‘They kick you because they are not able to kick the ball’: normative conceptions of sex difference and the politics of exclusion in mixed-sex football

Abstract

This study explores the role of normative conceptions of sex difference through a case study of an anti-discrimination football tournament in Warsaw, Poland. The tournament has a variety of anti-discriminatory aims, including anti-racism, anti-homophobia and anti-sexism, where sport is a way to overcome difference and stereotypes. We found that especially efforts to realize anti-sexism through football encountered barriers and normative conceptions of gender in this traditionally segregated sport were in many cases reaffirmed. Male participant’s reactions to the presence of female players often contained surprise and concern, and sex difference was seen as an unavoidable, biological fact which hindered play. We explore participants’ reactions to the gender-mixing rule, as well as the existence of normative conceptions of sex difference that lead to exclusionary practices concerning females in the context of mixed-sex football. We analyse these practices and explore whether participants declare a change of attitude over time.

Notes

1. The Public Opinion Research Centre in Poland/Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej (CBOS) reports are available online http://www.cbos.pl/PL/publikacje/publikacje.php

2. See, for example, Koivula’s (1999b) research where a sport in which aggressiveness is not only approved but even regarded as an essential part of the sport and considered as part of an athlete’s sporting skills (such as ice hockey and football) is qualified as especially masculine.

3. However, for an example of this type of research in a British context, see Tucker (2011).

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to the European Research Council which funded this research through an Advanced Investigator Award to Prof. Gill Valentine [grant agreement no. 249658] entitled Living with Difference in Europe: making communities out of strangers in an era of supermobility and superdiversity.