Loving the Sport, Loving the Self: Devotion and Defiance in Furia

Abstract

In the world of sports today, young people have access to models of women athletes who seem to have it all, women whose actions push on gendered assumptions of love and the associated roles of women as sacrificial and subservient. And yet, young people, particularly young girls, wanting to navigate their worlds in ways that challenge conventional love, do not have the same power and privilege given their gender, age, and lack of financial autonomy. The young adult novel Furia invites young readers to evidence an adolescent character whose love of sport serves as a form of liberation from social constraints in a way that likely feels more resonant and doable, more real somehow. The protagonist’s engagement with and dedication to sport invite complications of ideological assumptions about love, particularly gendered narratives that position girls and women as bound by devotion This paper draws upon the youth lensand methods of critical context analysis to better understand how the protagonist is positioned as an athlete and a young woman and to offer interpretative thinking that explores how this title can help us (and young readers) think about love through the lens of sport.

1. Introduction

In the world of sports today, young people have access to models of women athletes who seem to have it all, women whose actions push on gendered assumptions of love and the persistent positioning of women as sacrificial and subservient. As just one example, Breanna Stewart’s (USA, basketball) decision to adopt a child with her wife is seen as a testament to “how female sports stars are pushing past tradition and finding a level of power that extends to every aspect of their lives” (Streeter 2021). These athletes are not forced to sacrifice the sport they love in pursuit of the lives they want to lead; their “happily ever after” rejects singularity and opens possibilities for something new and different. And yet, young people, particularly young women and girls, wanting to navigate their worlds in ways that challenge conventional love, do not generally have the same power and privilege given their gender, age, and lack of financial autonomy.

In a particularly illustrative affirmation of this reality, Tjønndal and Hovden (2021) analyzed life story interviews with two teenage immigrant Muslim boxers to explore how the young women expressed their passion for boxing and how their athletic identities shaped their everyday lives, particularly given that boxing, a physical and violent sport, goes beyond what is considered respectable for women across many cultures (Rana 2017). The authors identified a tension between cultural and familial expectations and the visions of self held by the boxers growing from “encounters with conflicting meanings of religion and gender embedded in their identities” that placed the young women “in a continual squeeze of being a ‘good daughter’ and a ‘good Muslim’ against a successful female boxer” (Tjønndal and Hovden 2021, p. 463). As the authors explain, “The family context, previously experienced as a space shaped by love and belonging, has changed to a space of contradictory identity conflicts and daily constraints. This situation makes the women constantly question whether their boxing involvement and love for boxing is ‘worth the price’” (Tjønndal and Hovden 2021, p. 463). However, these young women also demonstrated agentive capacity in their resistance to the reactions of and control by the religious authorities in their families, in that “they do not accept being imprisoned by the dominant intersectional meanings of gender and religion” in the culture (Tjønndal and Hovden 2021, p. 464).

Similar studies suggest that a passion for sport can foster feelings of strength and joy for girls and women (Channon and Phipps 2017; Hovden 2004; Lensky 1986) by “providing a space in which girls and women can experience empowerment, excitement, [and] freedom and challenge stereotyped notions of femininity” (Tjønndal 2019, p. 459). This resistance suggests that cultural models are susceptible to negotiation, and in the case of this paper, potentially changed through creative tools, such as the fictional representations of life in our contemporary world (Glenn 2023). As argued by Moran (2015), creativity produces culture by functioning not only as a form of “self-expression or play” but as a tool to problematize cultural ideals and create “ripple effects” that result from cultural shifts (p. 168). In other words, story matters.

Hogan (2010) argues that literary representations may be “purer” than those encountered in real life and may, thus, have the power to enhance individuals’ affective and empathic responses. Lodge (2002) affirms this view, arguing that literary fiction as a unique form of writing is able to provide detailed moment-by-moment descriptions of the inner thoughts and feelings of its protagonists. In addition, because literary texts offer more ambiguity and complexity than other kinds of texts, they can engage readers in interpretative work that fosters affective thinking (Koopman and Hakemulder 2015). By prompting reflection, or “thoughts and insights on oneself, often in relation to others, and/or society,” fictional narratives can encourage “empathy to emerge for the fullest extent” (Koopman and Hakemulder 2015, p. 101). Given that reading and responding to literature are influenced by readers’ relationships with others and the larger social community, the exploration of fictional narratives can also be transformative in the lives of readers, shaping how young people understand, navigate, and imagine life in the non-fiction world. Literature “helps shape our perceptions of people and places in the world. In discussions of literature, we have an opportunity to explore the complexity of human difference and human relations, and the conclusions we reach matter. They matter because they tell us who we are and who we can become” (Pace and Townsend 1999, p. 43).

Literature scholars have provided rich and compelling critiques of sports fiction for youth that, as they argue collectively, reaffirms the positioning of young women as bound to and limited by cultural norms and assumptions. Scholars have highlighted, for example, how young adult sports fiction consistently diminishes the empowerment of young women athletes despite aims to do otherwise. Whiteside et al. (2013) explored the Pretty Tough and Dairy Queen series (6 novels in total) to engage in an analysis guided by poststructuralist perspectives on identity, specifically the emergence of a girlhood subjectivity. Their analysis invites the consideration of how the discourse of empowerment obscures how girls are directed toward an ideology of sport that undermines their ability to experience sports on their own terms. This same theme is evidenced in Heinecken’s (2015) criticism of post feminism as a frame of literary analysis. She argues that while books in the Pretty Tough series present unique representations of young women athletes in youth fiction, any advances made are undermined by the series’ focus on gendered teamwork that fails to disrupt the male dominance of sport given that girls in these titles compete against other girls. The sexual division of sport serves to reinforce the idea that “men’s activities and men’s power are the real thing and women’s are not,” thus reaffirming women’s second-class status (McDonagh and Pappano 2008, p. x). By presenting “female achievement in a female-only realm, Pretty Tough Sports’ celebration of the empowered female athlete reflects a central conceit of postfeminist ideology: the notion that because women have won the battle for equality there is no need to challenge masculine hegemony” (Heinecken 2015, p. 37).

Glenn and King-Watkins (2019) built upon this latter work to explore the experiences of young women protagonists who join all-male teams in contemporary middle-grade and young adult sports fiction. They applied two frames of analysis, identity and intersectionality, to examine how the protagonists navigate girlhood identities given their non-traditional sports participation on historically male teams. The findings suggest that, as the fictional women athletes move into male-dominated spaces, they must reconceptualize their identities within either/or binaries. These binaries not only reaffirm gendered expectations but also ignore the complicated multiplicity of identities and their associated privileges and oppressions. A related analysis (Glenn and King-Watkins 2020) drew upon navigational identity theory to examine the experiences of these same young women protagonists. The findings name how, in this process of navigating two spaces, the athletes are described as able to separate themselves from the girls but unable to fully join the boys. In the authorial construction of their identities, they struggle to navigate the culture of power (i.e., the male world of sport) successfully because they are unable to avoid internalizing the perspectives of those in positions of power. The institutional structures of sports reinforce traditionally masculine norms and demand conformity by young women athletes even though the athletes in these novels are non-conforming in their desire to play on young men’s teams.

Taken together, these studies reveal the regular and problematic positioning of girls and young women as athletes in fiction for young adult readers. This paper is original and important in the way it broadens this view to offer an example of the healthy disruption of this positioning. The young adult novel Furia (Méndez 2020) has the potential to invite young readers to evidence an adolescent character whose love of sport serves as a form of liberation from social constraints in a way that likely feels more resonant and doable, more real somehow, than those provided by adult models in the real world and those seen in other young adult sports stories. The protagonist’s engagement with and dedication to sport invite complications of assumptions about love, particularly the cultural narratives that position girls and women as bound by devotion. The sport-centered exploration of what it means and requires for the protagonist to love herself fuels the (re)consideration of notions of familial and romantic love.

To examine these ideas, this paper draws upon the youth lens (Petrone et al. 2015), a theoretical frame of analysis that invites the careful and critical consideration of how ideas about adolescence and youth are formed, circulated, critiqued, and revised, to better understand how the protagonist is positioned as an athlete and a young woman in a context that does not allow these identities to exist simultaneously. The paper employs critical content analysis, or CCA (Johnson et al. 2016), to unearth these positionings and offer interpretative thinking to explore the following question: how can this fictional title help us (and young readers) better understand the role of sport in reframing love-oriented conceptions of girlhood?

2. Drawing upon Theory to Inform the Literary Analysis

Grounded in the assumptions that “adolescence is a construct, that adolescence does not represent a universal experience for all youth, that conceptions of adolescence have material consequences, and that adolescence often functions metaphorically in ideological ways” (p. 508), the youth lens examines how texts reinforce and/or disrupt representations of adolescents and youth by asking two key questions: “How does the text represent adolescence/ts? What role does the text play in reinforcing and/or subverting dominant ideas about adolescence?” (p. 511).

The application of the youth lens in connection with these questions allows for new ways of seeing a text. The youth lens invites readers to witness and potentially question the adult norms and goals present in stories for youth to examine power and privilege. This emphasis on adult and age-based normativity encourages the consideration of how a text “aims toward achievements characterizing adulthood or toward reinforcing the superior and more knowledgeable position of adults in relation to youth” (Petrone et al. 2015, p. 512). The youth lens can also support readers in identifying and rethinking the biological and developmental paradigms of youth that forward a singular vision of what it means to be and become a young person. Through this process, readers are provided a way to explore how a text “relies on or disrupts such ways of knowing to help denaturalize these dominant discourses and open up other possibilities of knowing youth” (p. 514). Additionally, the youth lens uncovers how texts can reinscribe and/or reimagine social and cultural norms through the representation of adolescent protagonists. Drawing upon the intersectional constructions of identity, the youth lens “attends to how characterizations of race, gender, sexuality, and other social constructs interplay with notions of adolescence…. [T]he thought and action of characters is often linked to how society and institutions function to bound possible outcomes for certain identity markers, yet these boundaries might be fundamentally different for youth of color or lesbian youth than adults of color or adult lesbians” (p. 515). The youth lens, then, considers adolescence as a unique identity marker. Finally, the youth lens invites examination of how texts can reaffirm and/or push against broader cultural discourses that define adolescence metaphorically in ways that “serve agendas that extend beyond the interests of youth” (p. 516), thus inviting the critique and potential reframing of the status quo. Relative to this analysis, given that the youth lens invites the questioning of adult norms present in stories for youth to examine power and privilege, it affords particular opportunities to consider the intersection of youth and gender, as girls and young women, by virtue of their social standing, face unique oppression.

These central tenets of the youth lens are embedded in the approach to textual analysis employed in this paper. As aligned with the methods of critical content analysis, or CCA (Johnson et al. 2016), the analysis involved the use of a specific theoretical lens (the youth lens) to develop the inquiry question, choose the focal text, and analyze the story it contains. Critical content analysis requires prioritizing a lens as the frame of the study, demanding that researchers take a critical stance from start to finish, “not just as part of interpreting the findings or citing scholarship in a literature review” (Johnson et al. 2016, p. 5). The focus of this exploration grew from curiosities around the positioning of youth athletes related to love and a desire to uncover and think critically about the role of sport in disrupting the narratives of adolescent love relative to relationships with family and romantic partners. The text selection process, then, centered on a young adult novel about a young woman athlete who loves her sport but is situated in a complex cultural community that defines and influences the relationships she holds.

Furia (Méndez 2020) is a work of contemporary realistic young adult fiction that centers on the experiences of seventeen-year-old Camila Hassan, a talented fútbol player growing up in Rosario, Argentina, under the critical eyes of parents who do not think that sport is suitable for girls. She loves her sport and holds secret her dream of earning a scholarship to play in the United States and eventually on a women’s national team. She also loves Diego, a childhood friend who has achieved the goals to which she aspires, playing for the national team in Italy and garnering notoriety and fame. Although Diego returns home with the hope of convincing Camila to join him, she is devoted to her own path, channeling her defiant alter ego, Furia, and choosing to love herself first despite the costs. The novel, told in Camila’s voice through first-person narration, allows readers to witness her agentic development firsthand.

As aligned with CCA methods, the analytical process was reiterative, starting with a reading of the novel to gain familiarity with the story itself. This was followed by several rereadings of the novel and a generation of observational notes that documented each moment in the text where the protagonist engaged in some way with her sport and/or athletic identity. Formal coding followed with a review of the observational notes for the novel and the assignment of codes that layered in the protagonist’s engagement with adolescent love in the context of sport, as aligned with the tenets of the youth lens. With these framings in mind, the coded data were interpreted to consider and capture how these positionings worked together to define the protagonist as a young person leaning on sport to navigate love as part of her familial and romantic relationships.

3. Challenging Cultural Norms of Love Through Sport

In the section that follows, I share the central themes that emerged from the textual analysis, informed by CCA and guided by the youth lens, to answer the following question: how can this fictional title help us (and young readers) better understand the role of sport in reframing love-oriented conceptions of girlhood? I argue that textual analysis through a youth lens reveals the presence of a cultural model that positions girls and women as bound by devotion and sacrifice. The resulting narrative is imbued with age- and gender-biased power and traces expectations from girlhood into womanhood as girls and young women take up loving roles in their positioning as children in their families and then as romantic partners and mothers. Through her devotion to sport, the protagonist defies the normalized version of devotion and sacrifice as the defining elements of girlhood and womanhood, shifts the youth–adult power dynamic, and rewrites the narrative of youth. This argument will be traced through the provision of textual evidence in the presentation of the findings below.

3.1. Cultural Model of Girlhood/Womanhood

Growing up in her family in contemporary Rosario, Argentina, Camila is surrounded by idealized norms of gendered love grounded in sacrifice; a loving girl or woman is positioned as necessarily putting others, particularly fathers and brothers and husbands, before herself. Camila’s negotiation of familial love is influenced by an idealized cultural model of girls and women defined by devotion that positions them not as individuals but in relation to the men in their lives. Camila notes that she is known in the barrio as “Pablo’s sister” and that both she and her mother remain “nameless” in the larger community (p. 31). And when the men to whom they are attached misbehave, girls and women are sacrificed and blamed. When a young woman in the community is murdered by her notoriously violent boyfriend, for example, Camila’s mother points the finger of blame at the young woman and calls any other explanation feminist propaganda (pp. 3, 4). Failing to meet the social expectations associated with the model comes with consequences that are deeply embedded in assumptions about girls and young women and historically situated. Camila learns, for example, about the existence of a nearby asylum for disobedient daughters, wives, sisters, or employees, women referred to as “Las Incorrigibles” (p. 64). Although the building has recently reopened in the form of the church of El Buen, the narratives of good girls and bad are woven into the architecture of the time and place in which Camila lives.

Camila’s negotiation of romantic love is similarly influenced by an idealized cultural model of women defined by devotion that positions them in relation to their partner and eventual husband. As she works to make sense of romantic love, Camila looks to La Difunta Correa, an unofficial saint who serves as a community example of the woman she is expected to become. She recollects La Difunta’s immortal story as she gazes at an estampita she keeps on her nightstand. La Difunta’s husband is captured in war, and “heartbroken, [La Difunta] carried their infant son and followed her husband through the sierras and the desert until she died of thirst. When two drovers found her body, her child was still alive, suckling from her breast” (p. 7). La Difunta is celebrated because of her commitment to her husband and child, a commitment aligned with sacrificial expectations and for which she gave her life. Within her own family, Camila describes her Russian great-grandmother, whose first love broke her heart and married her sister, and her own mother, whose husband is emotionally and physically abusive, as the models of romantic love that surround her. She notes, “Our family was stuck in a cosmic hamster wheel of toxic love, making the same mistakes, saying the same words, being hurt in the same ways generation after generation” (p. 130). Her Mami, in particular, is repeatedly described as living for her father, seeking his approval despite his cruelty, and working to the point of exhaustion to keep him happy.

As evidenced through the application of the youth lens, the text reveals how Camila is bound to these cultural norms given the lack of power she holds as a young person growing up in this space. The characterizations of “age, gender, sexuality, and other social constructs interplay with notions of adolescence to reveal how the thought and action of characters is often linked to how society and institutions function to bound possible outcomes for certain identity markers [and how] these boundaries might be fundamentally different for youth of color or lesbian youth than adults of color or adult lesbians” (Petrone et al. 2015, p. 515). As a young woman, even if Camila disagrees with what she witnesses in her family and community, the responses available to her are limited given her financial dependence upon her parents and the lack of possible escapes. Relative to familial love, Camila is obligated to fulfill her duties as a “good” daughter, even if doing so contradicts her dream of being a collegiate and professional athlete. She goes along with her mother’s dream of her becoming the first in her family to graduate from high school, go to university, and pursue a career as a doctor, and when her father expresses explicitly that participation in athletics should be reserved for men, she chooses not to argue. While Camila’s brother, Pablo, is pushed by his father to pursue his talent as a fútbol player, to be the family savior whose athletic talents will yield fame and fortune, Camila hides her athletic interests by sneaking off to fútbol matches and burying her practice clothes in the bottom of her bag. Each day after practice, Camila changes out of her fútbol clothes and back into her “obedient daughter uniform” (p. 30). Although she is Camila to her family and friends, to her coach and teammates, she is Furia, a fierce competitor on the soccer pitch. When she plays, she explains, “The part of me that had been set free during the game stretched her wings and howled at the sun” (p. 17). Camila does not want this feeling to end, as “Once we left the field, it would be back to regular life. Back to being ordinary” (p. 19). As demanded by her father, Camila can participate in sport but only as a girlfriend or wife to a male athlete, an expectation that denies her athletic identity and positions her as sacrificial. Camila’s father envisions her as a pawn he can use to leverage her burgeoning romantic relationship with Diego, a fútbol player from the community who has garnered great success as an athlete on an international team, to improve his own class standing. He encourages Camila to make herself attractive to Diego by using the promise of sex as a form of commodification. He tells her, “Your life could turn into a fairy tale if you’re as smart as you pretend to be. Yours and ours, because of course you’ll help your family when fortune smiles on you” (pp. 122–24).

Camila is similarly bound to cultural norms as she navigates romantic love through her relationship with Diego. Again, through the application of the youth lens to the text, we are invited to see the biological and developmental paradigms of youth at work in the forwarding of a singular vision of what it means to be and become a young person (Petrone et al. 2015). In her growth from girl to woman, Camila is expected to travel a particular path, from subservient child to subservient wife. As an athlete, however, Camila wants nothing more than what Diego has. During their evening phone calls, Diego tells her stories about the places he is visiting and the people he is meeting. According to Camila, his stories “sounded like adventures right out of Harry Potter, boys training to be wizards. I’d had to squash my envy—Diego was living a life that I could only dream of, no matter how much I loved fútbol, no matter how great an athlete I might be” (p. 51). When Diego talks about missing Rosario, he refers to his sadness as “saudade.” In response, Camila thinks to herself, “The Portuguese word filled me with longing for something I hadn’t lost yet. My saudade had more to do with not getting to experience what he had: a life playing futból without having to hide” (p. 88).

Even if Camila disagrees that this is how things should work, she feels compelled to put Diego’s dreams ahead of hers and finds herself pulled into a culturally sanctioned vision of love that is easier to accept than to fight. When Diego returns home for a visit after being away in competition, she realizes, “I was too proud to ask him if his feelings had changed. Still, I wished I could tell him about my games and my dreams” (p. 46). After kissing him, she knows that pursuing her dreams of sport could jeopardize their relationship and chooses instead to allow herself to get swept away, as “The tug of real life pulled at me, but I still floated in a daze as I made my way upstairs and watched him drive away” (117). When Camila makes the decision to bravely share her athletic aspirations with Diego, she is afraid that he will not see them as legitimate or important. She tells him, “‘I’ve always wanted to play.’ I looked up to see if he was about to laugh at me, but his face was still and serious, so I kept going. ‘Their league is professional. But imagine…’ I didn’t know how to explain myself, but he waited for me to find the words. ‘I know it’s far-fetched, but if I do well in the Sudamericano, maybe I can get called up for a professional team. Even the U.S. women’s league…’ My heart pounded in my ears as I poured out my dreams at Diego’s feet” (pp. 191–92). Diego invites Camila to come with him to Italy, where his team is based, sweetening the offer with the reminder, “You know, they have a women’s team. Maybe one day….” (p. 197). Rather than seeing this as a second-rate invitation, she imagines their future together “like in a movie” (p. 198). As Camila navigates the familial and romantic models of gendered love within her culture, she elevates sacrifice and putting others, particularly fathers and brothers and husbands, before herself.

3.2. Devotion and Defiance Through Sport

Although Camila, as a young person, is limited in how she might push against cultural norms that get in the way of her athletic dreams, her devotion to sport offers pathways to empowerment and defiance that challenge the normalization of sacrifice as the defining element of womanly love. Relative to familial love, Camila’s refusal to give up her athletic dreams opens space for conversation, learning about and questioning the narratives of the past, and eventually, a renegotiated relationship between her and her mother. Growing from an application of the youth lens, we can see how these moves result in the questioning of adult norms and by extension, the examination of adult–child power relationships. Rather than “reinforcing the superior and more knowledgeable position of adults in relation to youth” (p. 512), Camila’s devotion to sport pushes against devotion to family and generates an alternative example of girlhood that ultimately empowers her, her mother, and her brother, as explored below.

For much of the novel, Camila is angry with her mother, seeing her as weak and sacrificial, especially in her willingness to overlook her husband’s extra-marital transgressions and acts of domestic violence. As she pursues the sport she loves, a journey that proves challenging given the cultural models she has to stand against, she develops increasing empathy and comes to see her mother in a new light: “For a second, I got a glimpse of that young girl César [a family friend] had known. That girl whose dreams had died when she’d chosen to follow someone else’s was buried under layers of expectations, responsibilities, and lies…. That girl had suffocated under all the rubble. My anger collapsed in on itself. Twenty years from now, would that be me? Would I be resigned to my fate, pushing my daughter toward the light so she could be free? Or pulling her down so I wouldn’t be left alone in the dark?” (p. 225). With this realization, Camila decides to tell her mother that she has been playing fútbol for a year. In response, her mother tells her that fútbol is a waste of time and that the pursuit of the sport will require that she throw away her medical school dreams, dreams that actually belong more to her mother than Camila. Camila replies that she can be a doctor and play soccer, but Mami tells her she cannot have it all. Camila responds internally, “Although I wanted to yell that this was the greatest lie told to girls like us for centuries, seeing the defeat in her eyes, I couldn’t find my voice” (p. 231). Camila leaves a tournament permission slip on the kitchen table for her mother to sign, and her mother insists that she needs to talk to her husband before making a decision.

The next morning, however, evidences a turning point in the relationship. Mami, after reflecting upon her initial reaction, tells Camila that her grandfather had once watched Camila play as a little girl. Impressed, he told Mami that Camila’s talent would save them all (i.e., make them rich), but Mami says, “I don’t want you to save us, at least not in the way everyone else does. I want you to break the cycle, Camila. That’s why I want you to go to school. Why I don’t ever want a boy around you, even if that boy has a good heart and a good future and money” (p. 236). Camila looks down and sees that Mami has signed the permission form. Mami has chosen to put what she wants—her daughter’s success—ahead of her husband’s wishes. Mami proceeds to actively take a role in elevating Camila’s athletic goals, showing up to watch a tournament match the next day and yelling loudly from the sidelines, “Vamos, Camila! Vamos, Furia!” (p. 332). After Camila’s team loses the match, Mami feels as though she is at fault and an embodiment of the bad luck that her husband cited as an excuse to keep her from attending the matches of Camila’s brother, Pablo. Mami tells Camila, “You are incredible. I’m la yeta. I made you lose.” Camila negates this internalization of blame, telling her mother instead, “Mamita, without you, I wouldn’t even have played” (p. 336).

The effects of this shift in relationship extend beyond Camila and Mami to ultimately rewrite the narrative of familial love by taking power away from Camila’s father, the power he has wielded over the entire family. Camila has long recognized the truth about her father: “All he wanted was a bite of what Diego had. I was his way in. He didn’t even know that I had that flair, too. For him, I was just a tool to get what he wanted…. He’d be the last person to know I played futból, and when he tried to take credit for my success, I’d squash him like a cockroach” (p. 124). But as a young woman who holds little power on her own within the family structure, she could only dream of this outcome. By seeing her mother in a new way—and inviting her mother to see herself in a new way—Camila gains an ally and shifts the power dynamic. At the novel’s climax, Mami, Pablo, and Camila stand up to the father when he tries to beat Camila after learning she was at a protest for a missing girl in the community. Pablo, seeing a new strength in his mother, tells his father that the violence ends now, and Mami tells the father to leave. Camila joins the moment, realizing, “It was now or never. I wasn’t going to let him off easy. Not after holding us hostage and blaming us for his failures. Not after destroying Pablo’s confidence, staining my mom’s love…. [W]hatever the consequences, my mom, Pablo, and I were breaking the cycle today” (pp. 307–8). Within the family, love is no longer “a weapon to be used against the weakest at the most vulnerable” (p. 196).

Similarly, but in the context of romantic love, Camila’s refusal to give up her athletic dreams opens space for reflection, learning about and questioning the narratives of the future, and eventually, a renegotiated relationship between Camila and Diego. When seeing Camila’s navigation of romantic love through the youth lens, we are invited to consider broader cultural discourses that define adolescence metaphorically in ways that “serve agendas that extend beyond the interests of youth” (Petrone et al. 2015, p. 516). Through her commitment to sport, Camila battles against a narrative of romantic love that is validated by her cultural community, a narrative that serves to perpetuate the status quo by elevating girls and women who sacrifice their dreams for the sake of others, as delineated below.

Camila feels repeatedly the romantic pull of Diego and his invitations to leave Rosario and join him in Italy. She dreams of a life sanctioned by her community: “I fantasized about what it would be like if I were flying out with him tomorrow. Heading to the glamorous new life he had in Italy. I wasn’t the first or last girl dating a fútbol player to do this. My body was on fire. I hovered at the edge of dreamland, feeling Diego’s gentle fingers on my skin, his soft mouth on mine” (pp. 206–7). However, the love she holds for her sport and her potential future within it allows her to remain committed to her dreams. As she gets closer and closer to playing in the Sudamerica tournament that could open doors for college scholarships, she revisits the story of La Difunta and questions whether this cultural model is the one for her. She explains, “La Difunta had died trying to save her husband, and although her sacrifice had cost her own life, she’d become immortal. But her journey didn’t speak to me. If I followed Diego, where would I end up? What doors were closing with each decision that I made?” (p. 119). In a later conversation on the telephone, Diego tells her, “I only want you, Furia. I’ve only ever wanted you.” Camila’s response, however, evidences a further shift from gendered expectations of sacrifice. She tells herself, “ I held my breath until the world stopped spinning, until I could stop myself from saying he was all I’d ever wanted, too. For a long time, that had been true. But it wasn’t anymore. I wanted to so much more than Diego’s love or money could give me” (pp. 233–34). In a later call, he tells her, “You’re why I do everything I do, Camila. Without you, all of this effort would have no meaning” (p. 292). She thinks, “Part of me had melted like sugar over fire, and the other part had wondered what he expected in return for all the love” (p. 292).

Camila’s gradual move toward a rejection of the sacrificial narrative of womanly love comes to a head when Diego leaves his team to come home to save Camila from her father given the possibility that he will try to harm her and the family after his release from jail. Camila tells Diego that she is unable to leave due to her own team’s plans to compete in the Sudamerica tournament the following weekend. Diego offers several arguments in an attempt to convince Camila to come with him—what if your father comes for you, what if your team does not win the tournament, what if we leave now and travel Europe together? As she listens, Camila closes her eyes for a second and thinks, “I could almost smell the fancy streets; I could almost feel the magic of playing house with him.” But she responds instead with questions, “What about my dreams? What about my career, Diego?” (p. 317). When Diego says, “I thought your dream was to be with me,” she tells him, “It’s one of them, Diego” (p. 317). When he persists, she asks herself, “Why was he making me choose?” (p. 317) and tells him softly while caressing his hand, “I’m sorry you bought a ticket. I’m sorry you left the team to come rescue me. But Diego, you should’ve at least talked to me before you did that. I have opportunities here. Even if I have a bad tournament and we lose el Sudamericano, there are other tryouts, and I’ll get them on my own. I’ll keep trying…. Te quiero…. Nothing will change that, but I won’t abandon everything I’ve worked for …. You can’t ask me to choose between you and my dreams” (pp. 318–19). As Camila navigates the familial and romantic models of love in her culture, sport provides the empowerment that fuels defiance, thus allowing her to challenge sacrifice and caring for others as the defining elements of womanly love and center herself instead.

4. Moving Between Text and World

As a fictional text, the young adult novel Furia (Méndez 2020) offers young readers an expanded model of girlhood and womanhood, featuring a protagonist whose commitments to her athletic passions push on the gendered assumptions of love and the regular positioning of women as most admirable when they put others before themselves. Camila’s love of sport provides liberation from the constraints of youth positioning in line with the cultural norms that surround and influence her, her family, and her community. As evidenced through an application of the youth lens, Camila’s age serves as a unique identity marker worth noting. She is a woman, for example, but she is not her mother or grandmother; she is Argentinian, but she is not a mirrored reflection of her community. Her position as a self-aware and determined young person forging the path she envisions for herself allows readers to question the unquestioned narrative of adults as all-knowing and superior, pushes on a vision of biological and developmental determinism that suggests a singular pathway to womanhood, and invites the examination of broader cultural discourses that work to define adolescence in ways that perpetuate the status quo. In other words, her story matters.