A Game of Words and Insults: Volleyball as an Everyday Queer Practice in Peru

Abstract

Volleyball is an especially visible activity among many gay and transgender people in popular, urban neighborhoods. Through ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2009-2010 among gay and transgender communities in two neighborhoods, one located in the north of Lima and the other in Callao, this article describes the socio-linguistic and embodied practices that emerged during the context of street volleyball, demonstrating how sport illuminates the intersections of identity, language, gender, and sexuality. The role of volleyball is profoundly communal and social—going beyond serves, passes, and scoring. Specifically, study participants challenged the rules of formal volleyball and interrupted the norms of public space through shared practices of insulting and the cultivation of a particular volleyball technique. Through this everyday transformation of the street into a volleyball court, participants produced a visible space and social frame to develop and make legible a queer sporting aesthetic.