No abstract

This article examines the current contradictory discourses on homosexuality and soccer within the British (specifically English) newspaper media. While support ostensibly is given in the press to the eradication of homophobia in relation to soccer, the continuing promotion of traditional masculine football stereotypes, such as the ‘hard man’, imagines an ongoing heterosexual normativity. Furthermore, the media fascination with professional soccer players ‘coming out’, although expressed in supportive terms, may be decoded as an attempt to publicly reveal the deviant other. Such ambivalent representation is even evident in coverage of the Kick It Out anti-homophobia campaign. News releases from the campaign have been reinterpreted within media representation to fuel a perceived public interest in wanting to know which Premier League soccer players are gay. Accordingly, by employing a psychoanalytic and post-structuralist perspective on the instability of discursive constructions of heteronormative masculinity, the article considers soccer and its related media as a site of hegemonic contestation in which the dominant discourse of male heterosexuality is at once undergoing challenge and reinforcement.

In sociology of sport, a considerable amount of scholarship concentrates on sport as an arena of social resistance. Fundamental to understanding resistance within practices of sport following and fandom is an underlying knowledge of the nature of sport as a cultural commodity in which fandom and following are invested. This article draws on Paul Willis’s theoretical work as a means of examining contemporary cultural commodities and the commodity nature of sport in particular. The theoretical discussion is illustrated by an empirical study of developments within English soccer involving collective supporters’ resistance to heightened corporate intrusion into the control of professional clubs.

This article examines the implications of Paul Willis’s conceptualizations of ‘common culture’ and the cultural commodity for understanding sport as a popular cultural form. It argues that Willis's Ethnographic Imagination(2000) successfully addresses accusations of ‘cultural populism’ against his earlier Common Culture(1990) by acknowledging the tensions between creative cultural consumption and the political economy of cultural production. Hence his conceptualization of the ‘doubly half-formed’ cultural commodity, its usages and meanings neither determined by cultural industries nor entailing unfettered consumer ‘symbolic creativity’. Arguing that sport exemplifies this contradiction, the article examines two contradictory aspects of commoditized sport as popular culture. First is the ways supporters' financial, emotional, symbolic and intellectual investments in sport constitute a material contribution to the sport commodity itself and enable an acute sense of ‘authenticity’ which may challenge sport's (as a cultural industry) political economy. Second is the ways supporters' ‘de-fetishizing’ of the sport commodity may combine with the commoditizing of athletes' labour power as workers to limit their capitalizing on the symbolic fruits of their own labour.