Qatar 2022 An unexpected legacy for a World Cup
- Beatriz Velez
- Jan 25, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 13, 2023
Qatar 2022
An unexpected legacy
for a World Cup
Beatriz Vélez
PatteART Group
Researcher in socio-anthropology of the staging of football
Associate at IREF (Institut de recherche et d’études féministes), Quebec, Canada
Author of the book “Football et érotisme au masculin. Une anthropologue au stade”
Cultural and artistic promoter of football
Introduction
The term football can relate to multiple realities since it is deeply embedded in society and in daily life. It can also be lived in the most diverse scenarios and can also take various forms, all of which, or almost all, are recognized as "exciting" by its protagonists. Certain rules of the game allow experiences that bring pleasure shared and felt throughout the body, whether it is practiced or seen.
The moods stimulated by this game refer to the theme of eroticism, an extremely complex component of the human life whose value and importance in football are all the greater. Indeed, the tangle of bodily movements and the lightness of the equipment specific to this sporting discipline makes the psycho-material imagination work. Football lovers have already pointed out these facts and sentiments. Eduardo Galeano, for example, exalts the sensuality carried by the "touch" of a good player who, with his gifted foot, seems to caress the ball. In the same vein, footballer Éric Cantona impertinently considers that a ball and a woman are equivalent in terms of their "love needs". According to this player, "both" require the same delicacy of treatment, because a ball, like a woman (sic), likes caresses, not kicks.
Therefore, we would say that, in the culture of football, the theme of eroticism passes through a chain of meaning which links, by equivalence, the corpo-sexual materiality of women and men with the elements of the game. Observation which has been confirmed by the documentation concerning football as a human activity linked to social representations of gender. In the same way, the corporeity of women, understood as THE "radical difference" in relation to the body-reference (that of men), is expressed in football as a kind of eroticism whose attention is limited to sexual particularities. This issue hinders the position of women in football, as female footballers are mostly desired as "dolls" and not as champions.
Such a perspective of meaning, reiterated with simplicity in songs, insults, jokes, gestures, behavior in stadiums, meeting rooms, was made "relevant" even in the ceremony of handing over the golden glove in Qatar 2022. A World Cup during which the dimension of eroticism, always present in football, has impertinently infiltrated in a completely unexpected way.
Indeed, the tangible fact of a stadium specially designed for this event by a female architect, and in particular the association of the roof with a giant vagina, has become the revealer of the reality of the erotic drive, while leaving a mark indelible legacy of this 22nd edition.
To conclude this introduction and facilitate the understanding of this undoubtedly unique heritage, a few brief reminders of fundamental anthropology are useful.
The researcher Edgar Morin reminds us that, in our sapiens-sapiens species, the physico-psychic forces of eroticism and other impulses come into play in our complex behavior through its excessive features, certain expressions of which would evoke more the demented side than sapiens. An example of this tension would be the human ability to switch unmediated from crying to laughing or vice versa, as well as the emotional spasms of pleasure that sometimes suffocate us.
For depth psychology (Psychoanalysis), we humans come into the world with a deficit of love because of our "premature birth" and for this in total dependence on the communicational encounter with others.
Thus, these two conditions: a complex behavior by its excessive features and the congenital lack of affection, make all human life a kind of quest for means to constantly try to fill the lack of affection and to solve the problems derived from a dynamic determined by these fundamental traits.
For this very reason, our path is populated with imaginative narratives. One of them points to Eros as a set of powerful forces of creation and destruction that attack us. Associated with love among other signifiers (one dies of love or, through love, one can cause death), such forces are present in every human act whose exercise requires relying on other people. We would say that Eros is present in almost all of our actions as social animals.
Finally, to conclude this point and return to football, it would suffice to say that this insane game (Vélez, 2011, “Football et érotisme au masculin. Une anthropologue au stade”) falls into the category of exercises where the presence of others constitutes an essential condition since neither playing nor enjoying is fully possible by relying solely on oneself.
A stadium. The common thread of the erotic legacy of the 2022 World Cup.
The Al Janoub stadium, in the city of Al Wakrah, gave new meaning to the purchase and sale transactions that marked this meeting of nations. Indeed, the stadium has become the bearer of the legacy of eroticism left by this cup in Qatar, as much for its artistic nature of the work and as for the introduction of a thread of unexpected carnal meaning derived from the interpretation that the men of football have attributed to its design. Designed by a woman, the call to the art of a female architect for the first time in an edition of the World Cup signals a cultural openness from the management of the organization of the event that we undoubtedly applaud. But it was the sporting event itself, the twist of that endorsement, that ratified, probably unwittingly, the presence of a creative and destructive Eros in the football scene.
The origin of this creative Eros dates back to 2013, when the architect of Iraqi origin, Zaha Hadid, proposed a 3D model for the Al Janoub stadium. According to the architect, the shell-shaped model installed on the roof of the stadium refers to the sails of pearl fishing boats swollen by the winds of the Indian Ocean. However, during the unveiling of the model, those present, men of the press and football saw the athletic representation of a giant vagina.
In this regard, Hadid pointed out the following: "Since our goal was not to exactly replicate the structure of a traditional boat, the concept attempted to go towards creating something dynamic that could be interpreted from different ways".
For our part, we would also like to hear the substantive interpretation of men, women and other sexual diversities in this regard, because it is about nurturing the conversation between different possible ways of "seeing" and "feeling" our tormented and passionate human life.
This architect "officially" opened the door for Eros to enter football. We, some people and football artists, would like to keep it open to continue to feed a conversation on the foundations of the transmutations of the sense of carnality thus brought about. And also, to initiate a reflection on the imperative need to name the forces of imagination, desire, fantasy that animate bodily movements in the game scene.
The Football World Cup in Qatar left us eroticism as an inexhaustible heritage through the thread of "a stadium, an architect, a woman's body". A conversation that already seems likely between nations. To illustrate this, we offer this audio and visual reading in the following links:
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