Exploring Gender, Sexuality, and the Power of Visibility through the Lens of Sport in Brazil

Dec. 2, 2024 

By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences  

Years of Cara Snyder’s work in Brazil studying the power dynamics of gender are now culminating in a new book exploring the ways in which soccer players who compete as women, trans, and cisgender gay men are using strategies of visibility to advocate for rights and recognition. 

An assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Snyder is particularly interested in inquiry around how marginalized groups use embodied forms of activism to work towards equality. 

“I’ve always been an athlete – but it was really in Brazil that I began to see how sport was this fascinating way to study gender,” Snyder said. 

Titled, "Which Team Are You On?: Visibility, Gender Dissidence, and the Right to Brazilian Fútbol,” the new book (under contract with University of Texas Press) builds on years of ethnographic work and interviews with “firsts” in Brazilian soccer. It includes insights and interviews with the first Brazilian women soccer players to compete in the Olympics, which occurred in 1996. Snyder also conducted ethnographic research (2016 – 2019) with the Meninos Bons de Bola, the first trans soccer team in Brazil, and the first cis gay men to form their own league (the LiGay), following them to the Gay Games in Paris in 2018. 

“Visibility is the key word,” Snyder said. “I am committed to writing queer, trans, and feminist activists together, but they also have to use visibility in different ways because they have different relationships to it.” 

The book explores this by examining how each of these groups navigates the media and their relationships to it depending on Brazil’s political leadership, the outlet’s audience, and more. The message changes depending on each situation as the groups advocate for themselves and for their right to identify as footballers. 

“The women footballers, my argument there, is that the visibility strategy they are using is that they really make it about a collective and that they are footballers,” Snyder said. “They are constantly turning the attention to: women, worker, footballer.” 

The book examines the way trans athletes went from asserting a right to visibility, coming out in 2016, to then shifting their approach to a right to opacity after Brazil elected a right-wing president in 2018. 

"They started to understand that visibility will not always be a good thing for them, and that they will not always be seen and represented in the ways that they desire or are advocating for, and I saw them begin to use invisibility, as well,” Snyder said. “The athlete activists I worked with began to use their discretion about where and how they want to be seen – for example, they got off of Facebook and onto Instagram because it gave them more control to filter hate speech. They started to be much more strategic about how they are using their visibility.” 

The cis gay men use a strategy that Snyder calls, “fielding futebol” (futebol is the Portuguese word for soccer).  

“The position that I liken this to is the goalie who stands in the back who has the balls lobbed at them, and they have to move to protect the goal,” Snyder said. “These athletes have had access to futebolin a different way [than trans or women-identified athletes] because they are cis men, so many of them grew up playing futebol; they had the opportunity to become professional footballers, and yet – to date- there is no professional male footballer who is out as gay.” 

In 2016, three gay teams formed. A year later – 46 teams had formed. 

"Clearly, there are gay men playing futebol, and they are playing in the closet,” Snyder said. “So, the visibility strategy that these players are using is, depending on the media outlet they talk to, they are advancing different messages. Around the mainstream media, their message is pretty consistently, ‘Brazil is losing out on top athletes because of homophobia.’ Then, to gay outlets, they are saying different things; they're sharing their experiences of discrimination but also focusing on the joy and the playfulness of their sexuality.” 

While the book examines power dynamics through the lens of sport, the subject matter is accessible for all. 

"Anyone can read this and understand something about visibility strategies, and I think in our current era of politics, this is going to be critical,” they said. “What messages can we promote, in what spaces, where, and how?” 

Students in Snyder’s courses will also benefit from their experience in conducting this research over the course of several years, as it also enriches her instruction. The book and its content will impact future learning by helping students explore how representation shapes cultural narratives and why it must be critically examined. Snyder plans to integrate its ideas into introductory and upper-level gender studies courses, using examples like physical culture and trans athletes to address major cultural debates on transnational scales. This approach broadens traditional gender studies to include underexplored topics like sports and activism in the Global South, fostering deeper critical thinking about the politics of representation. 

Looking ahead, Snyder said the work now continues to be essential to students who are expanding their perspectives and learning about their own journeys in life within the context of existing power structures.  

“I went to college with a desire to understand why poverty existed,” Snyder said. “I was an economics major, and I wasn’t getting my answers there. In this one intro to women’s studies class, taught by Dr. Beth Hackett, which I took in my last semester of my last year of undergrad, I encountered all of these ideas – like intersectionality – that profoundly impacted how I made sense of the world. And it was a turning point for me because I thought, ‘Here is a discipline where people are asking the right questions.’ You see the impact that having vocabulary gives students in their lives, the kind of clarity of vision WGST courses give to them, and how powerful that is for students to see their realities reflected in course content.” Snyder hopes that students at UofL can have similarly transformative experiences in their WGST and Latin American Studies classes.