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This paper intends to show the metonymical identification that exists between the male body and the Basque community and how this identification provokes a systematic exclusion of women from the spaces where cultural protagonism is displayed. To do so, it will examine how protagonism is performed in the sport of hand pelota, a sport in which the most popular modality is exclusively male and which has been central to shaping the Basque imaginary. The game of pelota has shaped many of the main squares in Basque villages and towns, as well as the Basque bodies placed in them. The place where pelota is played, the fronton, is the space used by the Basque community to hold their most significant events. And Pelota is the prototypical game played in that space. By deciphering the chain of signifiers generates in the game, it is possible to understand the imaginary which prevent women from becoming protagonists in the context of Basque cultural representation. The paper tells the story of one of them, the Navarrese pelota player Maite Ruiz de Larramendi, forced to give up pelota when she was a child, and attempts to provide keys for the interpretation of other cases beyond its ethnographic boundaries, such as the well-known case of the South African athlete Caster Semenya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]