‘You just wanna be like everyone else’: exploring the experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer sportspeople through a languaging lens

Abstract

Coalter claims that ‘while sport might provide the context for the development of positive experiences, the social process of participation is the key to understanding what is happening’. In this paper, I will draw on empirical data to describe ‘what is happening’ for gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer-identified (GLBQ) people who play club or team sports in Victoria, Australia. I will also build on Coalter's work by introducing the concept of languaging; ‘a social process in which we … construct realities for each of us to see, occupy and to talk into’. I will argue that it is the process of languaging within the context of a sports team or a club that can either (1) enable heterogeneous inclusion, where a shared love of sport exists alongside awareness and acceptance of heterogeneity in other areas of people's lives (e.g. ability, sex, ethnicity, religion and sexuality), or (2) constrain the space for inclusion through reinforcement of a dominant, assumed homogeneous, norm (in which difference represents a threat).

Keywords:

• sexuality
• participation
• inclusion
• culture change

Notes on contributor

Dr Gillian Fletcher is a Research Fellow at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She is also Chair of the Board of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society (2014–2016) and Senior Reviews Editor for Culture, Health and Society. Gillian's work focuses on processes of culture change and hierarchies of knowledge, paying specific attention to gender and sexuality.

Notes

1. The experiences of transgender and intersex people were not included in this research because I decided it was not possible to do justice to the complexities of issues faced by transgender and intersex people within the parameters of this research.

2. Two exceptions existed; however, these experiences are the subject of another paper.