PE is not for me: when boys' masculinities are threatened

This study used hegemonic masculinity theory to examine the intersection of masculinities and school physical education from the perspectives of boys who embodied masculinities that were marginalized. Over a 13-week period using present-focused, student-centered, qualitative methodological approaches, we observed, interviewed, and worked in small groups with 5 middle school boys from two schools. We identified three significant themes that merge the stories and experiences of masculinity hierarchies in sport-based physical education. First, we found that four social practices (content, pedagogies, teacher-student relationships, and peer cultures) in these physical education settings privileged some masculinities over others. Second, we examined the role that embodiment played, both in how the boys wore their oppression and in how their bodies resisted marginalizing situations. Third, we describe the contrasts these boys drew between physical activities experienced in sport-based physical education and physical activity experiences in other areas of their lives. We used Connell and Messerschmidt's (2005) reconceptualization of the theory of hegemonic masculinity for understanding how competitive sport-based physical education functioned to oppress boys with masculinities that were deemed abnormal. Additionally, we introduce feminist poststructuralism as a possible theoretical lens for interpreting boys' bodies as also being active agents in social practices rather than being only passive objects who are oppressed and dominated.     

Social agency and football fandom: the cultural pedagogies of the Western Sydney ultras

Abstract

This article addresses key questions of social agency and cultural pedagogy within the neoliberal structures of ‘modern football’ in the Australian context. It reports on a two-year ethnographic study of the Red and Black Bloc, an Australian ultras group in Western Sydney, one of the most culturally diverse areas in Australia. The origins of the Western Sydney ultras are described, along with their struggles to build their own cultural identity and to fight for social agency within a commodified football league. By combining a multifaceted theoretical model with a range of ethnographic data – including document analysis and in-depth interviews – this study reveals the processes by which the Western Sydney ultras enhance members’ social cohesion towards an increased social consciousness. The paper acknowledges the role that ultras, as authentic cultural formations, may have in the propagation of new cultural pedagogies that have the potential to enhance citizenship, communal life and participatory democracy.     

Inclusive and exclusive masculinities in physical education: a Scottish case study

This research examines how adolescent males (ages 16–17 years) construct and experience their masculine identities within the context of physical education (PE). A class of 23 boys and 3 girls from a state secondary school in Scotland were observed over a period of 3 months. During the third month, five of the observed pupils volunteered to take part in a conversation with the lead researcher which was guided by their participation in a repertory grid task. The same five participants also took part in a one-to-one semi-structured interview. The analysis of the evidence revealed that the adolescent pupils internalised and performed an orthodox form of masculinity that centred on strength, pain tolerance and the policing of others. More inclusive masculinities appeared to be emerging, however, the hypermasculine and public nature of the PE environment made it very difficult for the pupils to freely adopt or perform these alternative, more inclusive forms of masculinity. Additionally, pupils who did perform traits associated with inclusive masculinity often exhibited a high degree of social and physical capital. In order to facilitate a culture where all individuals feel free to express their gendered identities, teachers are encouraged to recognise, promote and celebrate multiple masculinities. This could create a safer learning environment for pupils and help prevent identities from being ‘destroyed’ in PE.     

Teachers' stories: physical education teachers' constructions and experiences of masculinity within secondary school physical education

Physical education (PE) and sport have traditionally been identified by scholars as a key mechanism for the production and reproduction of a culturally esteemed ideal of masculinity, premised upon being stoic, strong, competitive, sexist and homophobic. Yet, more recent research reflects a change in valued masculinity as a response to declining cultural homohysteria. As such, this preliminary study looks to establish how PE teachers understand and construct masculinities within the educational environment. Through in-depth interviews, we find participants recognised many elements of softer masculinities, described in inclusive masculinities literature, as being performed by contemporary teenagers. This includes being emotionally open, embracing a more effeminate taste in dress and being increasingly physically tactile. However, we also found that the PE teachers have a cohort variance in their masculine values, with those socialised in sport through the 1980s showing the most orthodox and oppressive views.     

Ultras in Turkey: othering,agency, and culture as a political domain

Abstract

Football administrators and non-fans or non-ultra fans in Turkey tend to posit ultras as either the ‘fire of the show’ or write them off as instruments of violence guided by irrationality. These two stances are the two sides of the same coin which points to a fascination/fear discourse that serves to produce ultras as the perfect other. The financially powerful actors of football tolerate and accommodate ultras so long as they don’t challenge dominating commercial or political interests. This relegates ultras to the supposedly innocuous realm of culture divorced from politics, especially in the aftermath of the Gezi Uprising of 2013. However, through organizations like the Fans’ Rights Association and in their everyday practices of fandom, ultras reject subjectivities assigned to them by the fascination/fear discourse, they agentively engage with their own spectacularization and othering as well as the legal or administrative efforts to contain and confine thesm.     

Masculinity in Singapore: the residual culture of the Chinese martial artist

The study set out to understand the complex landscape of masculinities in Singapore. In particular, it sought to investigate whether, apart from the common muscular and powerful dominant form, there are traditional views of masculinity sustained by Chinese cultural influence, in particular, the culture of Chinese martial arts. Open-ended survey responses from 48 male and female Singaporean first and second year undergraduate students on a sport and critical thinking course were elicited and then followed up by focused online asynchronous discussions to further elaborate understandings. Informants reflected on elements that construct masculinity in Chinese martial arts and how these may differ to what they consider to be the dominant or hegemonic masculinity, related in particular to the body builder. Responses indicate that a residual culture persists nourished by traditional Chinese culture and that this is quite different to the contemporary male identities of metrosexuals and spornosexuals revered in the West.     

White is the new black? Football,media and the New Zealand imagination

This paper interrogates the media articulation of football/soccer to New Zealand national consciousness during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. 541 articles from national and regional newspapers and Internet news sites were gathered and analysed using a critically discursive approach. I argue that the press re-framed football within the national sporting imagination in the context of a narcissistic nationalism. Coverage was underpinned by several interlocking themes. First, falsely positing football as ethnically inclusive by emphasizing Māori players’ presence in the national team. Second, the entrenchment of archetypes and caricatures of both others and the national self. This included the evocation of a mythic New Zealand masculinity, with specific individuals lionized as key embodiments of the fictive national character. Third, the caricaturing of other nationalities is also used to bolster the national self – in particular the Italians and Australians. Such framings resonate with long-standing themes in the selective construction of a settler-informed New Zealand nationalism. Coverage, however, ignores the complexity of how individuals are flexibly and ambiguously articulated to the nation, particularly in the context of the global football labour market.     

Negotiating sexuality and masculinity in school sport: an autoethnography

This autoethnography explores challenging and ethically sensitive issues around sexual orientation, sexual identity and masculinity in the context of school sport. Through storytelling, I aim to show how sometimes ambiguous encounters with heterosexism, homophobia and hegemonic masculinity through sport problematise identity development for young same-sex attracted males. By foregrounding personal embodied experience, I respond to an absence of stories of gay and bisexual experiences among males in physical education and school sport, in an effort to reduce a continuing sense of Otherness and difference regarding same-sex attracted males. I rely on the story itself to express the embodied forms of knowing that inhabit the experiences I describe, and resist a finalising interpretation of the story. Instead, I offer personal reflections on particular theoretical and methodological issues which relate to both the form and content of the story.     

Black Males in the Stadium: All ‘Bad Niggers’? French Literature,Sport and Masculinity from the 1920s to the 1950s

In the first part of the twentieth century, ‘sports literature’ presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity. The novels examined the stadiums, the boxing rings or the velodromes and noticed the existence of coloured sportsmen. Black boxers and athletes were considered as original models of manliness competing with the hegemonic masculinity, hitherto written in ‘white’. This essay intends to explore the French ‘sports novels’ published in the first part of the twentieth century. Relying on the history of masculinities and of gender, and on the methodological reflection of ‘race studies’, it examines the meeting between Black identity and athletic masculinity in literature. Thus this articles aims at showing how, through a series of stylistic, narrative and semiotic processes, the fiction essentialized the difference. Both fascinated and scared, the novels stigmatized Black sportsmen and endeavoured to analyse the alterity.     

The boxing gym as masculine space

ABSTRACT

This paper is divided into five parts. Parts I and II place the discussion in the context of anthropological spaces and more specifically sports spaces, including discussion of the extent to which these may be gendered. Part III focuses on the question of the nature of masculinity, while Part IV investigates the status of boxing as expression of masculine identity. Part V looks further into boxing and the spaces of boxing as an expression of modern masculinity, with part VI considering women’s recent appropriation of pugilism. The paper finishes with a brief reflection leading to the conclusion that although the boxing gym remains a masculine space it is no longer an exclusively male preserve.     

Toward sport reform: hegemonic masculinity and reconceptualizing competition

Hegemonic masculinity, a framework where stereotypically masculine traits are over-emphasized, plays a central role in sport, partly due to an excessive focus on winning. This type of masculinity marginalizes those that do not possess specific traits, including many women and men. I argue sport reform focused on mitigating hypercompetitive attitudes can reduce this harmful and marginalizing hegemonic masculinity in sport. I make this argument first by challenging the dichotomous nature of sport, especially in recognizing that all outcomes are a blend of winning and losing, that ties are relevant and informative outcomes to contests, and that winning and losing do not always tell accurate stories of the outcome. Secondly, I contend that expanding the potential outcomes in sport can help broaden the emphasis of competitive sport to take into account playing well and improving, in terms of both the test and the contest. I conclude that these reforms decrease hegemonic masculinity, making sport better for all.     

团体游戏与个人游戏训练对大学生抑郁心理干预效果比较

目的：观察团体游戏训练与个人游戏训练对中轻度抑郁症患者辅助治疗效果的差异。方法：将60例大学生中轻度抑郁症患者随机分为3组,分别为：心理疏导组、心理疏导+个人游戏组和心理疏导+团体游戏组,每组20例。心理疏导组仅采用心理疏导的方式进行治疗;心理疏导+个人游戏组在心理疏导基础上采用个人游戏训练进行辅助治疗;心理疏导+团体游戏组在心理疏导基础上采用团体游戏训练进行辅助治疗。结果：治疗前,3组患者一般资料组间差异无统计学意义,均P>0.05,具有可比性;经8周治疗后,3组患者的HAMD评分都比治疗前改善明显（均P<0.05）;经各组之间进行治疗效果比较,发现心理疏导+团体游戏组的HAMD评分改善效果及临床治愈率,均明显优于心理疏导组和心理疏导+个人游戏组,均P<0.05;而心理疏导+个人游戏组的HAMD评分改善效果和临床治愈率与心理疏导组无明显差异。结论：在心理疏导基础上采用团体游戏训练,可对大学生中轻度抑郁症患者起到协同治疗作用,联合治疗的效果明显优于单一心理疏导;而采用个人游戏训练进行辅助治疗的效果不明显。提示：不同形式的运动康复干预,对抑郁患者的治疗效果起着重要的影响,应妥善选择运动康复治疗的手段或方式。     

American Sammys and French Poilus in the Great War: sport, masculinities and vulnerability

The violence and duration of fighting throughout the Great War created an intense feeling of vulnerability among the men engaged in battle, which challenged their perception of manliness. When the Americans joined the war in 1917, the balance between the two opposing armies was modified and the psychological crises of French soldiers brought to an end. The confidence shown by the American soldiers and their first successes on the battlefield changed the way the French Poilus perceived their new allies. From scepticism to admiration, Frenchmen's feelings extended beyond the fighting. Indeed, by living with American soldiers in the trenches and camps behind the front, French soldiers discovered a new culture where games and sport played a major role and contributed to building manliness. The Foyers Franco-Americains du Soldat (Franco-American hostels for soldiers) provided an ideal place for the cultural transfer of a model of masculinity from Sammys to Poilus. The foyers were managed by the American YMCA and eventually reached the number of 1,500 in France during the war. These hostels afforded soldiers numerous opportunities to develop cultural and sports practices, by bringing together Americans and Frenchmen. Mainly based on the archives of the American Expeditionary Forces, the YMCA and the French Army, the paper argues that the Foyers du Soldat brought to light a new model of masculinity based on sport, which challenged the Frenchmen's vision. It aims to show the rapid transformation of masculine identity within a context of extreme vulnerability and confirms the changes in representations of men in French society at this time.     

Playing with tension: national charisma and disgrace at Euro 2012

By the time of Euro 2012, deepening tensions of nationalism and internal social struggles were developing across Europe in worsening conditions of systemic crisis. The official football ideology of UEFA conceives Euro 2012 as a civilizing platform for mutual respect and brotherhood between competing nations. In contrast, what I call Hyper-Critical Theory conceives of football competitions like Euro 2012 as part of a de-civilising ‘sports mode of production’ that necessarily produces crisis conditions, alienation and violence on a mass scale, fostering nationalism, militarism and racism. Between these polar perspectives, the figurational sociology of sport associated with Norbert Elias proposes that major international football competitions like Euro 2012 creates and dissipates contingent tensions of ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’. Study of Euronews ‘post-national’ coverage of Euro 2012 allows their explanatory adequacy to be compared. In a competition structure like the Euros no social group – players, officials, media or fans – is able to disregard entirely the field capabilities of the ‘best minority of 11’ in the serious game of exemplifying the group charisma of nations.     

Sport,Technique and Violence: The Technical Modes for Generating Sport Violence

Norbert Elias makes technical progress one of the markers of the state of civilisation. It is from this viewpoint that we would like to return to the question of sport, a fundamental part in Elias' civilising process, which also constitutes, a contrario, one of the most ambiguous aspects of ‘technical progress’ and its relation to violence, to the articulation of a double abuse of instrumental rationality. On the one hand the infinite improvement of human possibilities (records, performance) which leads to the recognised risks of exploitation and the ultra-sophisticated controlling of athletes (extreme pressure, over-training) as a corollary of the temptation to over-stimulate athletic potential as a result of the uncontrolled use of victory techniques (cheating, doping, violence). On the other hand, the stakes involved in the production of a vast spectacle with ideological, sociopolitical and socio-economic overtones which lead to technological manipulations. Both these tendencies overlap, and furthermore cannot be isolated from, a more general context of the technification of the social, at the heart of which instrumental rationality constitutes the first example of violence. This three-fold observation constitutes the basis of the argument set out in this paper.     

‘Between Work and Laziness’: Leisure in the Polish Countryside (1945–1989)

Abstract

The paper draws attention to free time activities in the Polish countryside after 1945. In pre-war rural worldview, every action in which the element of household usefulness was absent, was valued negatively, and considered to be laziness. Growing spatial mobility of village dwellers and changing attitudes towards work on farms resulted in depreciation of land as superior value. This shift together with industrialization and positive valuation of urban culture brought new patterns of spending time in the countryside. Traditionally, ‘Neighbourhood sit-ins’ – a kind of zone of pleasure and fun, situated on the border between the spheres of work and active rest – have been transformed into something totally different. The emergence of radios, TV sets, and pop culture meant that group meetings were focused on content entirely separate from work. In my article, I would like to examine the intersection of two domains of leisure in post-war countryside, time of community, associated with relaxing meeting, spontaneous fun on the one hand and organized time of the youth on the other. Another major issue I would like to discuss in my paper is emergence of private spare time and its perception by village dwellers.     

A post-social conceptual framework for exploring object narratives in sport organisations

In this article we propose a theoretical framework for narrative analysis that gives voice to objects in sport organisations. Despite considerable interest in the symbolic and mnemonic potency of some sporting objects – most notably memorabilia – many organisational objects go unnoticed, whilst little attention has been paid to methods for gathering stories from inanimate objects. We suggest that material objects in sport organisations participate in narrative production and therefore constitute a rich investigative site. We adopt a post-social approach to narrative methodology where objects are recognised as non-human actors in organisational sense-making, not as narrative repositories that ‘contain’ stories and memories. A three-domain research framework is developed recommending an approach to eliciting an object narrative within a sport organisation. First, object materiality exposes the significant networks of forces, materials and people – and therefore episodes and actors – that engage with and through objects. Second, since people and objects are enmeshed in sequenced, workplace activities, object practice allows organisational agents to define what stories objects can tell whilst objects reciprocally bound the scope of human performance. Third, object biography provides a strategy to map the connections and transitions that occur over the lifecourse of an object, which reveals a changing web of organisational relations.     

The importance of research on the ultras: introduction

Abstract

The ultras have become the most spectacular form of football fandom in the early twenty-first century. Thanks to global media, social media and increased travel, fans view, engage and interact with a range of fans from across the globe and bring various local dimensions to their fandom. This volume brings together a range of articles into the ultras style of football fandom. Whilst the ultras phenomenon began in Italy, then spread across Southern Europe into Northern Europe, it has now become truly global. This volume is designed to be an introduction; a first account of ultras for the uninitiated. What follows are analyses and accounts of ultras in Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Turkey, Israel, North America, Australia, Indonesia and Croatia. Not only does this demonstrate the prevalence of the ultras style of fandom across the globe, it shows how football becomes an important cultural arena to see the intersections of globalisation and localism.