sociology grants actors, groups and culture a relative autonomy from
the inequality and power structures that critical theorists use to decon-
struct empirical worlds. This uncoupling allows us to look for empirical
patterns and build structural accounts of how meaning shapes social life
and power. Binaries, narrative, and myth are empty at the outset and need
to be fitted out with empirical meaning. The result is an analysis explain-
ing how individuals and collectives are guided by empirically infused,
yet universal culture structures as they manoeuvre situations. Inequal-
ity becomes addressed, critiqued and amended by actors. Socialization
and skill acquisition turn into a meaning-making in which broad culture
shapes bodies and action in many ways. We need a conceptualization of
sport allowing us to fit out its modalities with empirical meaning.
In the elementary forms, Durkheim (1912/2001, pp. 280–285)
showed how an ideal society arises through assembly and settles on sym-
bolic and material forms in ritual, dramaturgy, totemism, play, and games.
These meaningful actions shape social life. As such, sport as ritual-like
and separate from everyday life, provides actors a greater leeway to play
with symbols that evoke, interpret, and reshape bodily experiences and
social lives. Huizinga’s (1938/1950) work can be read as a refocusing
of Durkheim in which play takes the place of religion and civilizations
thus evolve from and unfold in play. He expounds play as voluntary,
unproductive, a symbolic breaking down of social categories, and a goal
in and of itself. Romantically he mused that we are absorbed in play by
its prospect of shaping material and social realities uncorrupted by social
life and power. Yet play not only shapes societies, it is fundamental to
the individual’s development of a social self. Mead (1934/2015) claimed
that a child’s creative adaptation of roles and symbols is developed dur-
ing play with ideas of something or someone. Looking into the mind,
through culture, Winnicott (1971/2005) argued that play provides are-
nas, from infancy to adulthood, in which we use materiality and symbols
10 T. B. BROCH
to ease the separation from, connection with, and addressing of the other-
ness of social reality. Play agency, Winnicott maintained, is directed at the
achievement of omnipotence. Typified by the baby fusing materiality and
meaning to shape a favorable experience of social life. Inevitably, babies,
children, and adults’ attempts to control social life quite often fail. Still,
play enables us to study how meaning shapes materiality, action, and social
life as we join in experiences with culture. Play aims at fusing objective
external realities with subjective and bodily experiences. The play process
allows us to sense explicit and tacit meaning, surface and deep culture.
Winnicott but also Bateson (1972) paralleled play to psychotherapy.
Both take place within a delimited space, time and framework of percep-
tion. These spaces occur as we define acts as play (psychotherapy) and if
we “fall into” this middle reality that structurally allows us to alter individ-
ual and social meaning. What is specific to the play form, and its modal-
ity, is its condensation of the expressive forms we find elsewhere. Geertz
(1973a) thus used play to theorize how a society’s pivotal emotions, hier-
archies, and moralities are cast in symbolism. Aesthetic transformation,
he argued, awakens an inclination for mindful and unconscious reading.
If deep cultural patterns align with the surface of action, we experience
deep play. Barthes’ (2009) work on wrestling, a true product of moder-
nity and commodification, jog our memory that aesthetic transformations
of social life still provides an intensified appearance of reality, regardless
of its obvious choreography. The play transformation, of act and audi-
ence, is crucial to grasp modern sports, Shore (1996) holds. It reveals the
important often unspoken ideas and experiences of social life. As a civil
ritual, sport joins freedom of participation with a formality of the strict
goals and rules that arranges its meaning-making. Freedom to question
the social is allowed by the play modality that in unison sets its practices
apart from but also anchors it in mundane life. Dealing with play, we
cannot shy away from deep interpretation.
Sport do not contain ideal-typical free play but should be seen as com-
petitive games that invites us to play.23 To Caillois (1958/1979) sports
are institutionalized competitive play with formal rules and strategies that
are organized by the social structure of the game. In this democratic
project, players are given an apparently equal footing at the outset. It
demands focused training, personal dedication, a desire to win, and to
declare an untainted champion. While play is antagonistic to boundaries,
games are practiced through this formal and social control that furnishes
ideals of civility. It develops our abilities to be involved in interaction
whereby shared goals minimize conflicts between one’s own and oth-
ers’ attitudes. From this idealistic lesson, important notes arise about how
games introduce ideas and meanings about materiality and social life that
are not our own, but that, if accepted, enable us to play together in a
relationship.24 Shore (1996) argued that games, like scripts, are standard-
ized templates for well-defined, goal-oriented or pragmatic situations. The
game’s socio-structural universality enables interaction across cultural and
individual diversity. It contains global action-scripts.
Games do help actors and audiences forecast how play can develop,
to anticipate, but without extending the foresight indefinitely (Simmel,
1911/1971, p. 354). For Elias (1970) games allow us to measure and
establish relations in which a player’s strength always varies in relation to
her opponent. Fine (2015) later advanced this insight, beautifully naming
chess not as a contest, but as duets developing through lines of play.
Bodily knowing by routinizing games thus cannot dismiss our ability to
play and read actions. Contrary, it allows leeway for plausible creativity,
to transform and break with the routinized patterns of the game itself.
Athletes must read images and fine-tuning emotions (Beauchez, 2018a).
Games join intuition of social patterns with the reading of body contours
and social rhythms. It tests our joining of technical skills, creativity
and aesthetic reading abilities in reimagined, rule bound, and simplified
settings.
It is here, along the contours of the game that we find the mem-
brane that both contains its own loose logics and allows some broad
social meaning to enter, while others are repelled. In the organized play
of sports, we find codes that generate its worthwhile and goal-oriented
action. Institutionalization does not devoid meaning-making. Spillman
(2012, p. 181) argues that the pursuit of organized goals “ultimately rely
on collective identity and solidarity.” None withstanding the unlikelihood
of consensus, institutional actions are only meaningful if we have or can
develop shared strategies for action.25 The game removes disorder but
demands that we center our attention and act with a total, emotive and
meaningful play-involvement (Collins, 2004; Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Yet
its interaction cannot escape broad and private meaning. The game mem-
brane is not a given but an achieved social force. Goffman (1961) argued
that games are only rewarding when we are absorbed by and at peace with
the choices that are made within the game. Games are unpleasant when
we dislike the meaning-making that takes place and lose the capacity for
immersion. Individual and shared realities are thus often introduced in
12 T. B. BROCH
masked form, through mimicry or aesthetic transformation. Its actions

do not mirror but modify socio-cultural and personal realities to fit well
with game objectives. It both conceals psychological and social worlds
and attempts to reveal the right amount of information that gamers can
cope with.26 Realities are softened and exaggerated. Sustained game inter-
action, felicity, is the meaning-making by which personal, cultural, and
social dimensions are carefully introduced.27 It is always threatened by
choice and broad social dynamics. As a result, we have to stop the crit-
ical theory jumps straight from broad to individual meaning and starts
looking into felicity.
The combination of play and game in sport helps us to see sports as
commentary and sensation, as interpretation of and emotional shaping of
social life. These modalities that reshapes social life in an alternate form
allow globally shared, yet nationally and locally varied sports. Classical
theorists paved the way for us to see this. To see how sport is a cul-
turally contingent play organized by the game structures allowing global
sport-interaction. Sports are worthwhile because they satisfy the need to
interpret and shape social and personal life through play. It begs us to
play along with the aesthetics that evoke deep cultural feelings. This is a
major part of sports’ gravitational pull and cultural force.
What is Handball? A one-stop shop
Men and women’s handball has been a regular part of the Summer
Olympics since 1972 and 1976, respectively. It is primarily played
in Europe but also some East Asian, North African, and South
American countries. North Americans at times mistake handball by
its namesake resembling the racquet-game squash. As a primer, it
should be noted that handball is usually played indoors by teams
of seven on-court players and seven substitutes. Consequently, the
game has been dubbed “team handball,” “European handball,”
even “Olympic handball.”
According to the International Handball Federation (IHF) and
the International Olympic Committee, handball has more than 27
million players worldwide. In many northern and continental Euro-
pean countries, handball is a highly rated participant and spectator
sports, especially as the top men and women from domestic leagues
meet in the Champions League and come the European and the
World Cups played every other year. Major domestic leagues are
today located in Germany and France but also Denmark. Some top
teams, for example Hungarian women’s team Gÿori, are also attrac-
tive to players from abroad. Elite players and teams are sponsored
by widely recognized brands like Adidas and Nike but also well-
known European brands like Hummel, Puma, and Umbro. Often,
domestic and national teams wear sponsor labels on their jerseys as
a major source of income, like Füchse Berlin’s men team waring a
Lidle emblem on their shirtsleeve.
Handball is sort of like basketball crossed with soccer and with a
hint of hockey aesthetics. It is a rapid game with a ball in hand, fre-
quent turnovers, shots at goals. Skills include throwing fast and with
accuracy, blocking the ball and opponents, speed, and agility. At elite
levels, players are expected to engage in body checks, jumps, and
diving activity to shoot or block shots. This often involves landing
on a hard floor with hips, knees, shoulders, and other parts of the
torso hitting the ground first. This is sometimes painful and risky.
The referee oversees the act and hands out yellow cards, two-minute
suspensions, and a red card for various violations. If an attacker is
fouled in the act of shooting, a penalty shot is given.
When it comes to executing the game, for adult players the game
consist of two halves of 30 minutes and you can expect about 40–
50 goals divided between the two teams. Somewhat like basketball,
players can only run three steps and have one series of dribbles
before they have to pass the ball to a teammate. The ultimate aim is
to throw the ball into a small soccer-like goal that has a goalkeeper
guarding it. With a court measuring 40 by 20 meters, on-court play-
ers speedily transition from attack, via fast breaks to defense and
back on the attack. Team positions on the attack include wingmen
on each side, three backcourt players in the middle, and a pivot that
is usually placed among the opposing defenders’ defensive line to
set screens and take close-range shots. On defense, the same posi-
tions are more or less kept as they, in various formations, align in
a defensive wall outside the goal crease drawn six meters from and
in a half circle around the goal and net-minder. You can easily find
14 T. B. BROCH
info about the game on Wikipedia, game instructions and highlight

videos in general YouTube and its IHF channel. Doing so might
help you understand this book.
A Cultural Sociology of Sport: Culture

as Perspective
To avoid the pitfalls of late Durkheim (1912/2001), and at the same
time challenge the nonsymbolic approaches of cultural Marxist analyses, I
follow Alexander (2017, p. 3) in studying meaning-making in modernity
“as resting upon social performances rather than rituals per se.” Classical
theory has made us attentive to how play is the gateway through which
actors and audiences immerse in the dramatic game plot of sports. This is
what makes sports enchanted, captivating, and not simply a mechanistic
behavioral mode. Play and game scholars saw this but were thrown out
with the critical sociologist’s bathwater. To make their ludic theorizing
competitive to the hegemonic stance in gender and sport studies, we need
a new-Durkheimian study of how empirically infused structures shape the
social and material worlds of sport.
A break with our inspirational, classical and somewhat romantic
humanities narrative on play and creativity is crucial. In complex het-
erogeneous societies, culture is segmented and differentiated—meaning
is defused. A study of meaningful action-patterns therefore needs a the-
ory that joins broad culture and situational pragmatics. For this reason,
Alexander (2004, p. 529) merged performance theory to cultural soci-
ology to reveal “the social process by which actors, individually or in
concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation.” A per-
formance is an agentic meaning projection that brings codes, narratives,
and myth to action. It shapes truths by joining realism and symbolism,
material facts and dramas. The actor does not have to obey the mean-
ing she wishes others to believe but needs to convince herself and her
audience of the performance’s importance. The dramaturge is trying to
understand and direct action by a seamless stringing together of broad
culture and situational action. To do so, the actor needs habitualized and
creative acting skills to serve rational and transcendental aims. There are
therefore two sides to seeing sport as performance. Sports join knowledge

about the game and about society. It is an institutionalized play act and a
social performance.
Meaningful action involves more structural factors than any one
inequality-category (or its intersecting) can reveal. Alexander (2004)
argues that a successful performance re-fuses collective representations with
an immediate script. Actors and audiences use various means of symbolic
production to put culture in action and sway the social power invested in
the situation. All these elements of performance have to come together
in an agentic concert. As in real life, a sport performance is set apart from
“theatre” as actors do meaning-making in stride toward an open con-
clusion that appears to be “theirs to make,” wilfully and by chance. The
global fact is that the game script is leading to a conclusion. From here,
athletes use their acquired game skills on a quest in which nobody “really”
knows who will be champion or if an athlete will astonish us by denying
“social or nature’s forces” along the way. The script allows actors to use
props like sports tape, face paint, and padding as they draw broad culture
and moralities into play. It shapes heroes, villains, and styles of play as we
act out local meaning to make global game scripts walk and talk, sprint
and cheer to our various social passions.
Sports range across a field encompassing media, international and
national federations, local clubs, small groups, and individuals. For that
reason, a cultural sociology of sport needs to be open for a multidimen-
sional analysis. Within institutions, we find culture structures that gen-
erate vocabularies and narratives that direct specialized actions in more
stable ways than in daily life (Spillman, 2012; Swidler, 2003). In sports
collective representations are mediated by the loose logics of the institu-
tionalized play. These logics are loose. The game script is not set in stone.
Our attentiveness should thus be directed at plausible interpretation. New
action-forms steadily emerge as broad and institutional meaning struc-
tures collide. To complicate the matter, within institutions we find groups
that mediate both broad and institutional culture in making group identi-
ties and interactional styles (Eliasoph & Lichterman, 2003). Groups strive
to harmonize freedom in play with game discipline, broad moralities with
institutional goals. These symbolic layers re-fuse and defuse, feed off, and
feedback to create many meanings. A multidimensional approach deals
with how these various levels of mediation intersect.
These layers of meaning also move through bodies and objects. Codes,
narratives and myth guide nonverbal interpretations and our sensory
16 T. B. BROCH
engaging with social and material life. This is an iconic process that inter-
weaves meaning, materiality, and corporal acts. Alexander (2008a, 2008b,
2010, 2011) theorizes the aesthetic experience as iconicity and allows us
to account for how the moral depth of culture structures are expressed
through a sensuous surface. An icon is a compression and an expression of
a whole field of myth and meaning in which it is embedded and allows us
to immerse with the icon through an aesthetic experience (Giesen, 2012;
Smith, 2012; Sonnevend, 2012). Along with performance theory, iconic-
ity lets us explore the nonverbalized and material meanings of the sport
act. Corporal materiality and props are expressive surfaces that resound
deep meaning to selves and others (Champagne, 2018). The iconic con-
sciousness guides corporal acts and a “stellar performance” bolsters the
power of the body and its props. Through performance, this deep inter-
pretive play gives sport objects the meaningful power and possibility to
become a performer itself (Alexander, 2012).
As with the performance, there are also two sides to seeing iconic-
ity. The surface of athletic bodies and game scripts can provide aesthet-
ically pleasing contours and rhythms. These immediate referents become
beautiful, sacred, or profane through sensory engagements with symbol-
structured layers. Pearls of sweat, jukes just avoiding a tackle, the come-
back kid and a slam-dunk are dramatic to actors and onlookers if their
surfaces echo meaningful styles of play and the moral depths of charac-
ter, courage and devotion. This sensory experiencing relies on cognitive
simplifications of culture structures to allow swift readings and pattern
recognition of right and left jukes, of good and bad moralities in sports’
micro-worlds. This iconic power also reaches far beyond the field of play
to generate the athlete icons that can condense meaning systems in cor-
poral form. Of course, expert knowledge of particular sports grants a dif-
ferent appreciation than if you are a novice. Familiarity with the celebrity
allows access to the soap operas linking on-field and off-field dramas. Yet,
broad socio-cultural and narrow sport-cultural capital remains the cues
and clues that alone cannot generate deep play. Culture structures is what
makes decisive games into apocalyptic battles of geopolitical superpowers,
into a romantic appreciation of embodied identities and skills, into comics
of failure, flimsy, and flamboyance (see Smith, 2005). Deep culture is what
generates deep play.
In sports, actors and audiences join in the dramaturgy of putting cul-
ture into action. Distinctions between actors and audiences in sports are
therefore tricky. Professional athletes are aware that they are performing,
but they will not be successful, if they do not immerse in play (Csik-
szentmihalyi, 1975; Gumbrecht, 2006; Sutton-Smith, 1997). At the same
time, sport actors know that their coaches, referees, and audiences are
assessing both the aesthetic surface of their skills and their moral play.
What’s more, teammates and competitors that are looking for the ath-
lete’s dramatic statements and Freudian slips that can reveal how to best
carry on with the action. A successful athlete-performer convinces an
audience ranging from the global crowd to the self. From the spectator’s
point of view, audiences also strive for fusion and defusion, or what Daloz
(2017, p. 137) would term identification and dis-identification with ath-
letes, teams, and other fans. Parents identify with the physical and moral
bravery of their children and, at times, attempt to repair the image of their
unruly kids (and selves). Devoted fans reimmerse in their own biographies
and in the myths and soap operas of children’s and elite sports. Deep
play can thus engross us in many different ways and victory comes in
many shapes. Together, sport actors and audiences anticipate how game
rhythms playfully, morally, and socially intersect—whether the pass and
the receiver will join or not. This is not all about winning the game. It
is about the successful performance and a chance for those present to
experience the cultural mastery of liquefying divisions the structural ele-
ments of performance (Alexander, 2011, p. 55). It is about making the
sport performance ritual-like and allow action and place to transcend from
mundanity to ritual, in an instance, then back (Smith, 1999).
Sport carves out symbolic spaces and use physical spaces, stages, and
arenas for play. These means of symbolic production, the field, equipment
and props serve as material culture that help actors dramatize otherwise
invisible motives and morals. This act requires the skill to maneuver the
game script and, at the same time, engage in the play of mis-en-scèn,
putting culture “into the scene.” There is an obvious need for the mate-
rialization of the symbolic play space as well as for a ball in ball games and
racquets in racquet games. Through the cultural mastery of mis-en-scèn
players can both carve out and enter fields of play. Here, actors put on
formal or informal uniforms, sports tape screech, under-armor attire, face
paint, and padding shapes the act. This iconic feel of spatial and corpo-
ral change, as an arena gives you the chills, as sport-tape reinforces the
body, adorns the play and person made athlete. Sport appeals to its var-
ious actors and audiences by way of this dramatic capacity. Sport allows
us to practice and witness the pragmatic effect of emotion management
and dramaturgy through the practice of mis-en-scèn. A performative feel
18 T. B. BROCH
for the game is made here, at the margins of the game, creative play and
performative structures.
Some sport actors have more social power than others do. Quite often,
sports involve a performance leader, a coach who trains athletes that strat-
ify in relation to skill. Yet, some players exercise more social power than
their coaches do. Some athletes have better access to the stage of composi-
tion, more saying, more playing time than others have, and thus have their
mise-en-scène more easily accepted. The “iconic coach,” “sport stars” and
“talents,” once shaped by broad, institutional and group codes, are often
allowed more mistakes and therefore get more chances to show character
and grit than the actor who has not been seen as such. Both aesthetics and
technical skills are in the cultural eye of the beholder. Performance grant
social power to both. A cultural sociology of sport brings hermeneutic
power to the fore.
By joining performance and iconicity theory, we can break clean with
the romantics of classical play and game theory, challenge the cynicism
of the cultural Marxist tradition but also question the disenchanted anal-
yses of the practice theorist and the Foucaultian. With Foucault (1977),
sport are rationalized institutions aiming for machine-like actors. Analyses
avoid the subjectivity, myth, and virtues that can explain behavior (Reed,
2012). Motivation is sidelined as rational training techniques intend to
generate clockwork selves that reiterate social control (Smith, 2008). The
game modality, perhaps, persuades Foucaultians in seeing sports as styl-
ized forms of interaction, barely creative, even meaningless. Also practice
theory prefers analyses of sports as rid of meaningful and discursive aware-
ness. Bourdieusians show how athletes’ habitualized game-structure fuse
with economic and social conditions to shape an embodied feel for the
game’s practical behavoir and its social functions (Bourdieu, 1990; Wac-
quant, 2004). As with the “hard truths” of macro inequality, the institu-
tionalized play of games has seemingly become a “hard variable” relieving
the Foucaultian and the Bourdieusian from any need to interpret patterns
of meaning. Indeed, skill acquisition is vital but a cultural sociology of
sport must flip the scrip. Performance theory reveals how actors question
and play with social power and that rationality is a discourse and not an
empirical fact (Alexander, 1995).
Social power and game scripts set the stage for plausible meaning-
making but these structures alone cannot generate meaningful sports.
Meaningful sports occur when we strike a balance between being in con-
trol or overwhelmed by the plausible limits of its organized play. At
this time, we can achieve a high-pitched felicity, involvement, or flow,

Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 64) argued. To him, flow is contingent on
the matching of game challenges by individual skills. With performance
theory, the study focuses on how skillful actors meet scripted trials by
meaning-making skills. Flow is this meaning-seeking process and attrac-
tion of its achievement: a sensory experience of cultural mastery. Sport
flows in rhythms. Actors and audiences work in between the ebbs and
tides to shape its dramatic pulse. What is lost is not discursive awareness,
or “the awareness of one’s body or one’s functions, but only the self
construct ” as we gain a feeling of great power (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975,
pp. 43–44). This is a hermeneutic power stemming from play attempts at
omnipotence (Winnicott, 1971/2005) in which culture guides our mas-
tery of social transitions and material realities. Through culture we join
in something “whose fuller meaning eludes” us and “enjoy the possibility
for control despite being unable to access directly the script” (Bartman-
ski & Alexander, 2012, p. 2). The sense of a meaningful self reemerges
stronger after an episode of iconic flow but separation and defusion can
be equally uneasy and, at times, lead us into attempts at repair.
Cultural Marxists, Foucaultians, and practice theorists cannot alone
provide an answer as to why this happens. A cultural sociology of perfor-
mance balances the books by revealing an answer hidden in the symbolic
layering of culture structures, and the objects that condense its meanings.
From institutional, group and individual outlooks, iconic flow allows us
to find a multitude of meanings in the global game plots that makes insti-
tutional play turn into dramas with real contestants. As social life itself,
games and their material surfaces are moved by the subjective meanings
that resound the cultural depths of fleeting cathexis and empathy. In cul-
turally contingent ways, narratives, codes, and myth prevail in the sport
of modernity. Through skill acquisition and in our dealing with inequal-
ities and rationality. In contemporary sports, iconic flow is transient but
remains powerful in shaping bodies, gender, and social action. A perfor-
mative feel for the game stays an incentive for participation on the field,
in the stance and with the sport media.
Methodology
This project leans on the qualitative sociology that shows how “thick
description” can support explanatory claims and theoretical generaliza-
tions.28 These voices draw on Geertz’s essay on the Balinese cockfight
20 T. B. BROCH
to illustrate how theory and rich empirical accounts work together in

the form of an abductive analysis. Tavory and Timmermans (2014, p. 8)
define this approach as neither that of the grounded scholar insisting on
building theory off explicit salience and a dutiful coding of mountains of
data. Nor of the devoted student that vows to theoretical truths about
meaning and power, and that is mildly annoyed by waiting for the “right
quote.”
As a contrasting case to the majority of sport and gender research, Nor-
wegian handball is empirically distant, yet a theoretically close analogy to
the power and performance sports often explored in international sociol-
ogy. As such, handball possibly permits a different take on the claims that
capitalist interests and patriarchy always outweigh other cultural forces in
celebrating violent male role models and downplaying the achievements
of women athletes.29 From 2007 to 2017 I collected data from newspa-
pers and televised Norwegian handball. TV commentary from two inter-
national men championships, in 2007 and 2008, and one women champi-
onship in 2009, eighteen men’s and eight women’s games in total, serve
as the analytic nucleus of part I of the book. Knowing with Smith (2005)
that narrative genre tells and enacts the same story in diverse ways, recur-
rent themes of chance, fears, hopes and struggle inspired a curiosity about
the sport quest as genre. It could explain fluxes of romantic, apocalyptic,
and logic shaping of game experiences, and make narrative, in and of
itself, a tool to illustrate how the sport quests of modernity, just like the
myths of premodern times, remain deeply riddled with meaning. Thick
description (Geertz, 1973c) and structural hermeneutics (Alexander &
Smith, 2003) could then advance a binary code thought to shape inter-
pretations of handball’s game script. By giving handball a culture struc-
ture of its own, ideas about sport as best seen in light of external forces
like patriarchy and capitalism, could be challenged. The code that cut
across the gendered division of play could reveal empirical evidence of
gender sameness and differences. With a comparative tactic, I moved on
to study discrepancies between Norwegian gendered handball and gen-
dered sports documented elsewhere. This teased out what seemed to be
Norwegian about the journalists’ depictions of the global game script. An
ethnographic proclivity enabled the two levels of analysis that of genre and
that of the institutional code, to jointly reveal how the quest gives force to
the idealized handballer in the making of the iconic athlete. Sports pro-
vide global stages to display a local belonging and pride (Jijon, 2013,
2015) that re-fuse national and gendered narratives to shape folkloric
readings and distinct styles of game play (Archetti, 2003). Part I of the
book explores how sport belonging, aesthetics and myth fuse with the
solidarities and boundaries shaping gender in Norway. Handball game-
commentary, democratic narratives, and mythmaking defied the univer-
salism of prior work.
The book moves on to an ethnography paying attention to how the
handball code, gender narratives, and myth in media and pop-culture is
made relevant by situated actors. Part II bridges symbolic interactionism’s
attention to detail and a cultural sociology exploring how fantasy and
broad culture flows between elite sport media and youth sport practices.
During 2011–2012, I carried out participant field observations in one
team of 15 years-old boys and in one of 13 years-old girls. For about
eight months, I joined training sessions, team meetings, and matches. As
a handball player myself, I offered to join and help the coaches in training
the youth. In so doing, the team was observed from the stance, from the
bench, and from the field as I joined coaches and actors in play. With
its loose logics, the handball code mapped out in the media analyses was
also prominent at the youth sport arena. At the arena, coded talk and
action often linked girls and boys to the stories and characters produced
by media. The next move was to look for the ways that youth sport actors
fused meanings about sports with meaning-making in sports. With aims
for felicity and flow, socialization into a performative feel for the game
fused drills and tactics with moralities and myth about democratic sports.
While sport sociology ethnographies of Theberge (2000) and Mess-
ner (2002, 2009) provide rich backdrops of gender conflict, interaction-
ist studies tend to idealize inductive theorizing of belonging and mas-
tery. Fine’s (1987, 2015) micro finessing shows how task orientation and
moral communities create sport communities. Beauchez (2016, 2018b)
reveals how biographies and social injustice are shaped through boxing as
a source of addictive escape and newfound recognition. DeLand (2012,
2018) shows how pickup basketballers generate recurrent scenes of per-
formance with narrative starts, disorder, and conclusions. My abductive
tactic tries to clear these deductive and the inductive streams with a bridge
that likely falls short of pleasing all. Critical deduction of competition
would equal its task orientation to hierarchy and its moral communities
to patriarchal gender power. An inductive view would try to build theories
of task orientation and argue that cultures and characters emerge from the
interaction. Neither tactic is adequate when studying how meaning flows
in feedback loops between the symbolic layers of macro, institutional and
22 T. B. BROCH
group cultures.30 Sports allow children and adults to dream about and
play with our ideas of a good life, of power relations and solidarity (S.
Anderson, 2008; Dyck, 2012; Messner, 2002, 2009). The idea of a per-
formative feel for the game inspires analyses of how the sport team is a
scene for fights about how idealized gender relations can and should enter
competition. In the girls’ team, a phenomenology of the throw shows
how the children of the ’68 generation are trained to outdate the fusion
of “throwing like a girl” with notions of female inabilities and to make the
iconic smile of the elite handballgirl a tactical asset in their sport war. In
the boy’s team, discourses about rationality and social power are as promi-
nent as transcendental aims of belonging and attraction when the coach
and athletes give meaning to the hierarchies of sport bodies in the media
and at the arena. The code of play and seriousness shows that a perfor-
mative feel for the game involves an attentive code-switching as children
and adults embrace the ambivalence of meaningful sports.
To answer the question, “how does the meaning of sports intersect
with gender,” we need theoretical knowledge about how sports shape
meaning and about gender as a socio-cultural construct. We also need
these theories to be emptied out in a manner that makes way for using
thick empirical information to explain how observed meaning shapes
action. Then, and if our anthropologic belief that meaning of gender and
sport actually do vary culturally, our answer to this question will create
a colorful and critical field of study. It might entice us to rethink our
truths about play, children and adults, about sport, gender, and power.
Cultural sociology helps us see how meaningful sports bring landscapes
of myth and narratives into play—how the sport/media-nexus and sport-
institutional practices pertain to a whole way of life.31 Elite and youth
sports are no different in this regard. Looking at how sports are made
meaningful, gender becomes only one of the many codes and narratives
that shape social and material life. We are forced to account for the sym-
bolic layers that shape gendered life.
Outline of the Book

In Norway, the gender and national identity nexus is twisted in a way that
reveals the limits to a cultural Marxist analysis. Gullestad (1991, 2001)
defined the specificities of a Scandinavian version of egalitarian individu-
alism that is helpful in this regard. Influenced by Lutheran Protestantism,
this form of individualism fused notions of independence (selvstendighet,
uavhengighet ) with the strong collective values of the welfare state. Con-
trasting US notions of equality that signify equal opportunity to become
different. Norwegian views of equality, or sameness (likhet ), tend to indi-
cate being and doing the same and the chance for similar results. “In
the Norwegian context, differences between people are easily perceived as
unwanted hierarchy and as injustice” (Gullestad, 1991, p. 4). This code
of sameness generates an evaluative code shaping a society in which narra-
tives and myth of modesty and sameness are highly valued (Daloz, 2007;
Larsen, 2016; Skarpenes, 2007). Of course, it is not as if there are no
macro-social and gender inequalities in Norway. Norwegians still tend
to choose “traditionally gendered” occupations and many of the most
demanding and least-rewarded jobs are still done by women (Holst, 2009;
Vike, 2001). The code alerts us to how these social inequalities are medi-
ated by civil solidarity and actors shaping of a never fully obtainable, yet
shared democratic project (Alexander, 2006) in which gender equality is
at its core. Sameness provides substantial analytic potentials by exposing
a peculiar Scandinavian civil sphere and the paradoxes this culture gen-
erates across multiple institutional realms (Lien, Lidén, & Vike, 2001).
In sports, frictions between inclusive ideals and the hierarchal logic of
competition create extensive dilemmas for those involved (Broch, 2016;
Henningsen, 2001).
While the gender gap in sport has narrowed globally, it has almost van-
ished in Norway (Green, 2018). In Norway, 93% of the nation’s youth
have spent time doing organized sports. It is not only statistically nor-
mal for Norwegian-ethnic majority girls and boys to try out, join, and for
some time participate in organized sports. It is normative. To the point
in which parents are concerned that their children might be isolated if
they do not join (Johansen & Green, 2017). The Norwegian women
handballer is, to some, an affirmation of this narrow gender gap and a
material proof of the gains of gender sameness. In 2013, the year I ended
my fieldwork, the handball federation was the fourth largest of about 55
specialized sport federations in Norway. With 114285 memberships, two-
thirds of them being girls and women, it was about one-third the size of
the country’s largest federation, a soccer federation dominated by two-
thirds boys and men. From the inauguration of the federation in 1937,
the women have outshined and outnumbered their men peers. But also
the media have preferred the women’s performances over the men, von
der Lippe (1997) argues. In 1997, the male coach of top-ranked Bække-
laget, stated that his Danish import player, Anja Andersen, was not only
24 T. B. BROCH
the world’s best female handballer. There was no man in the world who
shoot better or with more versatility, he argued (von der Lippe, 2001).
From a 1986 World Cup bronze to the end of the 2012 Olympic sum-
mer, the women team was reigning Olympic, World and European cham-
pions. While the gendered conception of this game of controlled aggres-
sion has been seen as a typical men’s sport in France and Germany, swayed
between the genders in Sweden and Denmark, it has for long remained a
women’s game in Norway.32 The handballgirl as an icon of women power
has long been present in the media and at the sport arenas of Norway.
Part I of the book studies how this sporting drama of gender and social
equality, of Norwegian handball, resounds with existential and moral
dilemmas. The analysis begins a venture into the enchanted and meaning-
ful landscapes of media sports and explores the journalistic performances
as a re-fusion of broad culture to the scripted sport quest. This spring-
board allows us to single out how media sports provides a live game
mythmaking in modernity and the possibility of iconic flow this might
entail for the sport audience. The analysis ends with a comparative anal-
ogy of the Einherjer, a Viking warrior from Norse mythology, and current
sport media depictions. Leveraging cultural-historical knowledge like this
is not foremost to the benefit of empirical conclusions but of theoretical
evidence. It reveals a deep meaning structuring of competition that tran-
scends time. As part of a social psychoanalysis, it develops ideas of recur-
ring culture structures in Norwegian sport contexts and makes enchant-
ment the achieved fusion of national culture, observed action, and myth
making about chance, fears, hopes, and struggle.
The remainder of media analyses is dedicated to exploring how women
and men athletes, the handballgirls, and the handballboys, their corporal
materiality and actions are assessed by journalists. I map a culture struc-
ture that cuts across the sex binary that separate men and women ath-
letes into their dichotomous categories of play. The social organization of
handball, its rules and regulations are about equal for both. The interpre-
tive code, the binary that the journalists use to understand handball-girls
and boys is also the same. Both women and men, their performances on
the court, are evaluated by the purification of toughness and polluting
of kindness. When this institutional code intersects with bodies, it shapes
handball in subtly varied but gendered ways. The visual corporality of
athletes evoke readings of how chance, fears, hopes, and struggle intersect
with gender in Norway. Myth and sound imitations condense understand-
ings of handball for audiences’ to reinterpret by sensory reading of and
psychological identification with the bodily actions and gendered meaning

encircling the play.
Part II enters into the youth sports arena to explore links between
the sport media’s disseminated meanings and group interaction. I also
look into the meaning-making process generating Norwegian handball
and the iconic handballgirl . We have to backtrack, look into how hand-
ball is learned and how girls in their early teens are socialized into hand-
ballgirls. From the vantage point of their coaches, this femininity is best
directed by re-fusing broad culture and elite sports to reveal how the
game should be experienced and how the young women should sum-
mon the full force of their muscularity. The ability to play with moralities
and passions are key to the performative act in which broad and institu-
tional meaning systems are attempted somaticized through dramaturgy.
The most important requisite to becoming a handballgirl is to be tough—
to perform the code and its system of feeling rules—and to find it felici-
tous. Also at the youth sport arena, in order to win handball matches, it
is important to be unafraid, strong and cooperative. Putting up a smile
in hardship becomes a performative of perseverance in solidary struggles.
It signifies the believed to be fundamental “joy of sport,” an important
aspect of how these Norwegians interpret the game-script’s feeling rules.
No one, the coaches believed, exemplifies the fusion of toughness and joy
in a better way than the iconic handballgirl that circulates in the media
and in their broad egalitarian culture.
The final empirical chapter studies the young handball-man trying
to become a Norwegian handballboy. The iconic handballgirl is ever-
present, as its media image enters the arena, as the young men meet
women peers, and as their mothers, stacked with sport capital, tries to
guide their sons’ play and moralities. But also a global-cultural icon, from
Hollywood, was to assist this team. The 15 years-olds had gotten far in
embodying the game. Yet, the Hollywood movie revealed how bodies,
action, and social life kept on being shaped by and shaping narratives and
myth that primed the athletes for action. Aiming to foresee and control
the uncertainty of outcome, enchantment, even magic, was used to align
culture with the game’s scripted pragmatics. The coach wanted his players
to feel the power of solidarity in competition but it was not for all. Yet,
discrepancies in interpretation did not always dissolve chances of iconic
flow. On the contrary, cultural mastery allowed individual paths in sol-
idary attempts to generate and sustain a multitude of commitments to
the hierarchal democracy. Much of sports’ cultural force and attraction
26 T. B. BROCH
resides within this capacity for parallel flows. The coach was left with a
melting pot of democratic ambition, combative aggression, and wishes
for a sustained team that could escape from the economic and material
obsessions that surrounded their play.
Throughout I question our binaries of fiction vs. reality, tradition vs.
modernity, magic vs. pragmatics, childhood vs. adulthood, and equal-
ity vs. competition. In fact, sports are great for understanding how fic-
tion and media blend into real life. How modernity is still riddled with
magic. How transitions from childhood to adulthood takes the form of
hermeneutic loops. How combat can be civil. For this reason, the social
life of sports cannot be plausibly retold only through the lens of inequal-
ity categories. It is too complex. This does not mean that inequality, or
in this book that gender is irrelevant. It means that gender is as dynamic
as our axiomatic truths hold. That as real bodies take the field, gendered
dreams of toughness and equality shape the act. In sports, these perfor-
mances are guided by a creative play with our collective culture, with
the very categories sociologist love to see the world through. Inside the
game’s scripted realities, we are pushed and pulled between the irrecon-
cilable poles of these categories. Adults keep going back to childhood for
interpretive resources and children endeavor for imagined adult realities.
At times, gender matters. Not all the time, and not always with the effect
of reducing us all to reifications of social inequality or confusing us with
patriarchal ambiguity. Sport meanings and actions, as bodies and game
rhythms, are directed by multiple patterns and landscapes of meaning.
That is what this book is about.
Notes
1. Reed (2011, p. 86) explores the interpretive limits of critical and norma-
tive social sciences. After the cultural turn, gender studies can exemplify
his claims of how narrative, myth, and performance have become among
our favorite tools to make critical and normative sense of culture.
2. See Philip Smith and Jeffrey Alexander (2005) about “The New
Durkheim.”
3. While Durkheim is central to the strong program in cultural sociology, he
failed to theorize the conditions for symbolic action in complex societies
(Alexander, 2004).
4. Caillois (1958/1979), Geertz (1973a), Goffman (1961), and Huizinga

(1938/1950).
5. Geertz (1973b, p. 207) held that ideology critiques reduce social life
to structures of stratification, the “effect they presumably mirror,” or
“the social reality they presumably distort.” More recently, Alexander and
Smith (2003) separates a sociology of culture from a cultural sociology. The
former is concerned with culture as a soft variable explained by social
and material “realities.” The latter is concerned with culture as a strong
variable that can explain how meaning shapes social life. Latour (2005,
p. 8) argues that critical theorists have “confused what they are trying
to explain with the explanation.” Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), hold
that critical sociology emphasizes the academic’s critique rather than the
actors’ uttered and practiced critiques.
6. The common principle of intersectional theory is that various sociological
categories, like gender, race, and class, not only separately but also jointly,
produces inequalities (Choo & Ferree, 2010; Crenshaw, 1989).
7. Nielsen (2014, p. 28, my translation) drawing on Beauvoir (1999) and
Hirdman (1998).
8. West and Zimmerman (1987, p. 126) held that “the doing” of gender is
undertaken by women and men whose competence as members of society
is hostage to its production. Doing gender involves a complex of socially
guided perceptual, interactional, and micro-political activities that cast par-
ticular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine “natures.” They
drew on Connell (1985) to explicate how micro-gender is shored up in
macro-social and structured power relations.
9. Gender theorizing “requires a theory of social structure,” Connell told us
in 1987 (p. 91) and again in (2002).
10. West and Fenstermaker (1995) reworked “doing gender” into a study of
“doing difference.” Today, West and Zimmerman (2009) argue that the
concepts are commonplace, to the point in which scholars like Butler’s
(2004) never cites their work. The concept still holds a prominent posi-
tion in holding individuals’ accountable for undoing and redoing of patri-
archy (Connell, 2009; Messerschmidt, 2009) and in showing how situated
interaction is linked to diversified structural inequalities (Jones, 2009).
Connell’s (1987, 2005) used Gramsci’s hegemony theory to conceptu-
alize “hegemonic masculinity.” Critiqued for an exaggerated emphasis on
social structure, Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) reworked the theory
to encompass interrelations between hegemonic, subordinated, complicit
and marginalized, local and global men. Still keeping a focus on revealing
a global patriarchy (Messerschmidt, 2009, 2012).
11. Hall (1999, p. 186) notes that there is no sense of a voluntarist subject in
Butler’s (1998, 2004) notion of performativity, “as actors are little more
than ventriloquists, iterating the gendered acts that have become before
28 T. B. BROCH
them.” Butler’s actors either reproduce or bend empirical and theoretical

gender norms.
12. Carrington (2010, pp. 11–12) points to Connell (1987, 2000), Kimmel
(2008), and Messner’s (1992) work.
13. The literature is extensive (Follo, 2012; Grindstaff & West, 2011; Hov-
den, 2010; Hovden & Rafoss, 2017; Messner, 2002; Musto, Cooky, &
Messner, 2017; Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2009; Spaaij, Farquharson, & Mar-
joribanks, 2015). See for example Bruce (2013) for an introduction.
14. Disciplinary leaders note that sport sociology since the late 1970s and
early 1980s have been led by neo-Marxist, feminist, and Marxist-feminist
scholars who opted for a critical use of research to “purify” the “patho-
logical” sport-forms under capitalism (Coakley & Dunning, 2002) and
patriarchy (Theberge, 2002).
15. Reproduction (Gee, 2009; Messner & Sabo, 1994) and challenges (E.
Anderson, 2008; Coad, 2008).
16. Bäckström (2013), Cooky (2006), and Messner (2013).
17. Daniels (2009) and Davis-Delano, Pollock, and Vose (2009).
18. Markula (2003) presents a Foucaultian analysis and Thorpe using (2008,
2009, 2010) both Bourdieu and Foucault to provide slightly varied, yet
critical angels on gendered inequality in sport life.
19. Norwegian gender and sport researchers argue that central values and
norms in society correspond with central values and norms in sport to
normalizes “masculinity” as superior and “femininity” as inferior (Fasting,
1998, 2011; Fasting, Pfister, & Scraton, 2004). This is so through the
Bourdieusian concept of doxa (Sisjord, 2009; von der Lippe, 1997), the
Connellist concept of hegemony (Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2008, 2009; von
der Lippe, 2010), and Foucaultian ideas of discourse (Hjelseth & Hovden,
2014; Hovden, 2010).
20. Bernstein and Kian (2013, p. 324) and Markula (2009, p. 12).
21. Borcila (2000), Bruce (2009), and Koh (2009).
22. Sport sociology, they say, is “a field of scholarship that has paid consider-
able attention to the ways in which sport has been applied instrumentally
in order to advance or shore up state, class and gender interests” (Dyck
& Archetti, 2003, p. 13; See also Dyck, 2000, 2012; MacAloon, 1992,
pp. 106–107).
23. Meier (1988) and Suits (1988).
24. Mead (1934/2015) and Winnicott (1971/2005, p. 64).
25. I borrow the concept of strategies of action from Swidler (1986), but
instead of insisting that micro and institutional settings exercise monopoly
over causality, I rely on her later moves toward semiotics and notes on
how institutional codes (Swidler, 2003) and broad cultural semiotic axes
(Tavory & Swidler, 2009) shape social action.
26. Goffman (1961, p. 78) draws on Erikson (1937) to show how psychoso-
cial worlds are shaped in interaction.
27. In theorizing the meaning of social structures, Spillman (2002a) and
Alexander (2004, 2011) draw on Austin’s (1957) and Goffman’s (1959,
1983) use of the concept of felicity. Social structures are successfully
brought to bear on purposeful meaning making, not because of its truth-
value, but as actors strive to be content with how interaction shapes social
categories and relations.
28. Reed (2011), Small (2009), and Spillman (2014).
29. Knoppers and Anthonissen (2003), Markula (2009), Messner, Dunbar,
and Hunt (2000), Musto et al. (2017), Scraton, Fasting, Pfister, and
Bunuel (1999), Wenner (2004), and Wensing and Bruce (2003).
30. Smith (2017) draws on Jack Katz (2016) who theorize how macro and
micro culture, or meanings about a culture and within a culture, are
linked. “Feedback loops” between meaningful micro actions and macro
culture, they argue, shape actions and representation, motivation and
opportunity.
31. Spillman (2002b, p. 26) argues that cultural sociology bridges the gap
between an anthropological study of culture as a “whole way of life” with
a sociological concern for culture as production outcomes and the sym-
bols, meanings, and values in particular social locations and the specialized
institutions that organize our social life.
32. As a stark contrast to the North American games of baseball and foot-
ball that are (almost) exclusively for men, it is difficult to make assertive
claims about the gendered conception of many other sports as they seem
to fluctuate historically due to visibility and merits. It is nonetheless inter-
esting that handball, with its glaring physical aspects, has for long come
to be defined as a women’s game in Norway. That it seems to fluctuate
between the genders, or to be seen as gender neutral in Sweden and Den-
mark. That the game is considered as a more typical men’s game in France
and Germany where men have historically outnumbered women athletes
(Goksøyr, 2008; Grahn, 2008, p. 100; von der Lippe, 1997, 2002).
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Mon aimé vivait près de moi,
Hélas! il partit pour Alger!
Son œil était noir,
Il avait de longs cils,
Et les vêtements lui seyaient.
Mon aimé me quitta!...

S’en fut avec lui le bonheur de l’esprit,
Jusqu’à quand, ô Dieu!
Œil de mon cœur,
Ta beauté me sera-t-elle cachée?
Je te recommande, ô fils d’Adam!

N’attache pas ton âme
A celle qui n’a souci de toi.
Vois l’œil de la femme,
C’est lui ta balance. Il t’indiquera
Si elle t’aime ou ne t’aime pas.

N’attache pas ton âme
A une étrangère, à une chanteuse.
Avec elle tu te réjouirais dans les fêtes
Chaque jour au son des instruments...
Puis tu serais dépouillé, misérable,
Honteux de tes caftans en haillons...

N’oublie pas celle que tu laissa,
Pleurant et griffant son visage...
Mon cœur n’a plus de joie
Et la vie loin de toi m’est à charge...
Combien de temps, ô Dieu!
Œil de mon cœur,
Ta beauté me sera-t-elle cachée?
27 novembre.
C’est un triste patio, tout décoré de stucs et de peintures aux ors vieillis.
Mais les murailles oppressent l’étroite cour, elles semblent étrangler le ciel,
dont un carré se dessine au-dessus des arcades. Une terne lueur glisse le
long des parois humides, les salles s’emplissent d’ombre et les reflets de
leurs brocarts y meurent, exténués.
Il fait gris et froid chez Mouley Abdallah; mon cœur est serré d’angoisse
par la mélancolie des choses, tandis que j’attends Lella Meryem.
Elle arrive, éblouissante de jeunesse, de parure et de beauté. On dirait
que l’air s’échauffe tout à coup, que la lumière vibre, plus ardente, qu’une
nuée d’oiseaux s’est abattue auprès de moi.
Elle gazouille, elle rit, elle s’agite. Elle me pose mille questions et ne me
laisse pas le temps d’y répondre. Elle proteste de son affection, me prodigue
les flatteries et les compliments, remercie le Seigneur de m’avoir envoyée
vers elle... Je n’ai pu encore placer une parole... C’est une folle petite
mésange qui s’enivre de son babillage. Et je m’étonne qu’un tel entrain,
qu’une exubérance aussi joyeuse puissent s’ébattre en pareille cage!...
Même en de plus riants décors, je ne connus jamais que des Musulmanes
nonchalantes et graves, inconsciemment accablées par leur destin.
Mais Lella Meryem ne ressemble à aucune autre.
On ne perçoit d’abord que l’ensorcellement de ses yeux, noirs,
immenses, allongés de kohol; des yeux au regard affolant sous l’arc sombre
des sourcils. Ils pétillent et s’éteignent, ils s’alanguissent et se raniment,
tour à tour candides, sensuels, étonnés ou provocants. Ils sont toute la
lumière et toutes les ténèbres, étincelants comme des joyaux, et plus
mystérieux que l’onde au fond des puits. Ils éclipsent les autre grâces dont
Allah combla Lella Meryem.
Car sa bouche est une fleur d’églantier prête à s’ouvrir; ses dents, les
boutons de l’oranger; sa peau, un pétale délicat; son petit nez frémissant, un
faucon posé au milieu d’un parterre.
En vérité, Mouley Abdallah ne trouverait nulle part une femme aussi
séduisante, et ses promesses me semblent à présent moins extraordinaires.
Lella Meryem prépare le thé, tout en continuant à bavarder. Ses gestes
sont harmonieux, d’un charme rare; les petites mains rougies au henné
manient gracieusement les ustensiles d’argent et chacun de ses mouvements
révèle la souplesse de son corps, malgré l’ampleur des vêtements. Elle porte
un caftan rose et une tfina[17] de gaze citron pâle, qu’une ceinture brodée
d’or plisse à la taille en reflets chatoyants. La sebenia[18] violette, bien
tendue sur les demmouges[19], encadre son visage comme une ancienne
coiffure égyptienne. Un seul bijou brille au milieu de son front, plaque d’or
rehaussée de rubis et de diamants, en dessous de laquelle se balance un
minuscule croissant, dont la larme d’émeraude atteint l’extrémité des
sourcils.
—Je t’attendais depuis tant de jours! s’exclame-t-elle. Les négresses
m’avaient rapporté que tu habites chez Mouley Hassan, père de mon
époux... Combien grande mon impatience de te connaître!... Je ne vis
aucune Nazaréenne avant toi... Tu me plais! Promets-moi de revenir
souvent... Je ne reçois jamais personne, comprends-tu... Mouley Abdallah
ne me permet même pas de monter à la terrasse... Tu es la joie qu’Allah
m’envoie! Ne me fais pas languir trop longtemps en ton absence.
Je promis tout ce qu’elle voulut. Et j’ai quitté la triste maison, stupéfaite,
ensorcelée, ravie, les yeux éblouis de soleil, et la tête pleine de chansons.
30 novembre.
Mouley Hassan nous a trouvé une demeure voisine de la sienne. Le vizir
qui l’édifia mourut il y a quelques années, et les exactions du
moqaddem[20], des notaires, et du cadi, ont abouti au morcellement de ses
biens.
Parce qu’un tuteur fut déshonnête, nous vivrons au milieu des splendeurs
que le vizir Hafidh conçut pour la joie de ses yeux, et celle de ses
descendants... Étendus sur des sofas, nous déchiffrerons les inscriptions
désabusées qui se déroulent parmi les dentelles en stuc.
Dieu seul est grand!

Lui seul persiste!
La seule paix durable.
C’est à Lui que nous retournerons.
Les plafonds de cèdre, ciselés, peints et dorés, les lourdes portes, les
mosaïques aux miroitantes étoiles, les vitraux enchâssés en des alvéoles de
stuc, dispensant un jour plus mystérieux, les salles immenses et les boudoirs
de sultanes, précieux, étincelants et secrets, rivalisent de somptuosité avec
le palais voisin. Et l’on dit que le menzeh, d’où l’on embrasse un si
prestigieux panorama depuis les chaînes du Zerhoun jusqu’aux cimes
lointaines de l’Atlas, ne fut élevé, par le vizir, que pour masquer la vue à la
maison du Chérif, qu’il jalousait.
Une lutte sournoise divisa ces deux hommes, d’orgueil égal, qui
n’osèrent s’attaquer de face; chacun prétendant surpasser l’autre en
magnificence.
Outre l’intérêt qu’il nous porte, Mouley Hassan, dont les démarches
parvinrent à nous obtenir cette demeure, n’est pas sans jouir de la pensée
que toutes ces merveilles auront été réalisées par son rival pour la joie de
Nazaréens.... Et, sans doute, est-ce à ce mobile inavoué que nous devrons
de vivre en un tel cadre de beauté.
Tandis que le vizir Hafidh se réjouissait avec ses hôtes, dans les salles
supérieures, ouvertes par cinq arcades devant «le monde entier»—le vallon,
les collines, les montagnes bleues, du matin, et roses, du crépuscule,—les
femmes végétaient en ces longues pièces luxueuses et sombres qui donnent
sur le riadh.
Mélancolie charmante du jardin revenu à l’état sauvage!
Allées de mosaïque jonchées de feuilles mortes; vasque de marbre,
verdâtre et branlante, dont l’eau ruisselle avec un bruit de sanglot; tonnelle
de passiflores, jamais émondée, que soutiennent des bois tournés et
vermoulus; enchevêtrement des rosiers, des lianes et des bananiers aux
larges palmes; oranges mûrissantes, dans le vert cru des feuillages; petits
pavillons précieusement peints, lavés par toutes les pluies; et les fleurs des
églantiers, pâles, décolorées, d’être nées à l’ombre de murailles vétustes et
trop hautes...
En ces mois d’automne, le soleil ne dore plus que le faîte des arbres et le
jardin frissonne, humide et morose dans la lumière glauque de ses bosquets.
Quelques lézards sinuent, rapides, à la poursuite d’un insecte; des merles
sautillent à travers les branches d’un vieux poirier; les guêpes tournoient en
bourdonnant, qui ont fait leur ruche entre les stalactites dorées des arcades.
Il semble que l’on réveille une demeure enchantée, où les araignées
tissaient paisiblement leurs toiles sur les ciselures merveilleuses, depuis que
la mort emporta le «Maître des choses» en la Clémence d’Allah.
2 décembre.
—Balek! Balek![21] crie le mokhazni qui m’accompagne, en me frayant
un passage au milieu de la foule.
Je cherche vainement à modérer son ardeur, à lui faire comprendre que
les souks appartiennent à tous, que je dois supporter comme un autre leur
encombrement matinal. Kaddour ne peut admettre que la femme du
hakem[22] soit arrêtée dans sa marche, et, malgré mes objurgations, il
continue à écarter les gens par des: Balek! de plus en plus retentissants.
Kaddour est un grand diable, maigre, nerveux, tout d’un jet, attaché
spécialement au service de mon mari. Les yeux pétillent dans sa face
presque noire; une petite barbe frisotte sur ses joues osseuses; le nez s’étale
avec satisfaction; les lèvres, épaisses et violacées, grimacent d’un large rire
en découvrant les dents très blanches. Un mélange de sauvagerie et
d’intelligence anime son visage expressif; ses djellaba négligées bâillent sur
le caftan, et son turban semble toujours sortir de quelque bagarre. Mais
Kaddour porte fièrement le burnous bleu des mokhaznis et son allure a
quelque chose de noble.
Il marche d’un pas souple et bondissant, tel un sloughi. Monté, il évoque
les guerriers du Sahara. Les piétons s’écartent en hâte devant les ruades et
les écarts de son cheval qu’il éperonne sans cesse, pour l’orgueil de le
dompter tandis qu’il se cabre.
Kaddour est pénétré de ses mérites: il sait tout, il comprend tout.
En vérité, débrouillard, vif et malin, il a trouvé moyen de nous procurer
les plus invraisemblables objets, d’installer notre demeure aux escaliers
étroits, de passer les meubles par les terrasses, et de nous carotter[23] sur les
achats. Il se révèle serviteur précieux et pittoresque, d’un dévouement à
toute épreuve. Kaddour paraît déjà nous aimer et s’apprête à nous exploiter
discrètement, comme il convient vis-à-vis de bons maîtres qui ont du bien,
et pour lesquels on donnerait au besoin sa vie.
Nous quittons les souks où les esclaves, les bourgeois aux blanches
draperies, les femmes du peuple emmitouflées dans leurs haïks, se pressent
autour des échoppes. Les petits ânes, chargés de légumes, trottinent dans la
cohue qui s’ouvre et se referme avec une inlassable patience. Parfois un
notable, campé sur une mule, passe imperturbable et digne.
Les ruelles s’engourdissent alentour dans la tiédeur du soleil, plus
calmes, plus solitaires par le contraste de leur bruyant voisinage...
—Veux-tu entrer chez moi? C’est ici, me dit le mokhazni en désignant
une impasse.
Avant que j’aie le temps de lui répondre, il a bondi jusqu’à une porte, à
laquelle il heurte en proférant des «ouvre!» impérieux.
La femme se dissimule derrière le battant qu’elle entrebâille, et elle
prononce les formules de bienvenue. Puis elle nous précède jusqu’au patio,
modeste et délabré, sur lequel donnent deux pièces tout en longueur. Mais
les carreaux rougeâtres reluisent, bien lavés; aucun linge, aucun ustensile ne
traîne, les matelas très durs sont garnis de coussins, et une bouillotte fume
dans un coin sur un canoun de terre.
Accroupi près de la porte, Kaddour prépare le thé avec autant de grâce et
de soin que Mouley Hassan.
Ce n’est plus notre mokhazni, mais un Arabe dont je suis l’hôte.
Astucieux, il avait prévu ma visite et a su m’attirer dans son quartier.
Zeineb porte un caftan neuf et une tfina fraîchement blanchie.
—C’est la fille d’un notaire, m’apprend Kaddour avec satisfaction; du
reste, moi-même je suis Chérif!
Qui n’est pas Chérif à Meknès?
La jeune femme verse l’eau chaude sans omettre de me congratuler selon
les règles. Elle a de beaux yeux, dont la nuance grise étonne, et un visage
régulier. C’est une vraie citadine à la peau blanche, aux allures
langoureuses; mais des éclairs traversent parfois ses prunelles, sous l’ombre
des cils palpitants...
Elle me présente sa sœur Mina, une grande fille timide et pâle, à l’air
niais; puis elle m’apporte de l’eau de rose et un mouchoir brodé qu’elle
tient à m’offrir.
Une humble allégresse anime le petit patio: des canaris gazouillent en
leurs cages, quelques plantes égayent des poteries grossières, et le soleil
glisse de beaux rayons dorés jusqu’à la margelle d’un puits ouvrant son œil
presque au ras du sol, dans un vétuste encadrement de mosaïques.
5 décembre.
Les vêtements des Marocaines ne sont point, comme les nôtres, de coupe
compliquée. La tchamir, le caftan et la tfina—tuniques superposées, en
forme de kimonos,—ne diffèrent que par le tissu, et se taillent sur un même
modèle.
Le tchamir est de percale blanche; le caftan, de drap, de satin ou de
brocart aux couleurs vives; la tfina, toujours transparente, en simple
mousseline ou en gaze d’impalpable soie.
Une ceinture, brodée d’or, retient les plis autour de la taille; une
cordelière relève l’ampleur des manches. Les pieds, teints de henné,
chaussent négligemment des cherbil en velours, où s’enlacent les broderies
à l’éclat métallique.
Les cheveux se dissimulent sous la sebenia, large foulard de soie, parfois
couronnée d’un turban.
Ce sont bien les vêtements lourds, embarrassants et vagues, convenant à
ces éternelles recluses qui, d’une allure toujours très lasse, évoluent entre
les divans... Les fillettes et les aïeules portent des robes identiques.
Seulement les matrones adoptent des nuances plus sévères, et, puisque leur
temps de plaire est passé, elles se gardent des tissus aux dessins fantaisistes
qui font le bonheur des jeunes femmes.
Dès qu’une batiste nouvelle, un satin jusqu’alors inconnu, sont mis en
vente à la kissaria[24] toutes les Musulmanes de Meknès se sentent ravagées
d’un même désir.
Aussitôt les unes se montrent plus caressantes, pour enjôler leurs époux;
les autres sacrifient le gain d’un travail de broderie; celle-ci confie à la
vieille Juive—habituelle et complaisante messagère,—une sebenia dont elle
veut se défaire; celle-là, moins scrupuleuse, dérobe, sur les provisions
domestiques, un peu d’orge, de farine ou d’huile, qu’elle revendra
clandestinement...
Ainsi, la batiste nouvelle, le satin inconnu suscitent, à travers la cité,
mille ruses, mille travaux et mille baisers... Et soudain, toutes les belles—
riches citadines et petites bourgeoises—s’en trouvent uniformément parées.
Il faut être une bien pauvre femme, dénuée d’argent, de grâce et d’astuce,
pour ne point revêtir l’attrayante nouveauté.
Or, comme les modes ne varient point, ou si peu, toutes les Musulmanes,
en l’Empire Fortuné,—de Marrakech à Taza, de l’enfance à la sénilité—se
ressemblent étrangement, quant à la toilette, et les très anciennes sultanes,
au temps de Mouley Ismaïl, portaient sans doute, avec le même air
d’accablement, des caftans aux larges manches et de volumineux turbans.
Encore, y a-t-il, pour chacune, des traditions et des règles qui
restreignent, dans les couleurs, la liberté de leur fantaisie: le «bleu geai», le
vert, le noir, le «raisin sec» ne conviennent qu’aux blanches, à celles dont la
chair est de lait et que le poète compare volontiers à des lunes.
Les peaux ambrées se font valoir par des roses, des «pois chiches», des
«radis» et des «soleils couchants».
Les négresses attisent leurs brûlants attraits avec la violence des rouges
et des jaunes qu’exaspèrent leurs faces de nuit.
Nulle n’oserait essayer les nuances interdites à son teint par l’expérience
des générations et des générations.
Lella Meryem s’indigna fort de ce beau caftan orange, dont les ramages
d’argent sinuaient, à travers les plis, en éclairs acides et en arabesques
délicatement grises, et que je voulais m’acheter pour des noces.
—O ma sœur! tu n’y songes pas! Les gens se moqueraient de toi en
disant: «La femme du hakem ne sait pas mieux s’habiller qu’une
bédouine...» A toi qu’Allah combla de ses grâces et fit plus blanche qu’un
réal d’argent, il faut les teintes sombres ou tendres.
Elle me choisit un brocart jasmin salok, qui est d’un violet presque
groseille, un autre vert émeraude fleuri d’or et un troisième où des bouquets
multicolores s’épanouissent dans les ténèbres du satin.
Aujourd’hui, j’ai trouvé Lella Meryem assombrie d’une préoccupation...
Elle tenait à la main un morceau de tulle blanc couvert de légères guirlandes
brodées.
—Vois, me dit-elle, ce madnous (persil) qui vient d’arriver à la kissaria.
Vois combien joli sur mon caftan «cœur de rose»! J’en voudrais avoir une
tfina. Et cette chienne de Friha qui s’est fâchée parce que je n’ai pas voulu
lui donner plus de trois réaux d’une sebenia qu’elle m’apportait!... Voici un
demi-mois qu’elle ne revient plus ici!... Oh mon malheur! Qui donc fera
mes achats désormais, si cette Juive de péché se détourne de moi! Puisse-t-
elle être rôtie dans la fournaise! On m’a dit que Lella el Kebira, Lella
Maléka, Lella Zohor et tant d’autres ont déjà leur «persil», alors que moi je
n’en n’ai pas!
Le joli visage de la Cherifa se contracte d’une enfantine petite moue...
J’ai pitié de son extrême détresse, et propose d’aller faire l’achat de ce
«persil» passionnément désiré.
Le kissaria, le marché aux étoffes, n’est pas loin. Elle forme plusieurs
rues couvertes, le long desquelles s’alignent des échoppes qui sont grandes
comme des placards. Graves et blancs, enturbannés de mousseline, les
marchands se tiennent accroupis dans leurs boutiques minuscules, au milieu
des cotonnades, des draps et des soieries. Ils ont des gestes harmonieux en
touchant les étoffes, de longs doigts pâles où brille une seule bague, des airs
exquis et distingués. Ils me saluent avec déférence, une main appuyée sur le
cœur et le regard doucement souriant. Je m’arrête devant Si Mohammed el
Fasi; il étale aussitôt, pour que je m’asseye, un morceau de drap rose, sur
les mosaïques du degré qui donne accès à son échoppe. Après mille
salutations et politesses raffinées, il me montre les différents «persils» aux
guirlandes bleues, mauves ou jaunes, dont les élégantes de Meknès veulent
toutes avoir des tfinat...
Alentour, des femmes berbères discutent âprement pour quelques
coudées de cotonnade. Des Juives, des esclaves, des Marocaines,
enveloppées de leurs haïks, se livrent à d’interminables marchandages, sans
que les placides négociants se départent de leur indifférence.
Toutes ces échoppes si jolies, si gaies avec leurs boiseries peintes, leurs
volets précieusement décorés, évoquent une suite de petites chapelles,
devant lesquelles de blanches nonnes font leurs dévotions...
Combien de belles, qui ne connaîtront jamais ce souk où les boutiques
regorgent des étoffes dont elles rêvent, attendent, derrière les murs, le retour
de leurs messagères!...
Alors, je me hâte à travers les ruelles ensoleillées, car je rapporte un
trésor: le «persil» de Lella Meryem.
7 décembre.
Yasmine et Kenza, les petites adoptées que nous avions laissées à Rabat,
arrivent avec notre serviteur le Hadj Messaoud, très ahuries par ce long
voyage qu’il leur fallut faire pour nous rejoindre.
Misérables fillettes du Sous que leur destin conduisit chez des
Nazaréens, elles y ont pris l’âme de Marocaines habituées au luxe des
villes. Oubliant les gourbis de terre et les tentes en poils de chèvre, elles
évoluent sans étonnement dans notre nouvelle et somptueuse demeure.
—Celle de Rabat était mieux, déclarent elles. Par les fenêtres on
apercevait toute la ville française!... Ici, on ne voit que les maisons du
pays...
—Mais il y a des mosaïques et des stucs ciselés.
—Qu’ai-je à faire de ces choses à nous? riposte Yasmine.
Pourtant, la terrasse les ravit, car elles pourront y bavarder, au
crépuscule, avec des voisines.
—O ma mère! sais-tu comment ces femmes portent la tfina?... Étrange
est leur coutume!
Non, certes, je n’avais pas remarqué ce détail...
Il y a quelques heures à peine que Yasmine et Kenza sont arrivées, et
déjà elles retroussent élégamment leurs tuniques, selon la mode de Meknès!
8 décembre.
Des babillages au-dessus de la ville, lorsque le soleil déclinant magnifie
les plus humbles choses...
Les vieux remparts rougissent ainsi que des braises; les minarets
étincellent par mille reflets de leurs faïences; les hirondelles, qui tournoient
à la poursuite des moucherons, semblent des oiseaux d’or évoluant dans
l’impalpable et changeante fantaisie du ciel.
Pépiements, disputes, bavardages, cris de femmes et d’oiseaux...
L’ombre de Meknès s’allonge, toute verte, sur le coteau voisin et
l’envahit... Le dôme d’un petit marabout, ardent comme une orange au
milieu des feuillages, n’est plus, soudain, qu’une coupole laiteuse, d’un
bleu délicat. La lumière trop vive s’est atténuée, les montagnes
s’enveloppent de brumes chatoyantes et pâles... seuls, les caftans des
Marocaines jettent encore une note dure dans l’apaisement du crépuscule.
Ils s’agitent sur toutes les terrasses. Ils sont rouges, violets, jaunes ou verts,
excessivement. Leurs larges manches flottent au rythme convenu d’un
langage par signes. Ainsi les femmes communiquent, de très loin, avec
d’autres qu’elles n’approcheront jamais.
A cette heure, elles dominent la ville, interdisant aux hommes l’accès
des terrasses. Elles surgissent au-dessus des demeures, où elles attendirent
impatiemment l’instant de détente et de presque liberté, dans l’étendue que
balaye le vent... Mais il est des recluses, plus recluses que les autres, les très
nobles, les très gardées, qui ne connaîtront jamais les vastes horizons, ni les
chaînes du Zerhoun sinuant derrière la ville, ni les voisines bavardes et
curieuses... Et les Cherifat sentent leur cœur plus pesant lorsque l’ombre
envahit les demeures. Elles songent à celles qui s’ébattent là-haut: les
esclaves, les fillettes, les femmes de petite naissance...
Combien leur sort est enviable! Quelques-unes se livrent aux escalades
les plus hardies pour rejoindre des amies. Elles se montrent une étoffe,
échangent des sucreries et des nouvelles. Rien ne saurait égaler la saveur
d’une histoire scandaleuse!
Mais elles restent indifférentes à la magie du soir.
Une adolescente, ma voisine de terrasse, se tient à l’écart des groupes,
toujours pensive.
Un obsédant souci contracte sa bouche aux lèvres charnues. Elle a le
visage rond, les joues fermes et brunes, un nez légèrement épaté, des yeux
plus noirs que les raisins du Zerhoun. Lella Oum Keltoum n’est pas belle,
mais elle possède d’immenses richesses.
Son père, Sidi M’hammed Lifrani, mourut il y a quelques années. C’était
un cousin de Mouley Hassan. Il ne laissa qu’une fille, héritière de sa
fortune, ma sauvage petite voisine.
Je la salue:
—Il n’y a pas de mal sur toi?
—Il n’y a pas de mal, répond-elle sans un sourire.
Le silence nous sépare de nouveau, comme chaque soir, car je n’ai pas su
encore apprivoiser la taciturne. Lella Oum Keltoum détourne la tête et son
regard s’en va très loin, dans le vague du ciel... Les esclaves bavardent et
rient, accoutumées sans doute à cette étrange mélancolie. Une grosse
négresse, flamboyante de fard, promène ses airs repus en des vêtements trop
somptueux. Ses formes, d’une plénitude abusive, roulent et tanguent à
chacun de ses pas. Une aimable grimace épanouit, en mon honneur, sa face
de brute, tandis qu’elle s’approche de la terrasse.
—Comment vas-tu?
—Avec le bien... Quel est ton état?
—Grâce à Dieu!
—Qui es-tu?
—La «maîtresse des choses» en cette demeure, répond-elle, non sans
une vaniteuse complaisance.
—Je croyais que Sidi M’hammed Lifrani,—Dieu le garde en sa
Miséricorde!—n’avait laissé aucune épouse?
—Certes! mais moi, j’ai enfanté de lui Lella Oum Keltoum.
—Ah! c’est ta fille... Elle semble malade, la pauvre!
—Oui, sa tête est folle... Aucun toubib ne connaît de remède à ce mal,
ricane la négresse en s’éloignant.
La fillette, qui épiait notre entretien, me jette un regard malveillant.
Qu’ai-je fait pour m’attirer sa rancune?
Je voudrais l’apaiser, mais elle a disparu tout à coup, comme une
chevrette effarouchée.
La cité crépusculaire se vide.
La nuit bleuit doucement, noyant d’ombre les choses éteintes. La vallée
devient un fleuve ténébreux, les montagnes ne sont plus que d’onduleuses
silhouettes. Un grand silence plane sur la ville.
Tous les oiseaux ont regagné leurs nids, et toutes les femmes, leurs
demeures.
10 décembre.
Lella Meryem incline aux confidences. Par elle j’apprends les petits
secrets des harems, ceux que les autres ne diront pas, malgré leur amitié.
—Tu es plus que ma sœur, déclare-t-elle, j’ai mesuré ton entendement.
—Pourquoi, lui ai-je demandé, n’habitez-vous pas, selon la coutume,
chez le père de ton mari? Là, tu te plairais auprès de Lella Fatima Zohra, là
des jardins où te promener, des fontaines toujours murmurantes...
—Sans doute, me répondit-elle, mais là se trouve Mouley Hassan.
Son regard compléta les paroles, et je devinai: Mouley Abdallah, homme
de sens, voulut soustraire sa charmante gazelle aux coups d’un chasseur
endurci.
Certes, ce serait un grand péché devant Allah, que de jeter les yeux sur
l’épouse de son fils! Mais Mouley Hassan ne sait pas refréner ses désirs, et,
peut-être, croit-il à des droits d’exception, pour un personnage tel que lui...
Qui blâmerait la prudence de Mouley Abdallah, possesseur d’une perle
si rare, à l’éclat merveilleux?
—O Puissant! que de négresses, que de vierges! s’exclame la petite
Cherifa. Mouley Hassan se rend à Fès chaque fois qu’arrive un convoi
d’esclaves et il en ramène les plus belles. Lella Fatima Zohra montre bien
de la patience! Et que ferait-elle, la pauvre? Mouley Hassan l’a rejetée
comme un vieux caftan... Sais-tu, continue-t-elle, les yeux brillants, que,
malgré sa barbe blanche, il veut encore épouser une jeune fille!
—Un jour, Lella Fatima Zohra m’en a parlé, mais j’ignore même le nom
de celle qu’il choisit.
—C’est Lella Oum Keltoum, ta voisine de terrasse, tu dois la connaître?
Lella Oum Keltoum! La sombre fillette que ne peuvent distraire les
splendeurs du couchant ni la réunion des femmes bavardes...
—Pourquoi le Chérif la convoite-t-il ainsi? Elle n’est pas même jolie... Il
ne manque pas à Meknès de vierges plus attirantes.
—Oui, me répond Lella Meryem, mais il ne saurait trouver, dans tout le
pays, une héritière aussi fortunée. Or, Mouley Hassan aime les réaux
d’argent autant que les jouvencelles, et il veut épouser Lella Oum Keltoum
bien qu’elle se refuse obstinément à ce mariage.
—Depuis quand, ô ma sœur, les vierges sont-elles consultées sur le choix
de leur époux? Voici des années que je vis parmi les Musulmanes, et, de ma
vie, je n’entendis parler de ceci.
—O judicieuse! telle est en effet notre coutume, et les adolescentes sont
mariées par leur père ou leur tuteur, sans avoir jamais vu celui qu’elles
épousent... Alors comment donneraient-elles leur avis, et qui songerait à le
leur demander!... Par Allah, ce serait inouï, et bien malséant! Mais, pour ce
qui est de Lella Oum Keltoum, les choses sont différentes.
»C’est une étrange histoire entre les histoires:
»Son père, Sidi M’hammed Lifrani—Dieu l’ait en sa Miséricorde,—était
un cousin de Mouley Hassan. Il a laissé d’immenses richesses. Combien de
vergers, de terres, d’oliveraies, de silos pleins de blé, de pressoirs d’huile!
Et des moutons, des négresses, des sacs de douros empilés dans les
chambres!... Quand il mourut, à défaut d’héritier mâle, une partie de ses
biens retournèrent au Makhzen, et Lella Oum Keltoum, son unique enfant,
eut le reste. C’était encore la moitié du pays.
»Or, il y avait eu, du temps de son père, une rivalité entre les deux
cousins: Mouley Hassan détestait Sidi M’hammed Lifrani, plus riche et plus
puissant que lui... On dit qu’il essaya, par des cadeaux au grand vizir, de
remplacer son cousin qui était Khalifa du Sultan. Il n’y parvint pas. Plus
tard, une réconciliation étant intervenue, Mouley Hassan prétendit, pour
l’assurer, faire un contrat de noces avec Lella Oum Keltoum. Elle perdait à
peine ses petites dents!
»Sidi M’hammed chérissait sa fille, la seule enfant qu’Allah lui eût
conservée. Il refusa de la donner à son cousin, disant que ce serait un péché
de marier, à un homme déjà vieux, une fillette à peine oublieuse de la
mamelle. Mais à partir de ce moment, il eut peur... Quand il sentit ployer
ses os, il fit venir les notaires, et arrangea toutes ses affaires.
»Et voici pour Lella Oum Keltoum: il déclara dans son testament, par
une formule très sacrée, qu’elle désignerait elle-même son époux, fût-il
chrétien, fût-il juif,—hachek[25]!—pourvu qu’il se convertit à l’Islam. Et
que son consentement devrait être donné par elle devant notaires, et inscrit
dans un acte, pour que son mariage pût être célébré.
»Le Cadi fut très scandalisé d’une pareille volonté, si contraire à nos
usages. Mais la clause était valable, inscrite dans un testament conforme à
la loi, et Sidi M’hammed y avait également inséré, par prudence, un legs
important au Cadi. En sorte qu’il ne pouvait annuler ce testament sans se
léser lui-même.
—Alors, que peut faire Mouley Hassan? Lella Oum Keltoum n’a qu’à
choisir un époux de son gré.
—C’est justement ce qu’avait voulu son père, mais le meilleur cheval,
quand il est mort, ne saurait porter un caillou... Mouley Hassan chercha,
tout d’abord, à faire annuler le testament. Le Cadi s’y refusa. Il voulut
ensuite ramener Lella Oum Keltoum à Meknès. Elle était restée à Fès
comme au temps de son père, et elle échappait mieux, ainsi, aux desseins du
Chérif.
»Le tuteur, un homme juste et craignant Dieu, essaya de s’opposer à ce
retour; il connaissait les convoitises de Mouley Hassan. Alors celui-ci
demanda sa révocation. Certes, il dut payer beaucoup, car il l’obtint. Un
autre tuteur fut nommé, et commencèrent les tourments de Lella Oum
Keltoum. Elle vit entourée d’ennemis. Sa mère, Marzaka, est la plus
mauvaise; une esclave ne saurait avoir qu’un cœur d’esclave. Mouley
Hassan acheta sa complicité par des cadeaux. C’est Marzaka elle-même qui
a traîné sa fille à Meknès, malgré sa résistance.
—Et si Lella Oum Keltoum désignait un autre homme!
—Elle l’a voulu. Par défi, elle prétendait épouser un nègre affranchi.
Mouley Hassan interdit aux notaires d’aller recevoir sa déclaration, et
Marzaka battit sa fille jusqu’à ce que la peau s’attachât aux cordes... Quant
au nègre, on ignore ce qu’il devint, et les gens disent en parlant de lui:
—«Qu’Allah l’ait en sa miséricorde!» comme pour un mort...
—S’il plaît à Dieu! m’écriai-je, Lella Oum Keltoum finira par l’emporter
sur tous ces perfides!
—Qui le sait! Nul n’échappe à son destin. Tu connais l’histoire de ce
marchand trop prudent: pour éviter les voleurs, il coucha dans un fondouk.
Or la terrasse était vieille et s’écroula sur lui... Sa mort était écrite cette
nuit-là.
—Ne crains-tu pas, si Mouley Hassan parvient à épouser Lella Oum
Keltoum, qu’il ne se venge de ses refus?
—Allah!... Tu ne connais pas les hommes! Il se réjouira d’elle parce
qu’elle est jeune, et de ses biens, puisqu’elle est riche. Et sa résistance, qui
l’irrite à présent, il la jugera tout à fait excellente, quand elle sera sa femme.
Une vierge pudique et bien gardée ne saurait agir autrement à l’égard de
l’homme qu’elle doit épouser, même si le mariage la réjouit secrètement.
Certes Lella Oum Keltoum hait Mouley Hassan à la limite de la haine, car il
fut cause de tous ses maux. Mais il a bien trop d’orgueil pour le croire...
Lella Meryem se tait, lasse d’avoir si longtemps parlé d’une même
chose... et soudain, l’esprit occupé d’un sujet tout aussi passionnant, elle
s’écrie:
—O ma sœur!... le brocart que Lella Maléka portait, dit-on, aux noces de
sa nièce, le connais-tu? sais-tu où l’on en peut avoir?... Pour moi, on l’a
cherché en vain à toutes les boutiques de la Kissaria... Dans ma pensée, elle
l’aura fait venir de Fès.
20 décembre.
Trois fumeurs de kif rêvent au coin de la place devant l’échoppe du
kaouadji[26].
Le jour s’achève, triste et sombre: quelques feuilles d’un vert flétri
jonchent le sol. Elles ne savent pas mourir en beauté. L’automne est une
apothéose pour notre vieux monde, le suprême éclat des choses finissantes,
plus exquises d’être à l’agonie. L’Afrique ne connaît que l’ivresse ardente
du soleil; dès qu’il disparaît, elle s’abandonne, lamentable.
Mais les fumeurs échappent à la mélancolie des saisons: un chardonneret
chante au-dessus de leurs têtes, dans une cage suspendue à l’auvent de la
boutique; un pot de basilic, placé devant leurs yeux, arrondit sa boule verte,
et le kif s’évapore lentement, fumée bleuâtre, au bout des longues pipes
ciselées et peintes.
Ils ont ainsi toutes les chansons, toute la verdure et tout le soleil...
Ce sont deux jeunes hommes et un vieillard. Leurs yeux vagues
larmoient, perdus dans le mystère d’une extase; ils ne bougent pas, respirent
à peine. Leurs visages doux et béats s’alanguissent en une même torpeur
voluptueuse.
Le vieillard murmure des paroles sans lien, d’une étrange voix chantante
et suave:
—Viens, Lella!...
... ô ma gazelle!
... mon petit œil!
... mon petit foie!
... Viens, ô ma dame! ma chérifa!...
... viens!
Le jour s’éteint.
Les fumeurs de kif continuent à contempler le vide.
Mollement, un mûrier trempe ses branches dans la nuit, et ses feuilles
tombent silencieuses, comme à la surface d’un étang.
3 janvier 1916.
Les demeures mystérieuses n’ont plus de secret pour moi, je connais
leurs splendeurs et leurs trésors si bien cachés. Je sais les noms, les
coutumes et les grâces de celles autour de qui furent élevées les hautes
murailles. Je m’initie aux intrigues et aux drames de leur existence:
Lella Maléka et Lella Zohra co-épouses de Sidi M’hammed El Ouazzani,
se consolent, avec leurs esclaves, des privations imposées par un vieux
mari... Une haine farouche divise au contraire toutes les femmes et toutes
les négresses du voluptueux Si Larbi El Mekki, car il leur distribue ses
faveurs inégalement, sans souci du châtiment qui l’attend au jour de la
Rétribution[27].
Austère et calme, la demeure du notaire Si Thami n’abrite qu’un
touchant bonheur familial. Une vieille servante aide aux soins des enfants
que Zohor met au monde avec une inlassable fécondité.
Le palais du marchand Ben Melih contemple mille et une orgies. Les

libertins de la ville s’y donnent rendez-vous. Chacun sait qu’on y est aussi
facilement accueilli que dans les bouges de Sidi Nojjar. Les riches
débauchées n’ont pas même les exigences des courtisanes. Seule une
frénésie de vice, de plaisir et de curiosité les pousse à des aventures qui
n’ont rien de très périlleux, car le maître, impuissant à réprimer les
désordres de son harem, se résout à les ignorer... Pourtant, il y a quelques
jours, on l’entendit crier, du haut de sa mule, à un forgeron:
—Eh! le maalem Berrouaïl! Fais-moi, pour ma terrasse, une serrure dont
les ruses du Malin ne pourront triompher!
Les gens riaient sous le capuchon de leurs burnous et se demandaient
entre eux:
—Qu’a-t-il pu se passer chez Si Ben Melih pour qu’il s’en émeuve
ainsi?
C’est que, le matin même, il avait été appelé par le Pacha afin de
reprendre trois fugitives: sa sœur, sa fille et une favorite, ramassées ivres
mortes durant la nuit!... Et la publicité de ce scandale dépassait la
résignation du marchand.
Lella Lbatoul, la femme de Si Ahmed Jebli le fortuné, dirige sa maison

avec intelligence et sévérité.
—Les esclaves doivent être surveillées de près, dit-elle, si l’on n’y
prenait garde, elles mangeraient jusqu’aux pierres du logis.
Les heures, pour elle, ne passent point inemployées. Du sofa où elle se
tient accroupie, elle commande toute une armée de négresses: les unes,
auprès de la fontaine, s’activent à savonner du linge: les autres épluchent
des légumes ou cuisent les aliments. Chacune a sa besogne qui varie de
semaine en semaine. Il y a la «maîtresse de la vaisselle», la «maîtresse du
chiffon», la «maîtresse du thé», la «maîtresse des vêtements». Une vieille
esclave de confiance, la «maîtresse des placards», assume la responsabilité
des clés et des provisions.
On dirait une ruche bourdonnante, où les ouvrières s’absorbent en leur
travail. Malgré son apparente oisiveté, la «maîtresse des choses», Lella
Lbatoul, en est la reine, l’organe essentiel, sans qui rien ne subsisterait.
De ces Musulmanes si diverses, nulle n’atteint la sagesse de Lella

Fatima Zohra, ni l’attrait de cette exquise petite écervelée, mon amie Lella
Meryem.
Elle est un enchantement pour les yeux, un parfum à l’odorat, une
harmonie ensorceleuse. Elle est inutile, frivole et superflue, car elle n’est
que beauté.
Avant de me connaître, Lella Meryem se mourait d’ennui sans le savoir.
Les journées sont longues à passer, et si semblables, si monotones malgré la
gaieté qu’elle dépense!
Elle se lève tard, s’étire, bavarde avec ses négresses, savoure longuement
la harira[28].
Puis elle se pare, grave cérémonie compliquée. Une petite esclave
apporte les coffrets, les parfums, les vêtements, les sebenias et les turbans
pliés en des linges aux broderies multicolores.
Lella Meryem se plaît à varier chaque jour la nuance de ses caftans de
drap et de ses tfinat transparentes. Sur un caftan «radis», elle fait chatoyer
les plis d’une mousseline vert printemps. Elle éteint l’ardeur d’un «soleil
couchant» par un nuage de gaze blanche. Elle marie tendrement les roses et
les bleus pâles. Lella Meryem est jolie en toutes ses fantaisies, tel le rayon
de soleil qui embellit ce qu’il touche. Mais elle se plaint de ne pouvoir,
assez souvent, revêtir les lourds brocarts ramagés d’or et les joyaux réservés
aux fêtes.
—Mes coffres en sont remplis, dit-elle, avec fierté, je puis encore
assister à bien des noces sans jamais remettre la même toilette. Mon père—
que Dieu le garde en sa miséricorde!—n’avait pas rétréci avec moi!...
Mouley Abdallah non plus, ajoute-t-elle. Regarde ces bracelets qu’il m’a
rapportés de Fès.
Elle me passe les massifs bijoux d’or ciselé, selon le goût moderne, de
ceux que l’on apprécie à leur poids. Même les sultanes du Dar Maghzen
envieraient ces parures qui émeuvent à peine Lella Meryem.
On lui a tant dit qu’elle était la plus belle lune d’entre toutes les lunes!
qu’aucune étoile ne saurait briller auprès d’elle... Mouley Abdallah s’affole
en la contemplant. Elle se laisse adorer sans étonnement et sans ivresse.
Tout de Lella Meryem est léger, superficiel, gracieux et charmant. Son petit
cœur d’oiseau ne saurait contenir une passion. Elle n’a pas plus de vices
que d’amour.
O précieuse!
O chanson!
O petite brise parfumée!
Du bout de son doigt, enroulé de batiste, elle étale du rouge sur ses
joues, attentive à faire une tache bien ronde aux bords atténués. Elle avive
le pétale ardent de sa lèvre supérieure, tandis que l’autre lèvre, assombrie de
souak, semble tomber d’un pavot noir.
A l’aide d’un bâtonnet enduit de kohol, qu’elle glisse entre les cils, elle
agrandit ses splendides yeux de houri, ses yeux aux mille lueurs, ses yeux
où l’on perçoit une âme ardente et merveilleuse... qui n’existe pas.
Il ne lui reste plus qu’à tracer avec une longue aiguille de bois, trempée
dans la gomme de liak, un minutieux dessin, compliqué comme une
broderie de Fès, qui s’épanouit au milieu du front.
Lorsqu’elle a décidé entre les sebenias de soie aux couleurs éclatantes,
réajusté ses grands anneaux d’oreilles et sa ferronnière en diamants, Lella
Meryem s’immobilise, un instant.
La grande occupation de sa journée s’achève, et maintenant, tant
d’heures encore à remplir!...
Lella Meryem se désintéresse des esclaves et des travaux domestiques.
Dada, la nourrice de Mouley Abdallah, s’y entend, grâce à Dieu, beaucoup
mieux qu’elle. La couture et la broderie sont, pour sa vivacité, de trop
calmes distractions. Les visiteuses viennent bien rarement, à son gré, lui
apporter les nouvelles des autres harems.
O Prophète! que les heures sont lentes!
Lella Meryem monte aux salles du premier étage, s’accroupit sur les
divans, bâille, puis redescend. Elle envoie une esclave chez Lella Fatima
Zohra, et une autre dans sa famille. Au retour des négresses, elle commente
indéfiniment de très petits incidents.
Le repas arrive enfin. Il se prolonge, il prend une importance extrême
dans la monotonie du temps.
Les plats ont été portés d’abord au Chérif et à ses hôtes habituels. Une
épouse ne leur connaît jamais que cet air ravagé, cet écartèlement des
viandes dont il manque les meilleurs morceaux.
Lella Meryem déjeune toute seule, nulle femme de sa maison ne pouvant
prétendre à l’honneur de manger avec la très noble petite Chérifa. Elle
picore, de-ci, de-là, pour s’amuser, sans réel appétit. Après elle, les mets
seront servis, par ordre hiérarchique, aux divers groupes de parentes
pauvres, de servantes et d’esclaves qui composent son entourage. Et il ne
reste guère que des os nageant dans un peu de sauce, lorsqu’ils parviennent
au petit cercle vorace des trois négrillons et de la jeune Saïda.
La journée se dévide sans hâte, tel un écheveau pesant. Lella Meryem
prend le thé, bavarde, rit et s’ennuie. De vagues rumeurs arrivent à elle, à
travers les murs. Qu’est-ce que cela?... Elle dépêche à la porte Miloud le
petit nègre.
Il ne revient plus... elle s’impatiente. Une esclave va le rechercher... Ce
n’était rien, une querelle de gens... Mais ce pécheur de Miloud en a profité
pour s’amuser avec les négrillons voisins.
Miloud est fouetté.
Après cela, on ne sait plus que faire...
Et voici l’heure troublante où le soleil empourpre le haut des murs, où de
toutes les maisons de Meknès, les femmes grimpent aux terrasses et se
réunissent au-dessus de la ville, dans l’enchantement du moghreb...
Lella Meryem reste seule en son logis enténébré, car la jalousie prudente
de Mouley Abdallah lui interdit l’accès des terrasses.
Il faut que je vienne à cette heure, pour distraire son esprit de
l’obsédante envie, de l’unique chose qu’elle désire et n’obtiendra jamais:
prendre part aux bavardages qui s’échangent d’une demeure à l’autre, et
montrer aux voisines, à toutes les voisines, proches et lointaines, à celles
dont elle ignore même les noms, leur montrer qu’elle est belle, chérie et
comblée.
Et que ses parures se renouvellent comme les jours, présents d’Allah...
10 janvier.

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A Performative Feel for the Game: How

Meaningful Sports Shape Gender,

The Ponytail: Icon, Movement, and the Modern

Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and

Life in Groups: How We Think, Feel, and Act Together

Fitness Doping: Trajectories, Gender, Bodies and Health

The Sovereignty Game: Neo-Colonialism and the

Work on Your Game: Use the Pro Athlete Mindset to

Saving the Game: A Fake Relationship Sports Romance

Eroticism of More- and Other-than-Human Bodies: A Study

More information about this series at

Cover illustration: imagedepotpro/E+/Getty Images

New Haven, CT Philip Smith

period was winding down, cultural theory embracing ambivalence was

Elverum, Norway Trygve B. Broch

1 Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender 1

Part I Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender

2 Media and Sport Enchantment: Narrative, Myth,

3 Enchanted Fusion: Bringing Together Game Play

Part II Socialization, Sport Felicity and Gender

4 Throwing Like a Handballgirl: Performance

5 Throwing Like a Handballboy: Enchanted Flows

6 By Way of Conclusion: A Cultural Sociology of Sports 187

Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender

During the 1970s the Norwegian handball federation decided to invest

© The Author(s) 2020 1

I place this nexus of a democratic myth and the daily experience of

The Challenge of the Critical Theorist:

on the contours of sport inequality, these ethnographers have dealt with

Meaning-Making and Sport: Play and Game Theory

masked form, through mimicry or aesthetic transformation. Its actions

What is Handball? A one-stop shop

info about the game on Wikipedia, game instructions and highlight

A Cultural Sociology of Sport: Culture

therefore two sides to seeing sport as performance. Sports join knowledge

this time, we can achieve a high-pitched felicity, involvement, or flow,

to illustrate how theory and rich empirical accounts work together in

Outline of the Book

psychological identification with the bodily actions and gendered meaning

4. Caillois (1958/1979), Geertz (1973a), Goffman (1961), and Huizinga

them.” Butler’s actors either reproduce or bend empirical and theoretical

Alexander, J. C. (2007). The meaningful construction of inequality and the

Beauchez, J. (2018a). Embodying combat: How boxers make sense of their

Mon aimé me quitta!...

Je te recommande, ô fils d’Adam!

Je te recommande, ô fils d’Adam!

Je te recommande, ô fils d’Adam!

Dieu seul est grand!

Le palais du marchand Ben Melih contemple mille et une orgies. Les

Lella Lbatoul, la femme de Si Ahmed Jebli le fortuné, dirige sa maison

De ces Musulmanes si diverses, nulle n’atteint la sagesse de Lella

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