Ladies of Besiktas: A dismantling of male hegemony at Inönü Stadium

1. Prologue

I was born into a Besiktas ¹ family going back two generations. I learned my first chant, ‘Black, White, Besiktas’s the Best’, when I was three. Throughout my early childhood, I spent Sunday afternoons watching football on television with my father and younger brother singing chants against rival teams in my Besiktas jersey. Sometimes our uncles and male cousins would join us. We would all shout chants, jump from our seats and hug each other when a goal was scored while the other female members of the family sat in some other room or prepared food in the kitchen. My mother, aunts and female cousins were puzzled by my interest in football. They believed that as I got older I would direct my interest to ballet, swimming, or gymnastics like a ‘proper girl’. On the contrary, my love for football grew with years and I got more involved in the rituals. For instance, whenever Besiktas won a derby match against one of its eternal rivals, Galatasaray or Fenerbahce, ² after the last whistle, I would hit the streets and drive around Istanbul with my father, honking with the rest of the fans.

When our ‘Black Eagles’ won the national championships the celebrations in the family would last for days. My brother and I would record and watch the ‘championship specials’ on television over and over again, until we memorized all the details of our beloved team’s history, like why they were called ‘the Black Eagles’, how they adopted the ‘noble’ colors of black and white, and the many ways in which they were simply better than everyone else. When we lost the championship our mourning would last in proportion to the size of the loss.

Friends of the family who support the other two teams in the Big Three would sometimes try to turn us away from the faith by buying us Galatasaray or Fenerbahce jerseys and accessories. During the years when one of these teams did very well and played against famous teams in the UEFA or Champions’ League we would be bullied by our friends at school. Although the temptation would be great, we would never forsake the faith and kept singing about how we would support our great team in good and bad times.

Sometimes, we would watch the games at Besiktas’s Inönü Stadium. We would go to the stadium hours before the match started and join in with the chanting. To prevent us from fighting over one, I and my brother would get our own flags. We would wave them and sing chants we could not make much sense of. We would wonder why the referee was called a ‘ball’ ³ and why the fans were singing about the players’ wives and mothers but would keep chanting anyway, completely ignorant of the sexist and homophobic undertones.

Being a Besiktas fan was a family thing for me and my brother alike. My father treated us equally. As the proud father two fans, he often boasted about our devotion to the team. I never felt that I was a lesser fan because of my gender. We both got jerseys and flags when we were three years old. We spent Sunday afternoons watching Besiktas matches on television or at the stadium. When we turned 25 we both became members of the club, received our IDs with a Besiktas logo, started using the club’s facilities and voting for the football team’s managers. We also started getting season tickets and hence watching more live matches at the stadium.

For all these years, it never occurred to me that my fandom was inherently different from my brother’s. Until one rainy day at Inönü Stadium when I caught myself singing the chant ‘Suck my cock Fener’ to the tune of ‘Those Were the Days’ ⁴ during a derby match and making the appropriate hand gesture. That was a moment of epiphany for me: for years, I had been passionately singing about actions I cannot perform as a woman and had completely adopted the hegemonic male discourse to fit in with the men in the family, to fit in with the football stadium environment.

It was through this personal experience that I developed an interest in female football fans and the football stadium as a gendered space. I used autoethnographic research (Bochner and Ellis, 1996; Ellis and Ellingson, 2001) to interpret my experience and understand the football environment in Turkey. Through my interaction with and observation of the female fans in Turkey I realized that many repressed their femininity at the stadium and joined in with the offensive, sexist chanting in pursuit of equality. This article combines my personal and cultural experiences with established literature and published data on Turkish feminism and football culture in order to understand female masculinity at football stadia. As a Turkish woman football fan and researcher I spent many hours with the other fans observing and documenting their behavior and use of language inside the stadia. I used my own experiences reflexively to interpret my actions and interactions with other football fans. I also shared, compared and contrasted my perceptions with 27 Turkish fans, three football columnists and two feminist writers. This research enabled me and others interviewed to learn from our lived experiences of football and fan culture in Turkey.

The first section of this article will focus on the rejection of femininity by women entering the public domain as a tool to achieve equality. Since the gendered and violent stadia in Turkey today can be linked to the social changes during the first half of the 20th century the effects of state-led feminism on the liberation of Turkish women and their journey into public life will also be explored. It will be followed by a discussion of football stadia as masculine spaces and the female masculinity that can be observed there. The last section will be devoted to analyzing the revolutionary fan group, Ladies of Besiktas, who refuse to reject femininity in favor of the masculine discourses at the football stadium. They have an interest in the so-called women’s world but they also want to have a say in their team’s future. They are challenging the dichotomies of woman/wife/mother and desexualized comrade/fan in trying to reconcile femininity with football fandom. Finally, the negative and positive reactions the Ladies of Besiktas get from fans and the ways in which they are changing the football scene in Turkey will be discussed.

2. Equality through masculinization

Dunkerly (2007: 14) observed that in 18th century the reason why many saw the presence of women in a male space as threatening and destabilizing was because ‘women were considered to be weaker, less moral, and possessing less capacity for reason, control and logic’. Consequently, women bore the burden of proof that they are moral, strong, rational and logical. Only if they could show to the world that they can compete with men in their own fields could they come out of the devalued private sphere, enter the public sphere and be emancipated from the traditional gender order. In this sense, to achieve equality, they had to comply with the masculine standard (Price and Shildrick, 1999). Since masculine knowledge was considered to be more prestigious than feminine knowledge women had to acquire it to be taken seriously (Spain, 2005). Since masculinity was equated with power within a patriarchal society, to earn respect and intellectual equality women had to reject femininity, become masculine and adopt a masculine discourse and maybe also identify with male role models. Examples are found in leftist organizations and the communist feminist movement. Red feminism was developed in order to emancipate women from the traditional gender order in capitalist socialites. According to Lee, ‘Communism declared that sexual discrimination must be discarded as it was a product of capitalism. Women’s liberation and equality between sexes was what communism aspired to’ (2009: 194). Women who rejected the feminine mystique, that is, the identification of womanhood solely with the roles of the wife, mother and the qualities of frailty and passivity joined these organizations/movements. These women tried to position themselves as equals with male revolutionaries and repressed their womanly qualities in order to get equal opportunities/responsibilities.

De-feminization of women did not abstract men and women from their sexualities in the same way. Within the organization, women became active agents and genderless, sexless comrades-in-arms. They were not allowed to put on makeup, dress femininely, and were expected to behave and dress like men. Traditionally masculine traits of bravery and sacrifice were also expected of them. That was how female sexuality was controlled within the organizations (Roth, 2004). However, men continued being men and ‘the patriarchal relations within the household and the organizations remained intact’ (Lee, 2009: 195). Women were relegated to domestic tasks and lacked access to leadership positions (Roth, 2004). They performed supporting roles like cleaning, doing the laundry, offering food to the guests, and distributing fliers. In the 1970s they realized they were being discriminated against because of their sex (Ovadia, 1998) and that the men within these organizations were not very different from the men outside.

De-feminization still takes place when women enter traditionally male domains, like law enforcement (Miller, 2003), the army (Roth, 2004), the parliament and, maybe above all, football stadia. To be accepted, many women take on masculine identities and perform hegemonic masculinity which is often characterized by domination, aggressiveness, competitiveness, control and sometimes verbal and physical violence, but perhaps even more so in countries like Turkey where patriarchal structures are resilient and gender stereotypes still persist. Moreover, the state-led efforts to liberate women during the early 1900s as part of the Westernization project, which in fact perpetuated the patriarchal way of life (Arat, 1998), further contributed to the denigration of femininity in the public sphere in Turkey.

3. Turkish feminism: From concubines to comrades

During the Ottoman reign (1299–1923), religious and cultural influences trapped Turkish women in patriarchal traditions, veiled and restricted to homes with barred windows. They were treated as second-class citizens and their sexuality was exclusively associated with reproduction (Yaraman, 2001). Women’s everyday practices were regulated by the palace. There were strict rules regarding their behavior and attire in public space. If they were slaves, they could also be sold and bought by wealthy men. Before the Tanzimat Period of Reform and Westernization (1839–1876), 60,000 women were kept as slaves in the palaces and mansions of Istanbul (Karal, 1975).

During the decline of the Ottoman Empire many social changes took place out of necessity. The male population was shrinking due to long years of war and those who survived were kept under arms due to the constant threat of one. Women had to be emancipated and mobilized for economic reasons. They had to be included in the work force. ⁵ They also had to be incorporated in efforts to defend the country. They had to be convinced that they can fight on the battlefield with men and that it was culturally and religiously acceptable to do so. However, they could only do this by becoming non-feminine. During this period, novels were written about brave women who joined the army disguised as men so they would be able fight on the front lines (Yaraman, 2001).

As a result of these state-led efforts, Turkish women became desexualized comrades- in- arms, ‘transformed their bodies to castles’ (Yaraman, 2001: 119) and fought side-by-side with men. The role they played in border defense was later on acknowledged by the founder of Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The independence war narrowed the physical gap between men and women and the battle field, like other masculine spaces, had stripped Turkish women of their sexuality.

The war was won and in 1923 the Turkish Republic was founded. The newly founded republic was becoming pat of the Western world. Legal, institutional and structural reforms like the adoption of the Latin alphabet and the abolition of polygamy were made to strengthen the state’s commitment to the principles of secularism – the separation of state and political affairs from religious institutions and symbols (Keyman, 2007) – and gender equality. The use of the hijab was also discouraged by the state (Eslen-Ziya and Korkut, 2010). Europeanized Turkish women were expected to be unveiled, educated professionals in the public and private spheres (Gole, 1998). After 1934 they were also expected to exercise their political rights and run for governmental office.

With the abolishment of Islamic law ‘Sharia’, which required women to conceal their body from male view and prohibited the wearing of athletic clothing in public (Brown and Connolly, 2010), the constraints which prevented women from training for and participating in competitive sports (Kay, 2006; Walseth, 2006) were also lifted. That is why unveiled female athletes participating in competitions side-by-side with their male counterparts were considered perfect role models for modern Turkish women and helped propagate an image of equality for the secular Republic. They were considered indispensable agents in the country’s effort to reach Western civilization (Gole, 1998). Since sports were associated with nation-building (Von der Lippe, 2002), participating in sports became a national obligation. In 1930s physical education became an official strategy for increasing an individual citizen’s dynamism and gender equality (Ozman, 2010). In an effort to promote physical activity and celebrate the modern, athletic Turkish youth, an equal number of male and female athletes were selected from every school. After training for a year, they performed in similar outfits in stadiums around Turkey on Youth and Sports Day ⁶ which was a symbolic celebration of the young, healthy, civilized nation.

Joining the work force and participating in physical activity were not the only things expected of the modern Turkish woman. As enlightened mothers, they were also required to raise children who would carry the Republic forward to catch up with advanced societies (Yucesoy, 2006). Family and childbearing were seen as a national duty for women. In fact, it was the most significant component of their identity (Eslen-Ziya and Korkut, 2010; Ozman, 2010). Consequently, they had the multiple roles of wife, mother, daughter of the New Republic, pilot, athlete, and even member of parliament.

They were as productive as their male counterparts but the patriarchal order within the household remained unchanged. Moreover, by featuring them as daughters of the New Republic their relationship with Ataturk’s symbolic fatherhood and his authority was acknowledged. As White (2003) argues, state feminism, state-led promotion of Turkish women’s equality in the public sphere, which addressed only a limited urban population, monopolized women’s activism and shaped it as a tool of the state’s modernizing project. Consequently, the first wave of feminists were emancipated but not liberated (Kandiyoti, 1987). In this respect, underlying patriarchal social structures remained intact. Women remained subservient to a modernized patriarchy (Eslen-Ziya and Korkut, 2010).

Celik and Lukuslu (2010: 4) call this the ‘Turkish paradox’. Although Turkish women were ‘given’ legal, educational and political rights in the early 1920s and 1930s, the gender gap still persists. ⁷ The participation of women in the labor force is around 25 percent (SIS, 2001), and 80 percent of the rural female population works as unpaid family laborers in the fields as an extension of their housework (Yucesoy, 2006). Men own 92 percent of all property and approximately 84 percent of gross domestic production. ⁸ The illiteracy rate among women is still 20 percent (Celik and Lukuslu, 2010) and they still suffer from class, cultural, physical, sexual and psychological harassment (Buken and Sahinoglu, 2006).

It should also be noted that Turkish women’s emancipation resulted in the repression of their femininity which was perceived as a threat to the existing order (Gole, 1998). As Müftüler-Bac (1999: 307) articulates, ‘Islam dealt with that threat by confining women to their houses and Kemalism dealt with that threat by stripping women of their sexuality and by putting forth asexual stereotypes.’ Femininity was denigrated and the new woman was advised not to use her freedom to polish her nails or be a baby doll (Karaosmanoglu, 1934). She was not supposed to have an interest in the world of women or have a curved (feminine) body. As such, new Turkish femininity was somehow connected to the image of a male body and masculine character traits (Durakbasa, 1998). The modern Turkish woman was expected to enter the public sphere as a masculinazed actor devoid of any hint of femininity (Ozman, 2010). As a result, women in positions of power showed an effort to look masculine and perform masculinity. The first female members of the parliament all wore two-piece suits and ties and played a role in reinforcing state patriarchy. This attitude, which can be traced to state-led feminism, still resides in many Turkish women entering masculine spaces like football stadia.

4. Turkish football stadia as gendered spaces

McDowell (1999) observed that gendered identities ⁹ are spatialized, that is, that spatial division, the binaries of public and private, home and the world of paid work, and politics has been crucial to the social construction of femininity and masculinity in industrialized capitalist societies. Consequently, masculine and feminine spaces have been created and their consequent dwellers have been hierarchized. As a public space where the so-called male qualities of aggression, toughness, competitiveness, control, anger, and violence are praised, sport has for a long time been – and by some still is –perceived as masculine. In particular, male team sports and sporting spaces have been the epitome of hegemonic masculinity. ¹⁰ Alongside being architectural constructs where some play and some others watch the game, they are spaces where aggressive machismo and masculinity are produced (Caudwell, 2011; Hughson, 1998). They are spaces dedicated to the observation of masculine identities and solidarity (Gaffney, 2008) and are dominated by particular groups.

As Kandiyoti (1987: 327) argues, ‘since masculinity is not an ascribed but achieved status, one that is never permanently achieved because the danger of being unmanned is ever-present’, it must be constantly validated by proving itself as dominant and in control. As hegemonic masculinity is often proved by holding a warrior attitude, acting aggressively and sometimes even violently, toward what is regarded as ‘feminine’ (i.e. women and homosexuals) a wide range of sexist and homophobic behaviors and comments can be observed in male sports. What Mewett and Toffoletti (2008) call ‘hyper-masculinity’ can lead to displays of aggressive behavior against what is seen as the Other. They note that ‘the encouragement of violence by coaches, fans and team-mates promotes an aggressive behavior’ (p. 166).

In cultures like Turkey which controls women’s sexuality rigidly and requires that men flaunt their masculine prowess, men are even more intensely preoccupied with the possible loss of sexual identity (Kandiyoti, 1987). That is why hegemonic masculinity is even more visible and can be more acutely observed in Turkish football stadia. In Turkey, the stadia are masculine, hetero-normative spaces. They are seen as fortresses of masculinity (Tanir, 2007). What Simić (1969) calls the machismo syndrome can be exemplified in various ways. Terrorizing the passersby before or after the games, vandalizing the stadia, tearing the seats, smashing bathroom mirrors are common practices in Turkey. These actions arise from the desire to prove strength and dominance. After the games the visiting team is given a half-hour head start to clear the area to avoid possible clashes. Fans take pride in calling themselves delikanlı, a Turkish expression which means ‘crazy-blooded’. In an interview, a Besiktas fan, Selim, says ‘We used to fight before and after the games with rocks and knives. One of our brothers (a Besiktas fan) was beaten to death by Galatarasay supporters at a bus stop. I wish we could have prevented it’ (Tribün, 2001).

Turkish football stadia are also connected to other gendered spaces and vehicles of masculinization. As Tanir (2007) argues, being taken to your first football game by an uncle or big brother is a kind of rite of passage into masculinity for Turkish boys. It is almost like being taken to a brothel for the first time. In fact, the ritual of including a visit to the brothel after an away game is still common for the visiting team’s fans (Tanir, 2007). The visitors are there to win the game and ‘shag the women’ (Wagg, 1984: 215).

As Mewett and Toffoletti (2008) suggest, masculinity is manifested not only in physical actions but also in verbal discourse. Since language is responsible for the attitudes and beliefs that constitute what we call culture (Kramsch, 2004) uncovering the linguistic ramifications of what Caudwell calls ‘the soundscape of football stadia’ (2011: 125) is crucial in understanding football culture. Gendered language inside the stadium reinforces the notion that sports are masculine domains (Messner et al., 1993). Homophobic chants, on the other hand, help produce rhetorical territory within football stadia, ‘which is based on devaluing gay men’s sexuality and the ridiculing of sexual activity that involves anal penetration’ (Caudwell, 2011: 126). Since men police gender and sexuality through discourse (Adams et al., 2010), the chants are oftentimes sexist, misogynist and homophobic. Turkish fans distance themselves from homosexuality and insult the enemy (the rival team, the fans, the referees, sometimes their own players) by attributing to them sexual weakness and, hence, feminizing them. The most common insults are ‘sons of whores’ and ‘fag’ (Tanir, 2007: 16). These insults aim at undermining male respectability (Sandoval-Garcia, 2005). Winners and losers are positioned ‘within a social power relation of assumed gay men’s sexual activity’ (Caudwell, 2011: 128). As in other ‘phallically aggressive and anally closed cultures of desire’ (Pronger, 1999: 373), references to sodomy are incorporated into chants (Hughson, 2000) at Turkish football stadia. When Ali Sen was the manager of Fenerbahce he was subjected to such verbal chanting. A famous chant included the line ‘Ali Sen is the capital, Fenerbahce is the whorehouse’. As Fenerbahce supporters were trying to attribute to him sexual potency by singing about his ‘big cock’, the rival teams’ fans were trying to feminize him by singing about his ‘big ass’. There even was a chant about his alleged test tube babies. ¹¹

Players and referees are also abused by references to their wives, mothers, sisters or girlfriends. This type of abuse is designed to offend and to put the opposing team’s player off his game (Jones, 2006). For example, Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt in the 2006 World Cup final on Italian defender Marco Materazzi was allegedly provoked by such an insult. ¹² It is claimed that he called Zidane ‘son of a terrorist whore’ (Rowe, 2010: 362). Similar chants, swear words, and abuses are often heard at Turkish football stadia especially if the women in question are also famous. Besiktas player Arda Turan’s girlfriend Sinem Kobal, who is an actress, is often the target of offensive insults. ¹³

As in many other languages (Caudwell, 2011; Sandoval-Garcia, 2005), the football is a symbolic penis in Turkish. Football and sex share a common vocabulary. The phrases which mean to score a goal are ‘to enter’, ‘to insert’, and ‘to penetrate’. When a team scores a goal fans oftentimes start singing about anal rape ¹⁴ or insult the goalkeeper for his ‘weak performance’. Similarly, men use the phrase ‘score a goal’ to denote successful sexual conquests. When a sexual liaison is made impossible, it is said that the ‘match’ was ‘cancelled’ or ‘postponed’. This analogy is so common in the Turkish language and culture that the condom brand OK made a series of commercials in which condoms are playing football and puns on phrases like ‘don’t take of your jersey off until the game is over’ are made. ¹⁵

Since women and femininity are explicitly derogated and devalued and hegemonic masculinity is valorized, football stadia tend to be intimidating places for female football fans. According to the FSTATS & Alstats (2006) fan survey conducted in 20 cities called ‘The Fan Profile in Turkey’, a little over a quarter of the stadium attendants are women. When women decide to support their team at the stadium, they try to fit in by repressing their femininity and subordinating themselves to the patriarchal system. When they put on the jersey they become comrades-in-arms. They follow the tradition of entering the public domain through adopting hegemonic masculinity and joining in the sexist and homophobic chants (Tanir, 2007). The following extract taken from a female fan’s column illustrates this:

I watch the game like a man. I’m not disturbed by foul language. In fact, I join in. I do not mind the rain or the cold. Other women are in need of protection. They come with their husband or boyfriends. They fear they’ll be raped otherwise. I do not. (Senturk, 2001)

The key rhetoric of this extract seems to be Senturk’s determination to show that she can be as tough as a man. This suggests that she sees it as a condition for being a true fan. Only those women who swear, throw objects on the field, boo and whistle, that is, join in the tribalism, and are strong enough to watch the game in the freezing cold are qualified to talk about football. They are the ones who know what the offside rule is. This also suggests that the tickets are wasted on the other type of female fan who do not adopt the masculine discourse, who go to the matches to accompany their husbands or boyfriends and complain about the ugly atmosphere.

These stereotypes are peddled by the media. In a recent Vodaphone commercial, targeting Turkish audiences, a man is trying to explain the offside rule to his girlfriend on the phone in vain. It takes all night and she does not get it. In another commercial, while five men sit in front of the television, drink beer and watch football, their spouses sit at the far end of the living room gossiping and complaining about men’s irrational passion for football.

In line with the left-wing tradition that is still prevalent inside Inönü Stadium women like Senturk are seen as baci (sisters), de-sexualized subjects by male fans. Man distinguish between two types of women: women like Senturk, they would enjoy watching the game but never go to bed with and the ‘proper’ woman who may on occasion accompany them to the stadium and watch the game but never loses her femininity. It seems clear the dichotomy between the concubine who occupies the relational positions of mother, wife, girlfriend, and sister to a man and the comrade who adopts the masculine discourse and denies her femininity to enter public space still resides in both in the minds of women and men in Turkey.

As it will be shown in the following section, one female fan group, Ladies of Besiktas, has been trying to dissolve this dichotomy and challenge stereotyped gender roles and assumptions. They have been trying to challenge patriarchal structures and relations inside and outside the football stadium against all odds.

5. Ladies of Besiktas

Besiktas, founded in 1903, is one of the oldest football clubs in Turkey. Besiktas fans hold the 132 decibel world record for loudest fans and are proud of their (uncolored) colors, black and white. Their motto is ‘Delikanli fan does not support a colored team’. In fact, 28 percent of these ‘men’ are women. However, since the Turkish football stadia are gendered spaces and women are still relegated to the private sphere, most of these female fans prefer to watch the games at home. This is beginning to change thanks to the efforts of activist fan groups like Ladies of Besiktas, which was founded by Betul Aslan and three other women who wanted to breathe the air of the Inönü Stadium. What motivated them was the idea that it would be easier to enter this male-dominated space as a group rather than as individual female fans. Since then the group have been growing not only in numbers but also in influence. Ladies of Besiktas now has organizations in 12 Turkish cities as well as in Germany, the US and Japan. They have 700 members over 100 of whom support Besiktas at Inönü Stadium during every match. Their official Facebook group where they share photos and information has more than 500 members. Their motto is ‘Despite being women we won’t keep quiet. We’ll scream out our love [for Besiktas]’, and hold signs saying ‘We swore our love to you’ in and outside the stadium. ¹⁶

They also inspired the female fans of other teams to form similar groups like GFB Angels of Fenerbahce and the Female Fans of Trabzonspor. They have been trying to reconcile the concepts of women, football, and fandom. They refuse to lag behind men in support of their team at the stadium due to discrimination.

Mewett and Toffoletti (2008: 167) argue that female supporters of male-dominated sports are just as passionate in their support and just as knowledgeable about the game as their male counterparts. Ladies of Besiktas are trying to prove this in an overwhelmingly patriarchal country. In a 2007 interview (Milliyet, 16 July 2007), Aslan says ‘Our love and loyalty for the colors unite us. We support our team, shoulder to shoulder, for 90 minutes. Being a fan is not a hobby for us. It is an art. Besiktas is our mother, child, our love.’

Ladies of Besiktas are counter-stereotypical, which is what makes them very influential. They are trying to challenge the masculine world of football and the stadium without giving up their femininity, that is, they do not deny the reproductive aspects of femaleness and adopt masculinized public power. In interviews they mention their roles as girlfriends, wives and mothers and find it perfectly consistent with their roles as football fans. They come to Inönü Stadium, dressed in identical, tailor-made black and white scarves and jackets embroidered with angel wings. They blow whistles at the fans who use foul, sexist, homophobic language. They criticize the stadium atmosphere but still support the game and describe their mission as promoting safer stadia where both male and female fans can sit comfortably and support their team free from physical and verbal harassment. Ozge Arslan of Ladies of Besiktas claims that their presence is encouraging more female fans to come to Inönü stadium. ¹⁷ Tanir (2007: 17) also talks about their positive influence:

There are also women who refuse to adopt the masculine discourse of patriarchy at the stadium. The presence of these women helps create an aura of decency. It challenges the male fans’ illusion that they live in a world solely consisting of themselves and helps them perceive the game with humor.

Since Ladies of Besiktas are trying to be fully incorporated into the ‘we’ of Besiktas fans and assert full agency in the spectacle, they also want to influence the game outside the stadium and have a say in managerial decisions (Milliyet, 16 July 2007) like the legendary fan group Carsi. Although some sports writers like Gulengul Altinsay and Feryal Pere support this endeavor (Radikal, 14 March 2010) not all reactions they receive from the Turkish football community are positive. Many Besiktas fans who comment on online forums like pollemik.com argue that they should not interfere in a man’s job with ‘bread dough in their hands’ ¹⁸ and they should stay away from football stadia. Many others suggest they join the legendary anarchist group Carsi, instead of forming a new female-only fan group. The leader of Carsi, Alen Makaryan, on the other hand, does not want to be associated with them and criticizes the group for entering the stadium in large groups and making a big spectacle (Sabah, 21 October 2007). They especially received negative reactions from the male fans (booing, verbal harassment) for bringing (and using) whistles to the stadium – so much so that they stopped the practice. These can be seen as backlashes from male supporters who are trying to defend their space. However, territorial battles are not the only battles Ladies of Besiktas need to fight. They are also harshly criticized about going against Besiktas fan culture. When asked about his thoughts on this new fan group, anchorman, writer and Besiktas supporter, Reha Muhtar wrote:

You cannot find any light female Besiktas fans. They’d all die for their team. They are macho. They sing the chant ‘real men don’t wear colored jerseys’. That is why Ladies can’t coexist with other Besiktas subcultures. It’s just a cute enterprise supported by the club owners. Besiktas is not for ladies and gentlemen. (Vatan, 4 January 2009)

This reaction shows that the masculine traits of female football fans are still valued. It also appears to be closely related to notion that women must deny their femininity to enter public space and accept the role of comrades.

Since the term lady is connected to systems of inequality, like race, gender, class, and sexuality (Pelak, 2008), Muhtar’s criticism also fits with the Marxist criticisms of power struggles, class contention and commercialization of football. Hence, he seems to be critical of the commodification of the sport itself and the denigration of the ‘traditional fan’ (Jones, 2003), the partisan supporter who would die to see his team win, by the affluent middle-class female fan who comes to the stadium in tailored jackets rather than the all-equalizing black and white jersey. Muhtar, like Giulianotti (1999), argues that the working classes, who used to own the game, are being victimized and excluded as a result of excessive commodification. The main argument is that the efforts of club owners to make the stadia safer and family friendly (high ticket prices, fining the use of foul language, replacing terraces with seats, supporting new fans groups and modes of spectatorship like the Ladies and their bourgeois values) are resulting in the exclusion of the working classes which in turn is damaging football and the atmosphere of the stadium. It is beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss the commodification and commercialization of professional football and the exclusion of the working-class fan. However, it should be noted that Besiktas’s fan base is traditionally working class and left-wing. They take pride in supporting the Halkin Takimi, ‘the team of the people’. In fact, the fans, publish a magazine and blog called Halkin Takimi where they write about their reactions to what they call ‘the terror of industrialized football’ (clubs making profit by selling official products and screening rights, managers treating fans like customers) and the support they give to working-class and young fans. Kirezci says ‘instead of becoming an ordinary brand name the industrial monster owns, we want to be barricades against that monster’. ¹⁹ They even ask whether Che Guavera was a Besiktas fan. Their answer is ‘He wasn’t a Besiktas fan, but a true Besiktas fan is a Che Guavera fan.’ ²⁰ The traditional Besiktas fan also sees the female supporters as comrades and views sexual discrimination as one of the evils of capitalism. That is, they are against the existence of labels like ‘lady’, ‘gentleman’, even ‘men’ and ‘women’.

However, since the late 1990s, as a result of the globalization of football and the intensity of competition in the European leagues, the club has been changing. It is now run by a CEO, has a multimillion dollar collection of star players, and shares in the stock market. Besiktas-branded jerseys, bags, perfumes, even credit cards are out on sale for the bourgeois male, female and child fan who, on average, pay one hundred dollars to enter the stadium and one thousand to watch the games on TV or on the web for one season. Despite the traditional Besiktas fans’ resistance, the club’s identity is diluted ²¹ to include new types of fan culture and groups like Ladies of Besiktas.

Although there is a class dimension to the emergence of the new fans, the Ladies of Besiktas are not tying to promote classism and exclude the working classes. They want to be able to support their team at the stadium and be taken seriously when they talk about football without feeling to need to repress their femininity. They react to the use of sexist and homophobic language at the stadium not because they represent working-class values but because they intimidate female fans and force them to watch the games in the privacy of their homes. Yet, their presence inside the Inönü Stadium is a sign of change in the once gendered working-class space.

Some feminist writers like Beyhan Demir also criticize them for the use of the term ‘lady’, which, she argues, carries the connotations of passivity, helplessness and defensiveness. They also receive negative reactions for mentioning their roles as mothers, wives and girlfriends alongside their roles as football fans. One can claim that they are trying to distinguish their fandom from men’s along the lines of what Felshin (1974) called ‘apologetic behavior’. Since apologetic traits in appearance involve emphasizing normative feminine attributes like hair, makeup and dress and values like prioritizing socially accepted roles for women such as girlfriend, wife, and mother over participation in sport (Newhall and Buzuvis, 2008) it can be argued that they are in fact reproducing and reinforcing the superior position of hegemonic masculinity. However, if we evaluate their emergence in the historical context and consider the denigration of femininity as part of state-led feminism in Turkey it can be seen that the ladies are trying to reassert their femininity and prove that they can wear long hair, ear rings and angel wings and at the same time make smart comments about the game and support their team for 90 minutes. Thus, the term ‘lady’ is not a polite euphemism for ‘woman’. Rather, it is used with sarcastic overemphasis.

6. Discussion

This article aimed to link the emergence of the non-stereotypical fan group, Ladies of Besiktas, to the social, cultural and political changes which took place after the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923. When the founding fathers led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk decided to sever Turkey’s link with its Islamic past, they reinforced gender equality as part of the nation-building and secularization process. The modern Turkish women would cease to be concubines. They were expected to be visible in the public sphere, run for office, compete in sporting events, fly jets and at home, raise healthy children who would carry the nation forward. However, as was the case with other state-led efforts to emancipate women, like Red Feminism, the measures taken did not liberate Turkish women from patriarchal domination. Like communism, Kemalism took the women out of their houses but also stripped them of their sexuality and turned them into masculinized subjects. Since equality was ‘perceived as sameness to man’ (Ozman, 2010: 459), women started performing masculinity in especially gendered spaces like the parliament and football stadia. They went to watch football in their all-equalizing jerseys, joined in the sexist chants and were perceived as baci (sisters), de-sexualized subjects by male fans. Also influenced by the left-wing tradition dominant inside the stadia, they became comrades-in-arm.

Ladies of Besiktas were founded with a vision to dissolve the dichotomies the hyper-feminine concubine who comes to the matches with a male companion, keeps asking about the off-side rule and the masculinized comrade who knows what is going on on the field. They are heavily criticized by the traditional fan base who accuses them of being too bourgeois with their tailored jackets and makeup for the Inönü Stadium. They also respond negatively to crowd monitoring measures the Ladies of Besiktas take like blowing whistles at the use of foul language. In a country where sports, especially football, is heavily dominated by men, women still suffer from class, physical and sexual harassment and challenging the rules of the stadia is not an easy task. Yet, the discussions they have started in the print media and online forums show that the Ladies of Besiktas already have had some influence on Turkish football. They and the other emerging ‘new fans’ may, in the long run, bring equalizing changes to football fandom in Turkey.