The gendering of defining moments: heroic narratives and pivotal points in footballing memories

ABSTRACT

Footballing attachments are made through memories not least by being able to say ‘I was there’ or at least ‘I remember where Iwas when we won the World Cup or beat Leeds United 6–0 or when Pele/Cruyff/Kempes/ Maradonna/Bergkamp scored or when Messi set up the goal. You can fill in your own examples, some of which will be more personal and local, and others more global. These memories draw footballing communities together through virtual collective attachments in ‘imagined communities’. In football, heroes are mostly men: heroes with names we know. Where are women in these narratives and how are defining moments made and remade in light of the development of the women’s game? Can the increased visibility of women’s football, put new narratives into discourse and generate opportunities for redefining the pivotal points and great moments? Change is marginal and incremental, but it is happening.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Caudwell, ‘Why this football tournament should be called the men’s World Cup’.

2. Anderson and Travers, eds. Transgender Athletes in Competitive Sport presents a range of accounts by trans athletes of their own experience as examples of self-identification. Kath Woodward, Embodied Sporting Practices demonstrates some of the history of the dilemmas faced by regulatory bodies such as the IOC and IAAF in relation to their attempts to establish certainties about the categorization of sex and gender for intersex and non-binary athletes, for example using the case of 800 m champion Caster Semenya.

3. Woodward, Sex, Power and the Games.

4. Michel Foucault uses the idea of ‘putting something into discourse’ to explain how this process makes it possible to classify and categorize people, actions, body practices and events by having a name, whether it is of a type of person or figure (as Foucault suggests in the context of sexuality, in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 11)) or, for my purposes in this article, a defining moment in sport or the figure of a female sporting hero.

5. Jennifer Hargreaves has written extensively on the history of women’s sport in her seminal book, Sporting Females.

6. Chevalley and Woodward, Chasing Time; and Woodward, Sporting Times; Woodward, Sex, Power and the Games.

7. David Goldblatt’s work on football explains some of the attraction of football, as well as its contradictory forces. See Goldblatt, The Ball is Round. Goldblatt cites the Shankley quotation. Football has attracted a huge number of contributors to the canon of the sport, not least because of the sport’s massive global appeal and intense personal commitment and psychosocial dimensions.

8. Recent work has been attentive to female fandom. See, for example, Stacey Pope’s The Feminization of Sports Fandom and Kim Toffeletti, ed. Sport and Female Fans.

9. Woodward, ‘World Cup: sexism in British punditry is clear for all to see’; Sex, Power and the Games; Globalizing Boxing; Planet Sport.

10. McClure, Jordan, and Woodward, Culture, Identity and Intense Performativity.

11. Woodward, Planet Sport. Sporting Times was written in the ‘real time’ of the 2012 Olympics and explored the immediacy and intensity of sport, in which past, present and future are condensed in the moment of the event; time is of the essence in sport. Not only is the event timed, each event reminds us of past records, current possibilities and the promise of future achievements.

12. ‘Hidden from History’ is the title of an important critical contribution to the second wave of feminism by Sheila Rowbotham. Rowbotham’s Hidden from History demonstrates the ways in which women’s activities and relevance have been marginalized and concealed, so that it is a key concern of feminism to research the work and contribution to society of women historically. This has been undertaken in sport, especially recently following Jennifer Hargreaves’s seminal work.

13. Woodward, The Politics of In/visibility. The book argues that Laura Mulvey’s concept of the gaze whereby women look at women (and at themselves) through men’s eyes and the process of looking is controlled by the male gaze of patriarchal power relations, can be re-interpreted to permit a female gaze which challenges patriarchy.

14. For example, Carrie Dunn reported on the Women’s World Cup in Canada in 2015 for a number of national newspapers, including the Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman and Eurosport and, as well as blogging on the subject. Also see Dunn, The Roar of the Lionesses, published in 2016, the year after England won bronze at the Cup amidst considerable excitement in a very competitive event which generated interest and very positive commentary. Also see Dunn, Football and the Women’s World Cup.

15. See for example, Woodward, ‘World Cup: sexism in British punditry is clear for all to see’.

16. I mention these two Manchester City players, both of whom are represented in the club shop of this enormously wealthy team, currently riding high in the Premiership, as large-scale figures among those of the men’s team, because, whatever the huge importance of the growth of such recognition, women’s football can be seen as a new phenomenon, especially at a club which has recently become sufficiently well-resourced to promote its women’s team, but which has nonetheless ignored the history of women’s football in Manchester as historian Gary James has demonstrated in his collection of oral testimonies and in the history of the club. See James, Manchester.

17. See, for example, SheKicks magazine at https://shekicks.net/and the work of its editor Jen O’Neill which provides information and up to date coverage about the women’s game and its players.

18. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 28.

19. Toussaint, Football.

20. Critchley, What we Think About when we Think about Football.

21. Recent works on women fans have gone some way towards redressing the imbalance in the visibility of male and female fans in research such as Pope and Pfister, eds. Female Football Fans; Toffoletti and Moweth, Sport and its Female Fans; and Toffoletti, Women Sport Fans.

22. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/3402519.stm (accessed October 28, 2018).

23. https://www.theguardian.com/football/womens-blog/2015/jul/08/sports-woman-problem-the-fas-tweet-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg (accessed October 28, 2018).

24. The quotation is from WalesOnline. https://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/gareth-bales-incredible-bicycle-kick-15027694.amp, which is likely to have some bias towards Bale, but most of the coverage expresses surprise at such an amazing goal being overlooked.

25. http://www.espn.com/espnw/news-commentary/2015worldcup/article/13075090/abby-wambach-2011-header-heard-round-world (accessed October 28, 2018).