"I Am a Football Player and/or a Girl": Psychosemantics of Self-Consciousness among Teenage Female Football Players

Abstract

Background: Women's football (soccer), despite official recognition and growing popularity, is perceived as a gender-non-typical sport. This contradiction can be implicitly transmitted by society and acts as a condition of conflict in the self-consciousness of teenage female football players (TFFPs). In this study, the model of self-consciousness is defined as the semantic structures generated in the dialogic interaction "person - sociocultural environment".

Objective: Various options, including internally conflicting ones, for the content of self-consciousness in the context of both gender (girl) and professional sports (football player) are identified in comparison with the gender personality type of TFFPs.

Design: The psychosemantic method of multiple identifications is used to assess self-consciousness in participants. Image-markers of self-identification in gender and professional sports semantics are assessed through verbal personal characteristics and non-verbal color-associative stimuli. Sample: 29 female football players aged 15 years who have been involved in pre-professional football for the last 5-7 years.

Results: In TFFPs with androgynous and masculine gender personality types, self-consciousness is not conflicted; the image of a football player has masculine semantics. In TFFPs with a feminine gender personality type, self-consciousness is not conflicted due to the transformation of the image of a football player from traditionally masculine semantics to more feminine ones. TFFPs with an undifferentiated gender personality type are characterized by contradictions at the explicit and implicit levels of self-consciousness.

Conclusion: The results confirm the concept of self-consciousness as a process of dialogical interaction between the self-image and images of the socio-cultural environment, as well as the possibility of its diagnosis as individual variants of psychosemantic structures.

Keywords: gender self; implicit conflict; professional self; psychosemantic; self-consciousness; teenage female football players.