Doing Sport in a Headscarf? German Sport and Turkish Females

“Sport is best played in a club,” “Ali is on our side,” “Sport is international”—these and similar slogans are designed to encourage foreigners living in Germany to join a sport club. This interest of German sport organizations in attracting immigrants has a variety of aims. First, everybody living in Germany ought to have the chance of making use of the potentially positive effects of physical activities, such as improving health, establishing social networks, and having just pure fun. Further, sport can be used as a means of socialization and as a way of helping foreign people to adapt to the mainstream culture of the country in which they live. Moreover, sport organizations and officials hope that sporting activities, especially among young people, can contribute towards reducing deviant behavior and even violence. However, sport officials and the public seldom either question whether adaptation and integration is indeed the right goal for immigrants or consider that this kind of advertisement only attracts males, Sport fits in with their ideas and their ideals of masculinity, with their life circumstances, and with their habitus in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. A number of studies confirm our everyday knowledge that sport plays an important role in the lives of many male immigrants, especially Turks. But is sport attractive for immigrant girls and women? And what do we know about the sporting activities of female immigrants?