‘Power in the arm, steel in the will and courage in the breast’ – a historical approach to ideal norms and men’s dominance in Swedish club sports

ABSTRACT

From both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, research shows that men and masculinities have dominated the Swedish sports movement for a long time and that sport as a so-called ‘democratic people’s movement’ has been criticised for being a male movement. Given the self-made claims of the Swedish Sports Confederation’s fostering of inclusivity and democratisation, this study encompasses a critical and historical perspective on the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of sport. The study object is a Swedish sports club and the specific aim is to analyse the prevailing norms and ideals and how they eventually helped to reproduce men’s domination in a local sports club. Chronologically, the paper uses a historical comparative approach studying the club’s 1910s–1920s and 1970s–1980s. The research questions put are: What characterised the norms of the ideal member and collective membership in terms of gender and did these change over time? Is it possible to find specific examples of inclusion and exclusion techniques by studying the club’s photographs and stories? The main result shows subtle and explicit power techniques that reproduced (some) men’s superior position at the club level.

Introduction

From both a quantitative and qualitative perspective, research shows that men and masculinities have dominated the Swedish sports movement for a long time and that sport as a so-called ‘democratic people’s movement’¹ has been criticised for being a male movement.² It is clear that a masculine norm was developed in modern Swedish sport during the late 1800s and early 1900s and reproduced during the twentieth century.³ As modern welfare politics advanced in the 1950s and the Swedish social democratic movement’s hegemony intensified, critical voices were raised and initiatives for social justice for all increased. A feminist wave swept throughout Swedish society in the 1970s and since then the Swedish Sports Confederation has made several attempts to challenge masculine domination, although the progression towards gender equality has proved to be slow.⁴ Given the growing popularity of associative sports during the 1900s and the self-made claims of the Swedish Sports Confederation’s fostering of inclusivity and democratisation, this study encompasses a critical and historical perspective on the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of sport. The specific aim is to analyse the prevailing norms and ideals and how they eventually helped to reproduce men’s domination in a local sports club. The research questions are: What characterised the norms of the ideal member and collective membership in terms of gender and did these change over time? Is it possible to find specific examples of inclusion and exclusion techniques by studying the club’s photographs and stories? With this approach, the paper contributes to critical research on men and masculinities, sport and history.

Indubitably, ‘men’s domination’, ‘inclusive and exclusive techniques’ and ‘fostering democratisation’ are complex phenomena (that are seldom problematised by the Swedish Sports Confederation). The research questions are analysed with the aid of a broad range of historical sources (protocols, annual reports, members’ reviews and images), which generate enough data to initiate a discussion about the relation between men’s domination and the inclusive and democratising ambitions of the Swedish Sports Confederation at club level. In the discussion, the limitations and validity of the study are also considered.

Theoretically, the paper draws inspiration from critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM); a perspective that critically interprets the gender order of society as a patriarchy that supports the hierarchy between men and women. CSMM often interpret men’s domination as a hegemony that predominantly privileges men and masculinities.⁵ The next section contains a more detailed contextual setting of Swedish sport and is followed by a description of the paper’s theoretical frame and a review of previous research. The paper’s methodology and the study’s results are then presented. The paper ends with a discussion and some conclusive points.

Swedish sport and its voluntary basis

The Swedish sports movement, which to a large extent is synonymous with the Swedish Sports Confederation, is often described as a democratic people’s movement (in Swedish folkrörelse) that was established in the early 1900s. As with other people’s movements (e.g. the temperance- and workers’ movement), the nuclear nature of the organisation was – and to large extent still is – the voluntary non-profit engagement that has contributed to the common good of society.⁶ In exchange for this societal support, in 1913 the Swedish Sports Confederation received annual public financial support.⁷ From a more local perspective, this meant that sports clubs were expected to invite everybody to partake in their activities. As a consequence of this ideal, a typical Swedish sports club often included – and indeed still includes – different kinds of sporting activities for children, young people and seniors. Formally, this inclusive and democratic ideal was stipulated in the clubs’ statutes, which, for example, stated that every club member had (and has) the right to vote at a club’s annual meeting. The club board is elected at the annual meeting and governs the club between annual meetings.⁸ Despite public financial support of the Swedish Sports Confederation and its clubs, a central democratic principle is the sports movement’s independence in relation to national and local government. In other words, the sport clubs’ voluntary nature and support for the good of society have been rewarded with independence (or autonomy) and self-government.⁹

Swedish sport can thus be regarded as a social movement that supports public health and societal democracy and can be seen as a democratic people’s movement in which everyone can participate. This democratic ethos can help to explain why the Swedish amateur rules were not dissolved (initially in the Swedish Football Association) until 1967¹⁰ and why this decision opened up a commercialisation process that was accompanied by a de-amateurisation process in Swedish football and other sports.¹¹

In contrast to this idealised description, research also shows that the voluntary and non-profit nature of the Swedish sports movement should not be overstated, in that as early as the 1920s some sport clubs employed coaches, invested economic capital and used commercial techniques to support elitism and increase the opportunities for sporting successes.¹² For example, the competitive logic of sport supported the individual’s desire to win or be selected by the coach; a logic that in the end supported exclusion and elitism.¹³ In line with this elitism, other research shows how Swedish sport and other people’s movements have been permeated by manliness and male norms, rather than people’s norms, which include both men/masculinities and women/femininities.¹⁴ Put differently, the ‘democratic’ people’s movement of sport was one that privileged the most successful men. But how might this privilege be theoretically understood in a more nuanced way?

The gender order and the hegemony of men and masculinities – a theoretical frame

Theoretically, this paper draws inspiration from critical studies on men and masculinities (CSMM) and, more specifically, from Connell’s concepts of ‘the gender order’ and ‘hegemonic masculinity’.¹⁵ Since Connell’s initial use of hegemony and gender in the early 1980s, extensive empirical and theoretical research has been conducted on societies’ gender order and their support of hegemonic masculinity. In this paper, the primary focus is on the content of hegemony in terms of inclusion and marginalisation. Previous research problematising men’s and masculinities’ sport hegemony has resulted in elucidations of the fostering of boys into men through sport,¹⁶ analyses of the excluding content of masculine ideals¹⁷ and the construction of the coach as a hegemonic position that privileges men and masculine behaviour.¹⁸ Certain characteristics linked to the male body have also been identified as crucial by previous research, with aggressiveness, strength and a competitive attitude perhaps being the most frequent.¹⁹ Permeating these and other critical studies of men and masculinities is a political ambition to problematise men’s power advantage as an issue relating to gender inequality and social injustice.²⁰

Despite, or perhaps due to its comprehensive influence on understandings of men and masculinities, in a Swedish context the term ‘hegemonic’ has had different meanings and been interpreted in slightly different ways.²¹ In this paper, the terms hegemonic masculinity and men’s hegemony are interpreted and used as analytical tools that at a general level explain and explore how patriarchy is maintained and reproduced through different power techniques.²² In relation to this, men/masculinity, women/femininity and gender are understood as being (more or less) socially and culturally constructed. (The relationship between biological essentialism and social constructionism is per se a vast and complex research area that I do not intend to discuss in any detail here.) Hegemonic masculinity is an ideal that can be expressed through a physical body or as a cultural idea that, at a given time and place, carries a certain status and expresses legitimate, dominant masculine behaviour and/or behaviour that reproduces (some) men’s dominant positions over women, other men and the power advantage of (some) masculinity ideals over femininity and other masculinity ideals.²³ In other words, hegemonic masculinity is promoted as a kind of ideal script that can be separated from ‘undesirable’ or ‘unacceptable’ feminine or masculine behaviour/bodies/ideals in order to reproduce (some) men’s dominant positions. In specific situations, hegemonic masculinity also consists of norms regarding sexuality, skin colour, body functions and other aspects such as social class, culture and ethnicity.²⁴ In short, this means (erroneously, some critics argue) that men and boys and women and girls can be interpreted as more or less masculine or feminine depending on which actions or bodies they perform and how these correspond to the situational hegemonic script.²⁵ It also means that they are more or less included or marginalised in relation to the hegemony’s core positions.

Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as ‘the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’.²⁶ Many men do not live up to the hegemonic script, but are in a complicit position by silently supporting the hegemony’s gender order. A hegemony thus relates to a socio-cultural gender order in which there are specific relations of dominance, subordination and marginalisation between men and women, between men and other men and between women and other women. Connell uses both subordination and marginalisation to describe different exclusion techniques (‘subordination’ as a kind of oppression exemplified by a homophobic milieu that positions heterosexuality over, and thus subordinates, homosexuality). However, in this paper, I have chosen to use marginalisation as a concept for analysing exclusion because it captures hegemonic masculinity’s strategy of dominance, which Connell (although not being completely satisfied with the term) relates to socio-cultural powers such as class and race relations. However, according to Connell, the marginalisation and subordination processes may sometimes exist simultaneously.²⁷

Other central aspects of men’s hegemony are the brotherhood or homosociality of men as a strategy that excludes women/femininity and men/masculinities that are not regarded as acceptable or desirable.²⁸ In short, this means that some men primarily choose, socialise with, look up to or are inspired by other men. The homosocial community is per se an inclusion of selected (male) ‘friends’ and an exclusion of other men and women without ‘entry tickets’ and where discrepant masculine and feminine ideals are marginalised in various ways.²⁹

Although research on hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies since the 1980s, the perspective has also been criticised. One scholar argues that Connell’s work is based on a binary understanding of gender as either male or female and as subjects as more or less feminine and/or masculine.³⁰ In line with this critique, researchers have pointed out that the often under-reflected or under-problematised attitude of sport’s gender binary rules help to reproduce an understanding of men and women as (biologically) different, which could lead to the idea that male sport is ‘real’ and that female sport is simply an additional extra.³¹ According to some researchers, due to this gender binary logic, sport reproduces sex discrimination,³² while others contend that organised sport is a key factor in the maintenance of patriarchal societal structures.³³ Additionally, Connell argues that sport is a key symbol of ‘men’s superiority and right to rule’.³⁴ Sport and its logics are therefore important to study if we want to understand the power of patriarchy.

Another critique of the hegemonic masculinity concept concerns its lack of precision and designation of vague boundaries between a hegemonic and non-hegemonic or complicit and marginalised subject; a distinction that is not always theoretically or empirically crystal clear. This has been highlighted by Jeleniewski Seidler, who discusses the (too) structural and universal emphasis of the hegemony concept.³⁵ Drawing on a similar critique, Wetherell and Edley explore the hegemonic powers ‘from below’ by interviewing men and analysing how men position and negotiate their positions as ideal, masculine men. These positions, which can include ideals such as ‘the heroic man’, ‘the ordinary man’ and ‘the rebellious man’, are not completely isolated from each other.³⁶ Such norms and ideal positions also contain consequences that can be interpreted in terms of a reproduction of men’s dominance and, with this critique in mind, the distinctions between the genders and hegemonic and non-hegemonic (i.e. complicit or marginalised) masculinity or feminine expressions are dealt with in this paper as empirical issues.

As sport is traditionally a masculine domain that has predominately supported a hegemony of men, there may be a bias towards hegemonic masculinity expressions in the empirical sources. This means that the expected repertoire of diverse men and masculinities can be predicted as narrow, with, for example, no explicit homosexual relations or other explicit challenges of the ‘strong’ and ‘competitive’ sportsman. Concerning the relationship between sport and hegemony, it is appropriate to now look at the results of previous research.

Previous research on sport and gender and their visualisation

Traditionally, most sports have a fixed ‘gender order’, where females and males are often separated. Some scholars argue that the male version of some sports, such as combat sports, ice hockey and football, creates hegemonic ideals about what a ‘real’ man should be like and thereby privileges men and masculinities.³⁷ Women tend to occupy more precarious and inferior positions in sport than their male counterparts. In general, women’s sports have a lower status, lower economic benefits (e.g. sponsors) and are less recognised than men’s sports.³⁸ However, this precarious position also makes it possible for women (and men) to challenge the hegemonic ideals in the very same sports. When females play ice hockey, or are engaged in other male-dominated sports, they can be understood as emancipative acts that enable women to make more use of their bodies.³⁹

With regard to men’s domination in sport, sports media analyses have found that sportswomen are highly under-represented – and misrepresented – in the different types of media.⁴⁰ For example, Crolley and Teso have shown that reports of sportswomen in Spanish newspapers during the summer Olympic Games in 2004 in Athens contained asymmetrical gender-marking, infantilising and task-irrelevant content that contributed to a perpetuated male dominance in sport.⁴¹ In line with this gendered order of sport, research results also show in more detail how gender differentiations can be reproduced through photographs. The under-representation of women and female athletes in photographs is perhaps the most obvious, but research also illustrates that female athletes are seldom portrayed in team sports or traditional masculinity-coded sports, are more frequently photographed in passive or less active poses and that these portraits are more likely to have a (hetero)sexualised tone. In contrast, males receive significantly more coverage than females and male athletes are portrayed as active, strong and successful.⁴² The hegemony of men is maintained by the use of gender representation techniques, which help to make sport a site for the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity.

In a longitudinal study of sport in the televised news media, Cooky, Messner and Hextrum contend that sexist treatment of female athletes declined from 1989 to 2004, but that the coverage of women’s sports has been silenced and marginalised. Despite the increased participation of girls and women since the 1970s, the authors show that televised news media communicate that sport is mainly about men and masculinities.⁴³

In Sweden, historical research on sports clubs has to a large extent dealt with specific sporting issues related to culture, commercialisation, professionalisation and talent development.⁴⁴ In some studies, democracy, gender issues and the dominance of men and masculinity at the club level have been problematised and analysed.⁴⁵ However, at the national and more general level, several studies have looked at gender issues from historical and other perspectives.⁴⁶ In a study of the Swedish media coverage, Hedenborg shows that there were a higher percentage of articles on Swedish sportswomen participating in the London Olympic Games compared to previous Olympics. This means that the Swedish media cover sportswomen more than before, at least regarding major and global sport events.⁴⁷ Regarding daily sport coverage, males still dominate the texts and pictures in Sweden and beyond.⁴⁸ In another study, Hellborg and Hedenborg find a more complex and somewhat contradictory result. In a study of mediated gender relations in equestrian sports in two Swedish morning papers during the 2012Olympic Games, they find that some narratives can be seen as (gender)norm-breaking, whereas others confirm gender stereotypes. For example, the story of Lisen Bratt Fredicson is, on the one hand, interpreted as a celebration of a real sports hero(ine), living up to expected (masculine) behaviour. On the other hand, Bratt Fredricson is also treated with pity rather than admiration.⁴⁹ Despite this research, there is a lack of knowledge about men’s hegemony and how inclusive and marginalising power techniques work in Swedish, local sports clubs.

Photographs and portraits, as well as reports and other narratives, help to shape (or challenge) a gender order and reproduce stereotypes of sporting females and males.⁵⁰ Photographs also reflect the photographer’s ‘eye’ and gaze on the portrayed subject. Brandt and Carstens have analysed this discourse and shown how a male (i.e. the photographer’s and/or the editor’s) gaze in sports magazines such as Sports Illustrated reproduces heterosexually attractive feminine stereotypes. They highlight that women are portrayed less frequently than men and that when they are in focus they are often portrayed in roles that emphasise beautiful bodily proportions, eroticism or sexual availability.⁵¹ Brandt and Carstens link this visualisation of images to a (male) spectator’s power advantage and argue that ‘spectators become more powerful than the object of their gaze – so powerful that the stereotypical identities created by them are uncritically accepted by the objects of the gaze (or, differently formulated, the subjects of domination)’.⁵²

In a study of the cover photos of football magazines, Woolridge seeks to situate portrait photographs in their historical context by arguing that they should not be viewed as ‘isolated, single artefacts, but as part of a sequence or series, in which significant periods of continuity or moments of change can be discerned and analysed’.⁵³ Woolridge thus finds that portraits are simultaneously characterised as ‘perfection’, yet are filled with ambiguities and tensions and thus go beyond the merely illustrative level of visual communication in the analysing process. She also concludes that the cover photo creates a powerful representation of the ideal qualities or norms of a (male) football player.⁵⁴ According to Woolridge, these dimensions of a photo could be labelled as spiritual and moral. These dimensions have also motivated the use of photographs (and other historical sources) in this paper, with the hegemonic masculinity perspective as an interpretation tool.⁵⁵

If we assume that it was mostly males who read the members’ magazine, another situation is actualised, namely one that involves male subjects looking at and reading about other men (as ‘objects’). I argue that such a (male) gaze on other males actualises a special kind of power relation between the reader/viewer and the object. Patterson and Elliott put the (hegemonic) male gaze on hegemonic objects under the microscope in their study of males in the advertising media. The main finding in their investigation is that male spectators do not look at other males as sexual or available objects, but as potential role models and as more complete, powerful and desirable male objects.⁵⁶ As hegemonic masculinity tends to reproduce a strong heterosexual norm,⁵⁷ the act of men or boys looking at other males may induce issues of homophobia and a need to eliminate any suspicion of homosexuality.⁵⁸ Similarly, Hirschman and Thompson employ the metaphor that men use images of other men as a ‘visual department store of symbolic possibilities’ that can be tried on, adopted or discarded.⁵⁹ In this way, the spectator is allowed to enact a ‘narcissistic’ identification that retains a sense of power and simultaneously integrates desirable meanings and values.⁶⁰ These interpretations form the very basis of homosocial communities, where men (or women) primarily socialise with and look up to other men (or women).⁶¹

To sum up, sport in general and sporting images in particular seem to be of great importance and interest in revealing the norms, characteristics and techniques of men’s dominance over other men and women. A conclusion to draw from previous research is that sport has supported masculine domination for a long time and, as a consequence of this, the historical sources cannot be understood as gender neutral. We can rather assume that the club’s protocols, its members’ review, images and annual reports and other historical impressions of sport contain and promote gender norms that support men and masculinity as hegemonic. This means that if sport is considered as a key social sphere for supporting patriarchy and gender differences, which for example Connell and Duncan contend, this supporting must, in one way or another, permeate the historical remnants.⁶² With regard to the study’s methodological and material characteristics, these are presented in the next section.

Methodology and material

In this part the paper’s study object, the sources used and the methodology are described and how they link to the theoretical frame. Here, the main interest is to clarify, to speak with Connell and Hearn,⁶³, how the ideal hegemonic scripts of masculinity and femininity have been identified in the sources and what separates them from ‘undesirable’ or ‘unacceptable’ feminine or masculine behaviour/bodies/ideals.

The study object

The study object is Örebro⁶⁴ Sports Club (ÖSK), which was selected due to its established position in Swedish sport and its initial inclusion of several sports other than football, which at an early stage became the club’s dominant activity. Shortly after its foundation in 1908, ÖSK became the largest (in terms of the number of members) and most successful club, not only in the city but also in the entire county of Örebro. The membership increased steadily and almost linearly from the 1910s to the 1980s, when the club reached over 3,000 active members. Today, ÖSK is well known for its premier-division, male, senior football activity, although during the 1900s the club boasted national successes in handball, bandy, bowling and individual sports such as track and field, skiing and figure skating. Although men initially dominated the club’s membership, some women became successful enough to gain recognition and admittance.

The comparative approach to history

Chronologically, the study object is divided into two main periods. The first period is the 1910s–1920s, but actually starts with the club’s establishment in 1908, and ends in 1933 when the publication of the members’ magazine stopped due to a lack of finances. During the 1930s and early 1940s the club’s activities were less comprehensive, but increased in the 1950s but especially in the late 1960s. This can be explained by the contextual crisis before and during the Second World War. Like many other Western countries, Sweden enjoyed an economic boom after the war and benefited from the rebuilding of Europe.⁶⁵ Of special interest here is the growth of a (American) youth culture and youth sports during the late 1950s and 1960s;⁶⁶ a growth that became apparent in the Örebro Sports Club in the 1970s. Therefore, the second period mainly covers the 1970s–1980s. In 1967, the publication of the members’ magazine was resumed (and due to the importance of de-amateurisation, this period contains a few examples from the late 1960s) and in 1989 the various sections of the club were split into separate juridical entities, i.e. associations. Briefly, the reasons for these decisions were that the senior male football section was both powerful and financially demanding and, in the eyes of the football section’s board, the other sections were too expensive.⁶⁷

Historians have animatedly discussed historical comparisons and their strengths and limitations for many years.⁶⁸ In this study, the comparative approach is chosen as a method for two main reasons. The first is that the historical sources are limited in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, in that there are fewer protocols and annual reports in the club’s archive and also that no members’ magazines were published until 1967. Due to this ‘fluctuation’, the long and empirically precise contours of the club’s history in these periods are difficult to ascertain. The second reason is that the paper’s ambition is to elucidate and discuss men’s domination in the club. To paraphrase Skocpol and Somers, the comparative history method was chosen in order to demonstrate the fruitfulness of a (theoretical) hypothesis, in this case hegemonic masculinity as a theoretical framework.⁶⁹

The disadvantage with theoretical use in comparative-historical studies is that the theoretical ambition overshadows the empirical complexity. Another aspect, in line with the risk of telling a too linear and homogeneous historical narrative, is whether it can be assumed that Örebro Sports Club was the same club in the 1910s as in the 1980s? Firstly, I want to argue that the club was definitely not the same, which means that a study object such as a sports club should be understood as a heterogeneous, inconstant and living object (or perhaps subject) with implicit complexities and a contextual setting in each period’s contemporary society. For example, men’s domination in the 1910s–1920s and the 1970s–1980s can be explained in different ways. As Skocpol and Somers also indicate, the analysis warns against making an empirical generalisation in the search for causalities and explanations.⁷⁰ Secondly, with the limitations of the comparative approach in mind, the ‘new’ shape of the club is exactly what is of interest here. Lastly, each period has its implicit characterisations and contradictions, and in the results a central ambition has been to focus on the contrasts and congenialities within and between the two periods and to downplay the linearity from the early to late 1900s. The strengths and weaknesses of the comparative approach are considered in the paper’s discussion.

Overall, ÖSK has a well-organised archive with a substantial number of historical documents and records. The members’ magazine was published between 1918 and 1933 and between 1967 and 1989. In the early period approximately two issues per year were printed, although these had fewer pages than later issues. In the 1960s–1980s, the magazine was published once a year with approximately 50–60 pages. However, the dominant content changes over time and male senior football activities increase in scope. For example, most of the cover photos from the latter period show male football players. A typical issue opens with a few words from the club’s chairman and is followed by reports from the sections. These often contain a nostalgic view of important games, important players and other memorable and glorious moments in the club’s past. Besides the members’ magazines, annual reports and protocols from 1908 to 1989 have also been used as empirical sources.

The use of photographs (in addition to written documents)

From a historical perspective, men’s domination may appear differently and in order to capture men’s domination ‘broadly’, a particular focus is placed on images, partly because they are interesting and influential from a gender perspective.⁷¹ In British sporting history there has been an increased interest in visual images. For example, Woolridge has analysed cover portraits as cultural productions in football magazines published between 1950 and 1975.⁷² Photographs are thus used to analyse and interpret the domination of men. For example, men’s domination can be understood as a question of representation and presence.⁷³ In this paper, a total of 508 photographs from the various members’ magazines have been analysed. Women appear on only 12 of the photographs and feature the club’s female tennis players. In only one case does a female tennis player appear on the front cover of a members’ magazine. In Clavio and Eagleman’s words, this under-representation of women can be interpreted as an effect of men’s domination and hegemonic masculinity.⁷⁴

The photographs were initially categorised as representing males or females and then categorised with regard to five different photographic ingredients, namely

1. individual or collective pose, i.e. a formal headshot/team portrait

2. an active pose (e.g. a frozen sporting activity)

3. milieu (e.g. on the playing field or in the office)

4. inactive pose (sitting or in some other way not involved in sporting activity)

5. the relations between the picture and the text.

Typical questions posed in relation to this categorisation are: Which genders are represented in the photographs? What are they doing (and what kind of sport is presented)? In what milieu are they doing this? Are the motif(s) active or inactive? How does the photograph’s content correlate with the surrounding (text) report? The photographic content as a ‘whole’ and the report are then interpreted in terms of a gender order and a hegemonic script. This means that men or masculinity as a hegemony can be reinforced through texts and images in the way the representation in itself works, how and for which reasons individuals are portrayed and described. Knapp, for example, shows how males are more often represented in photographs depicting active grappling, which is then interpreted as a way of reinforcing hegemonic masculinity.⁷⁵

Like other historical sources, images are limited footprints of a so-called past reality. In view of this, a photograph can be understood as a representation of, or an extract from, a specific version of the past. Photographs and images also have unique characteristics, one of which is that they seem to have a more immediate ‘reality effect’ than texts and documents.⁷⁶ According to Knapp, visual depictions, such as photographs, often play a central role in the reinforcement of gender norms and, due to their perceived ability to neutrally depict reality, ‘photographs are powerful agents in maintaining hegemonic relations’.⁷⁷ This also means that the creator of the image and how it is made are important for the content and its interpretation. Unfortunately, none of the photographs in the source material display the photographer’s name or the exact camera techniques used (shutter time, aperture data etc.). From a more specific photo-technical point of view, techniques developed rapidly during the twentieth century – e.g. cameras with faster shutter speeds, widely available telephoto lenses and better quality films – which in turn made it possible for photographers to take other kinds of photographs.⁷⁸ For example, one consequence of the telephoto lens is that the photographer is able to get ‘closer’ to the practitioners, which then makes it possible to capture faces and other details on film and to visualise masculinity ideals in new ways. However, these technical dimensions are downplayed in this study.

The analytical steps and the operationalisation of the hegemonic masculinity perspective

This paper analyses men’s domination in a sports club by comparing two periods (the 1910s–1920s and the 1970s–1980s) in the club’s history. In the first analytical step, the club’s sources were read and the various individual and collective norms and ideals were identified in each period. In a second analytical step, these norms were interpreted in terms of a gender order and/or an expression of a hegemonic masculinity. The ambition in this step was to identify ideal norms of behaviour as well as undesirable conduct. Thirdly, the norms and ideal behaviour of each period were compared and discussed. The ambition here has been to discuss continuities and change in the ideal norms.

Individual and collective norms (and counter-norms) were chosen with the theoretical and previous research as motifs. By analysing the written documents and photographs, norms and ideals, and thus expressions of men’s domination, were identified. However, this approach should be regarded as a version of men’s domination and does not exemplify all forms of how men’s domination or the gender order in a sports club were demonstrated. Another point to consider regarding the limitations of the paper’s methodology is that there are multiple ways of operationalising the hegemonic masculinity perspective. Nevertheless, I argue that the identification of norms and ideals in the different types of source material provides a reasonable picture of the content and expression of men’s domination.

Using the theoretical approach (and results from previous research), three overall areas were identified as particularly interesting, which together constitute three overall sections in the paper’s results and, I argue, capture expressions of men’s domination and hegemonic masculinity in the historical sources. The three areas are (a) ideal norms of behaviour, (b) portrayals of ‘active subject and passive object’ and (c) the ‘collective community and hierarchy’ and the conditions of homosociality and how the collective’s gender order functions are described. These three areas are presented in the following historical-analytical result section.

Results

The first part of this section presents the norms and ideals regarding the individual member. Several characteristics are identified using both the written sources and the photographs, which are then interpreted in terms of gender and hegemony. The club’s norms were not formed in a vacuum and in each period a relevant context and historical background is set.

Individual norms of behaviour in the 1910s-1920s

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, rhetoric pertaining to the importance of encouraging the younger generation to be patriotic citizens became widespread in the Swedish context. As this was also seen as the duty of modern sport, it was no coincidence that Viktor Balck, who ‘imported’ modern English sport to Sweden, was also a military man.⁷⁹ Sport was regarded as a way of training young men in desirable characteristics, such as endurance, strength, flexibility, agility and other skills that strengthened their ideal behaviour. These general ideals were also reflected at Swedish club level. One issue of the members’ magazine in 1919 stated that:

Sport is the chivalry of our time … With chivalry comes something that testifies that the athlete is first and foremost a gentleman … It should therefore be the duty of each and everyone to endeavour to show the public the good influence of the sporting spirit, physically and spiritually, and in as few words as possible tangibly proves that sport is ennobling.⁸⁰

The ideals of the gentleman, which had Anglo-Saxon roots, could be expressed in various ways and have, for example, been labelled as patriotic masculinity by Carr.⁸¹ The perhaps most militaristic and patriotic representation of this norm in the club’s sources is illustrated by John Dahlberg dressed in military uniform and posing with his prize collection (see Figure 1). In my interpretation of this picture and the surrounding text, a link is created between Dahlberg’s clothes and symbols, his sporting success, militariness and patriotism and, ultimately, his manliness.⁸²

Figure 1. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (1921) nr 9–10, p. 44.

The gentlemanly norm also included the qualities of conscientiousness and healthiness. At a time when machines and the modern society were considered to be making fewer demands on human muscle strength, sportsmen’s performances provided a vivid alternative. It was therefore important for club members to act as role models – not only on the playing field but also in public spaces, such as cafés and trains. Conscientiousness, as a norm, also implied a mastered moderation and balance, exemplified by muscle training that was not too exaggerated. Whoever trained too much risked becoming overstrained, which did not characterise an ideal athlete.⁸³

Another dimension of this balancing norm is the interaction between body and soul. This anonymous writer, who references Plato, argues that:

You shall not practise the soul without the body, nor the body without the soul. Both should simultaneously be practised so that they mutually affect one another and ultimately become healthy and strong. Therefore, those who are occupied with science or spiritual activity must also devote themselves to bodily development, and those who endeavour to care for the body need to add spiritual activity and ways to cultivate the soul.⁸⁴

In the early editions of the members’ magazines studied here, there is no mention whatsoever of women becoming patriotic or contentious citizens. Ideally, it was thought that young men and adolescent boys should be educated to become gentlemen and, as one member put it, with ‘power in the arm, steel in the will and courage in the breast’ ⁸⁵ the new generation should be fostered and, ultimately, the national identity strengthened. These young men had a grand tradition to shoulder, because in one issue of the member’s magazine this gentlemanly position’s past and the origin of his power emerges. Here, the Vikings are described as the gentleman’s ancestors and as role models. In this way, history per se is employed as a symbolic value to nurture present masculine ideals.⁸⁶

Physical activity in general and the competitive situation of sport in particular were seen as having the potential to develop an athlete’s psyche and body. The greater the competition, the more pressure there was on the athlete. Mastering such situations was conceived as fostering, although it could also result in anxiety or be perceived as threatening. The norm the athlete tried to follow was control of his emotions. Bertil Jansson, a male member who won 15 Swedish championships in shot put, articulates this norm in a story about his preparations before a championship and finding a method by which to overcome his inner fears:

In an instant a thousand thoughts spun round in my head in wild disorder, but then I gritted my teeth and told myself that: First, if I don’t stop brooding I won’t be able to do anything at all tomorrow. Second, I will at least show the audience that there is another David who dares to do battle with Goliath.⁸⁷

Competitions gave athletes an opportunity to perform, show their courage and demonstrate their acquired behaviour and characters. Daring to challenge a superior opponent and, at best, win in a seemingly hopeless situation was considered a virtuous feat. More theoretically, competitive situations offered opportunities to foster, intensify, embody and/or perform a norm in accordance with the hegemonic script. (The biblical references are not coincidental, but can be interpreted as an expression of the Christian content of modern sport.⁸⁸) Above all, the competitive situation sifted out a winner and created a hierarchy, which enabled athletes to dominate and win victories over their opponents. However, it also meant that practitioners who could not orchestrate this type of hegemonic behaviour lost some of their status. One of the members’ magazines contains an illustrative example of a writer correcting a male member who gave up too soon in a running competition: ‘Elis, you must not behave like that anymore!’⁸⁹

The early period’s individual hegemonic script can be summarised as a contentious, patriotic, emotion-controlling gentlemanly ideal, with a balance between the healthy and the well-trained body, the brave and the strong soul/mind. The norm conveyed was that the ideal club member should act as an ennobled role model to other citizens, which in turn could be interpreted as the club’s norm being a national concern. Narratives and morals were directed towards all members but, as the stories dealt with men and thus desirable masculine ideals, the male members may have felt or perceived them to be more appropriate or inclusive for them than for the female readers. I interpret this way of describing ideals and addressing members as an expression of men’s dominance.

Moving forward – Three examples of ‘new’ norms in the 1970s–1980s

When we compare the 1910s–1920s with the 1960s–1980s, it is clear that the increase in commercialism and the de-amateurisation process can explain some of the new demands on some positions in the club.⁹⁰ Money gained in importance and even influenced participation in the club’s activities for some members. Also, in this latter period of the study, patriotic expressions totally disappeared, which marked a significant change in the narratives and portrayals of the member norms and hegemonic script. Instead, and somewhat contradictory, patriotism was replaced with a transnational-like ideal performed by, for example, the foreign-born (and professional) coach or player. In ÖSK’s case, one of the best advocates of this kind of ‘new’ ideal was Roy Hodgson, who joined the club in the 1980s with the task of returning the male senior soccer team to the premier division. Although Hodgson failed to achieve this, how he is portrayed in the members’ magazine and which norms these reports signalled are of interest in this study.

Given that in the past, Swedish sport was regarded as a democratic, non-profit, voluntary people’s movement, the appointment of a (well-)paid foreign-born coach was frowned on.⁹¹ As Hodgson was in such position and also an incomer to the club, his engagement and club feelings proved challenging. This may have been why he was initially portrayed in a members’ magazine holding the club badge in his hands and with the club’s prize collection in the background and a pictorial link between Hodgson and ÖSK (see Figure 2). In the accompanying text, Hodgson is described as motivated, with a clear and long-term ambition and a sustainable plan for how the club would return to and become established in Swedish soccer’s premier division. Hodgson’s football and governing competence announced status and contentiousness. The function of the images and the texts about Hodgson was to signal a new contextual setting to the members that needed new competence. The purpose of the reports was also to legitimise Hodgson and this ‘new’ kind of norm. Here, the primary purpose of the club, and thus sport, is no longer considered a national affair, but is instead focused on winning. Gone are also texts that indicated norms of striving for a balance between the body and the psyche, and there is no report either about the importance of members acting as civic role models in society at large (which perhaps went without saying).

Figure 2. ÖSK:aren (1983) nr 30, p. 3.

The second major difference between the club’s early and later years is also linked to the new context of the commercialisation and de-amateurisation of Swedish sport. In the early period the typical board member was an active athlete, but in the latter period it was impossible to combine these two engagements. In the practitioners’ narratives, where male soccer and bandy players dominate the images, it becomes clear that they are only engaged in sporting activities, which means that the ideal athlete in the 1970s and 1980s no longer needed to take an active part in the club’s decision-making and, thus, in its formal democratising work. Now the typical board member is an experienced older man, and the club has a CEO and administrators working in the office. But conscientiousness is still a vital norm for these positions and, ideally, he (as only men occupied these influential positions) should be competent, in control of the economy or administration, the governing of the club and able to represent the club in its public relations; a business that now seems to have increased in importance. In this now much more demanding position, men can no longer be active athletes, but at best former athletes. In contrast to the older governing contentious board position, the active athlete position could in rare cases involve women or femininity, which is discussed in more detail in ‘Active subjects and passive objects in 1970s–1980s’.

A third difference, which is also linked to the new context of commercialisation, appearing in the sources is that women’s sports were treated differently to those of men. In the early period the club experienced a steady increase in the number of female members, which for example resulted in a women’s section in the club with its own board, as well as other (male) sections such as boxing, football, bandy and track and field. The female members could thus experience a distinctive belonging to the club where they were able to consider and discuss issues and sporting activities on their own.⁹² However, women were never highlighted as role models or as ideals in the members’ magazines. In the latter period, the women’s section disappeared and female activities, which had dramatically decreased in size, were regarded with disdain. A telling example is the club’s treatment of the women’s football activities. In the 1970s, ÖSK’s female football players were successful and some of them even participated in the Swedish national team in 1972. Despite such achievements, in the same year the CEO stated that due to economically hard times, the club’s female football players were welcome to participate in the club’s activities, but that ‘their activities would no longer receive financial support from the club’.⁹³ As the female footballers were unable bear the costs of their activities themselves (e.g. travel costs, coach payment, facility costs, referee fees etc.) the decision resulted in the disappearance of senior female football in ÖSK. Compared to the club’s treatment of the (expensive) senior male football or ice hockey sections, this decision explicitly uncovered which sporting version and norm were prioritised and recognised by the club’s (male) governing positions. In particular, the male ice hockey section, which repeatedly showed negative financial results, was more amiably treated by the club’s board.⁹⁴

Men’s dominance was thus expressed through these decisions and norms that ultimately favoured the club’s men to a greater extent than the women. In the next section, inclusive and marginalising norms are explored by employing pictorial and textual portrayals of members, and this section can be read as an intensified analysis that aims to identify norms regarding the ideal club member in the 1970s and 1980s.

The active subject or passive object – norms and ideals in the 1970s and 1980s

Hundreds of photographs and stories in the sources portray male members as active subjects, but only a handful of these describe women as active and successful athletes (and appear in the latter period). Such situations made it possible for (particularly) men to express hegemonic characteristics such as strength, endurance, skilfulness and dominance over their opponents. In order to chisel out the conditions for inclusion in the hegemonic script, two portrayal themes are analysed in more detail here: the stories of men in potentially non-hegemonic situations and the stories of women portrayed as active subjects.

In the first theme, being portrayed with a naked upper body in a locker room is here perceived as a potentially non-hegemonic positioning. Only males were depicted in changing room situations and, from a feminist perspective, much can be said about the perceptions or interpretations of a nude male versus a female torso.⁹⁵ The (hegemonic) heterosexual male gaze will probably respond differently to two such photographs, which, at yet another level, can be interpreted as an example of how patriarchy conditions men and masculinity as ‘freer’ subjects and women and femininity as sexualised objects.⁹⁶ Standing with a naked upper body in front of a photographer in a locker room is, I would argue, a bigger ‘risk’ than being in a competitive situation where the athlete risks not living up to the hegemonic masculinity script. On the other hand, the locker room is obviously an environment in which hegemonic masculinity blossoms and is created in the form of jargon, joking and chatting.⁹⁷ Such conditions perhaps help to explain why only men were depicted with exposed bare skin. The point here is that nudity implied an objectifying potential if the nudity and the locker room context were interpreted as situations that did not directly signal engagement in sporting activities, but instead indicated passivity. Put differently, a nude male upper torso might attract a heterosexual female gaze, or a homosexual male gaze, which in turn could result in the portrayed male being perceived as an available and sexualised object. How was this dealt with in the members’ magazines?

A telling example of the treatment of this non-hegemonic potential is found in a portrait of a nude male upper torso in a locker room context (see Figure 3). Both the portrait and the accompanying texts correspond strongly with sporting activity, popularity and success, which defuse the objectifying, sexualising and pacifying (non-hegemonic) potential. The happy player smiles at the camera and exposes his muscles in a relaxed way, which enables the viewer to interpret the portrayed player as being comfortable with and in the situation and that he (the player) rather regards the photographer’s presence as an opportunity to show off his muscles. In other words, the player is not objectified or perceived as being in a ‘threatening’ situation. In the background, the viewer can see another photographer pointing a camera at the player, which helps the viewer to understand that the player is popular, especially as the text reveals that he has just scored a decisive goal in the season’s final game. The picture fronting this particular magazine can thus be interpreted as having a symbolic value that is enhanced by the player’s status. This image is also an illustration of men’s, or at least two (male?) photographers’ fascination with another man’s nudity, muscles, popularity and skills, which, in theoretical terms, underlines the homosocial rather than the homosexual dimensions of the situation and that men often regard each other as potential role models.⁹⁸

Figure 3. ÖSK:aren (1970) nr 11–12, p. 1.

Photographs of injured players also have the potential to portray men as passive and non-hegemonic subjects (e.g. with a leg in plaster), where it is challenging to uphold the ideal of an active subject and a hegemonic image. What kind of techniques were used to ‘solve’ this problem and sustain the player’s link to the hegemonic script?

In one of the members’ magazines a player, dressed in the team’s sports kit and standing on the football pitch (see Figure 4) is photographed with his leg in plaster and on crutches. The placing of the player informs the viewer that he is a member of the club’s senior soccer team and the narrative beneath the image reveals that he was injured during a game.⁹⁹ The report thus makes use of the sporting activity to defuse the non-hegemonic potential and tells the reader that the player had played hard and, in his efforts to win, had proved willing to sacrifice his mobility. Rather than being portrayed as a passive object, the photograph tells the viewer that playing football at elite level is risky, but that a real man is conscious of the risks yet willing to play the game to the full. These risk-taking dimensions have also been identified by previous research as important content of men’s hegemony and its masculinity ideals.¹⁰⁰ Without an explicit gender analysis, Woolridge also finds that the portraits of male football players echo the desirable ability to suffer.¹⁰¹

Figure 4. ÖSK:aren (1977) nr 24, p. 1.

The point that I am trying to make with these examples is the flexible and creative ‘ability’ of hegemony to reverse a potentially non-hegemonic situation into an image or action that instead places and retains a subject in the hegemonic script.¹⁰²

Turning to the second theme, the active female subject is also interesting to examine, although in the sources these females are not football players, but tennis players. The most telling examples are the portraits of Karolina and Carina Karlsson and the narrative of Sigrid Norrman. In terms of these players being included in the hegemonic position, their stories indicate three different ‘distances’ or degrees of marginalisation.

First, Carina Karlsson is portrayed as a successful, skilful tennis player beyond gender conditions (see Figure 5). This image reveals focus and action (the tennis racket is blurred due to its high speed in relation to the camera’s shutter time) and was featured on the front page of the members’ magazine in 1984. Karlsson is wearing a sweatband bearing the sponsor’s name, which underlines the professionalism of the active subject. The text beneath the image reveals that she was in the final of the Swedish championships but lost the match. In the magazine, the reader is informed that both Carina and Katarina were very successful in 1984, for example with Carina making it to the quarter-finals of the Wimbledon tournament and Katarina Karlsson winning the second biggest tournament in Sweden (next to the Swedish Open in Båstad) and won 25,000 US dollars. Both Carina and Katarina were in a special team sponsored by the multinational company Volvo, and took part in training camps in Australia and also participated in the Australian Open. The reader thus encounters two successful and skilful tennis players performing as hegemonic (but also female) subjects. There were therefore no differences in the textual or pictorial narratives of these women and the male footballers in the club’s sources.

Figure 5. ÖSK:aren (1984) nr 31, p. 1.

But there is a second side to this story. In another image of Carina Karlsson, she is portrayed in front of a crowd of people at Wimbledon (see Figure 6). This time she is portrayed outside the court with her tennis racket against her head and the following somewhat objectifying text beneath the picture: ‘In the Wimbledon throng admiring looks are directed towards happy and successful Carina Karlsson.’ Why, we might wonder, is the reader explicitly told that the looks are admiring and that the player is happy, and why does the photograph does not show her in action as an active female subject? In other words, by placing Karlsson outside the court holding a tennis racket (but no ball) the content of the photograph and the narratives beneath it distance Karlsson from the core of the hegemonic script. Note that there are still some links to the sporting activity, but they are not very obvious to the viewer. Previous research has also identified this placement of sportswomen in passive poses and non-sporting milieus.¹⁰³

Figure 6. ÖSK:aren (1985) nr 32, p. 24.

In my opinion, the third female example is completely marginalised from activity and is thereby excluded from the hegemonic script. Sigrid Norrman was one of the club’s most successful female tennis players in the 1970s and ranked number one in the region. Norrman was also a qualified PE teacher (i.e. she was not a professional tennis player, as Karolina and Carina Karlsson were in the 1980s). In the members’ magazines there are no images of her playing tennis. Rather, she is portrayed as a bathing nymph (see Figure 7).¹⁰⁴ This photograph has two important characteristics, which can be considered as objectifying power techniques. Firstly, the player subject is placed in a situation or context to which she does not belong, i.e. Norrman is not portrayed in a tennis context or in that of a PE class. Secondly, the tennis player and PE teacher is sitting down and therefore passive. If the portrait of Norrman is compared with that of Hodgson, who is also seated, Hodgson’s portrait contains explicit links to the sports club and its present and successful past. His competence is also encompassed to a much larger extent in the textual narratives. In this way, the portrait of Norrman employs power techniques that objectify her as a passive female, rather than an active subject. In short, these results indicate a similar complex and contradictory treatment of sportswomen that Hellborg and Hedenborg found in their study on media narratives of equestrian sports.¹⁰⁵

Figure 7. ÖSK:aren (1970) nr 14, p. 24.

What I would like to say with these examples is that, taken together, they can be interpreted as an expression of how men’s or patriarchal dominance was expressed by objectifying and passivising female athletes and, vice versa, activating and strengthening injured and half-naked male athletes. However, from a historical perspective, these examples illustrate a somewhat progressive change in the presentation of women from a passive, objectified position to an active, professionalised position, and from marginalisation to inclusion in the club’s hegemonic script. With the treatment of the women’s football team in mind, this progression also illustrates an implicit contradiction in the period of the 1970s and 1980s (and that a story always contains at least two aspects). Connell has been criticised for being vague in his distinction between being included in and being marginalised from the hegemonic script. In the sources, there are many empirical examples of men being linked to hegemonic characteristics more often and coherently than women, but the examples presented above add empirical clarification of the grey zones of inclusion and marginalising techniques. This will hopefully enable sports historians to focus on the changing of norms and the sliding scale of marginalisation.

So far the primary focus has been on individuals. In the next section the collective and homosocial dimensions of hegemony are scrutinised.

Collective community and hierarchy in the 1910s and 1920s

As masculinity and the interpretation of masculine behaviour are things that are performed or understood in relation to other men (and women),¹⁰⁶ it is important to examine the collective dimensions of norms and ideals. Unfortunately, and with reference to men’s dominance in the club, there are no examples of female collective community, which means that in this section the focus is entirely on men and masculinities. Here, reports and photographs are used to examine this relation and focus specifically on: (a) the relation between the group and the leader and (b) older men ‘fostering’ the younger generation.

The most typical example of sportsmen’s hierarchical homosociality is perhaps the team photograph; an image that portrays men in a group dressed identically and the coach and/or leaders in tracksuits or business suits and thereby separated from the others. Woolridge also studies team photos, the point here being that these constellations simultaneously signal community and hierarchy and that this genre largely remains unchanged in content in the club from the 1910s to the 1980s.¹⁰⁷

The most illustrative example of the club’s men being organised in a hierarchical community, which means that the (homosocial) bonds are tightened in parallel with the acceptance or legitimisation of the group through the control of a male coach or leader, is the narrative of Karl T. Graflund, one of the club’s founding fathers and its chairman for almost half a century (from the 1910s to 1958). As a governing leader, he knew immediately how to nurture brotherhood and his own leadership:

One of the founders knew how to win the boys’ undivided friendship and trust, and he was like a big brother to the entire group of young people – the engineer Karl Graflund. He is the person who has contributed more than anyone else to the success of the club.¹⁰⁸

Hence, in this quote, the author almost worships Graflund; a technique that helps to legitimise Graflund’s authority. It is also interesting to examine what Graflund’s reactions were to this celebrated position. Rather than becoming grandiose and conceited, Graflund instead emphasised the value of selfless work and highlighted the club’s community spirit. He thus balanced his striving for authority with a striving for community; endeavours that ideally originated in the voluntary engagement. Graflund responds like this:

Anyone who has been involved in managing a sports club must surely admit that this has been of great benefit to him, and for my own part, I consider that I owe a debt of gratitude to Örebro Sports Club, for the ideal view of things that has been imparted to me during the time I have had the privilege of being on its board. It would be difficult to find any parallel to the feeling of inner satisfaction that one feels after well-executed and unselfish work for his club.¹⁰⁹

The value that Graflund attributes to unselfishness is unmistakable.¹¹⁰ The ‘remuneration’ for voluntary engagement was and should ideally be an inner satisfaction, and Graflund’s altruistic attitude had a huge influence on the association. This can be interpreted as an example of the intimate relation between altruism and individual influence and the subject’s need for collective support in order to shoulder authority and responsibility. In Connell’s words, the team or club community formed a group, or audience, in front of which the leader performed.¹¹¹ Graflund’s actions had such group witnesses who acknowledged his governing skills and power. Graflund in turn acknowledged the group and the club and the privilege of being part of this community. In other words, the support for Graflund reinforced his position and characteristics as hegemonic with the other men who cheered him, in Connell’s words, embodying a complicit masculinity.¹¹²

Collective community and hierarchy in the 1970s and 1980s

Moving to the next chronological period, we can see that this collective support and honouring of a single man’s (higher) position largely remains unchanged. An obvious consequence of this homosociality was that it conditioned the influence of men/masculinity and women/femininity that did not fit with its texts. This inclusive and simultaneously marginalising power was rarely conceived as an explicit problem in protocols, the members’ magazines or the annual reports until the late 1960s, when Rolf Sund explicitly spelled out in the members’ magazine: ‘The fact remains. ÖSK is a confounded man’s society which unfortunately in many respects lacks charm, which the engaged female element would help to change.’¹¹³ Here, male homosociality seems to contain a certain jargon, although the historical sources do not reveal the specific ingredients of it.

In general, a coach or a leader such as Graflund is in a position to potentially arrange the community’s cultural ingredients in different ways. Interestingly, the altruistic ideal recurs in the 1970s, when Orvar Bergmark, who had coached the Swedish men’s national football team during the late 1960s, became the coach of ÖSK’s senior male football team. Similar to Graflund, Bergmark emphasised the value of the collective and did not believe that individuals should be praised or acclaimed in team sports. Sporting success in team sports could not be measured individually, Bergmark argued.¹¹⁴ But like Graflund’s positioning in the club, and also somewhat contradictory to this approach, Bergmark himself was given the nickname ‘Mr ÖSK’ and ‘the Gentleman’ (with a capital G), which made him one of the most influential people in the club and put him in a position similar to that which Graflund had held decades before.

Another central function of the hierarchy-community relation was that it instilled the values and behaviour of the older generation in the younger. For example, the senior players became role models for the youth and children in a sort of fostering process that was also expressed through photographs showing older successful players posing with younger ones (see Figure 8). Some players were considered to have great talent and many of the members’ magazines carry pictures of older coaches or players instructing children and youth. All these examples served, amongst other things, to reproduce the collective and hierarchical content of the sports club’s masculine homosociality, with the result that women and femininity took an even greater step backwards. Although the club had a female senior football team in the years around 1970, which is recorded in the protocols and annual reports, there are no narratives or photographs of their activities or successes in the members’ magazines. Their actions were in one sense included in the club sphere, although in another sense they were marginalised from the magazine platform, which reduced the females’ chances of appearing as role models for younger females. How might this absence be interpreted? According to Connell, similar portraits of male and female players and coaches may have challenged the club’s script of hegemony and threatened the male community and its dominating position. This, which goes hand in hand with Kane and Greendorfer’s results, may have explained their absence.¹¹⁵

Figure 8. ÖSK:aren (1971) nr 15, p. 46.

Discussion

During the 1900s, the Swedish Sports Confederation regarded itself as a democratic, people’s movement that ideally welcomed everybody to participate in its activities. This paper studies this policy’s practical consequences at club level from a comparative-historical perspective. Specific attention has been drawn to individual and collective norms and ideals that in turn have been placed in relation to a hegemonic script and men’s dominance. Although the paper has shown that men dominated in the club in several ways, a central point to highlight is that female membership increased in the 1910s and 1920s, and that some women in the 1970s and 1980s were successful and performing and embodying a hegemonic script, i.e. they achieved outstanding results, were professional and were portrayed as active subjects. This gives the impression of a progressive change, although in the early period no women were photographically represented and in the latter period female membership simultaneously decreased and women’s football was excluded from the club’s programme. This shows how progression goes hand in hand with regression, which in broader, associative democracy terms, shows how a club’s democracy simultaneously contains undemocratic actions depending on which members are in focus.

Two overall points in this study are, firstly, that norms of masculinity change over time. In this paper, the ‘new’ context of de-amateurisation and commercialism of the 1970s is given explanatory power, which results in a negotiation between ‘old’ norms and ‘new’, where the professional, foreign-born coach is identified as a major norm shift and where money and the economy gain in importance. Secondly, the paper shows that these norms contain power that, among other things, contains an ability to shape a gender order with inclusive and marginalising capacities. In the club’s endeavour to minimise costs in the early 1970s, women’s football activities are initially targeted rather than e.g. expensive male ice hockey. Given the financially hard times around 1970 in the Swedish economy, this exemplifies how the ‘all’, as in the Swedish Sports Confederation’s motto of ‘sports for all’, is conditioned by norms that, depending on the given situation of a club, could narrow and marginalise members (in this case several women football players) from club activities. Both Connell and Hearn underline that the characteristic of hegemony in a given situation is linked to e.g. the economy and other societal powers at large.¹¹⁶ It may also be the case that the nuclear norms of the gender order’s hegemonic script appear clearer in financially hard times. Future research could therefore put more focus on formative times (which the de-amateurisation after 1967 meant in Swedish sports) in order to gather more empirical examples of how sport’s gender order in general and how men’s dominance in clubs in particular work and fluctuate.

The economy and the commercialisation process cannot just be interpreted as factors that collude with men’s hegemony. This paper shows that the two female tennis players, through sponsorships, prize money and other ‘nurturing’ aspects of commercialism, made a career for themselves and thus gained recognition. Thus, it would seem that ‘money’ and the economy represent both a progressive and problematic power when it comes women’s and men’s influence and status in sport.

Previous research has shown that male’s power can be (re)produced in a sports context and that sporting images often reveal such a gendered power order.¹¹⁷ Therefore, images in this paper are regarded as important for formulating the content of the club’s hegemonic script. The most apparent result is that males are solely portrayed as active subjects, whereas females, in the few images in which they are portrayed, are almost exclusively presented as passive subjects. However, there are exceptions and, in contrast to some research findings, this paper shows how women in the club were able to perform as professional, active, sporting subjects in positions close to the centre of the hegemonic script.¹¹⁸ The interpretation of this result is that women are not entirely excluded from hegemonic and influential positions. However, contrary to this progression, the study confirms some of the previous research’s results, namely that women are simultaneously portrayed in irrelevant situations that marginalise them from the sporting activities and the hegemonic script and instead objectify them.¹¹⁹ Similar findings, discussed in terms of inclusive femininity and masculinity, are also shown by Hellborg and Hedenborg¹²⁰ In any future research it would be important to identify the possibilities for sportswomen and sportsmen to challenge the traditional (patriarchal) stereotypes and thus renegotiate a (masculine) hegemonic imagery and script. Such knowledge is probably necessary to shape a more gender equal future.

The study has shown that the portrayed males more consistently embody norms of activity, such as skilfulness, popularity, contentiousness, risk-taking, endurance and competence, which are interpreted as techniques that help reproduce men’s dominance. Here, the analysis is closer and focuses on what I call ‘re-negotiating techniques’. The portraits of men in potentially non-hegemonic situations are likely to dissolve the ‘threatening’ or non-hegemonic potential of, for example, being wounded, and these men are instead portrayed as hegemonic subjects. This flexible ability of hegemony is important to study further because it contains an element of the answer to why men’s dominance – and thus the patriarchy of sport – is so stable and continuous. By revealing such techniques and abilities, critical research on men and masculinities can help to challenge and destabilise patriarchal power.

Highlighting what almost remained unchanged during the investigated period is also of interest. Here, homosociality is perhaps the best example of such a drawn-out process. The paper’s result shows how men’s homosociality is somewhat ambiguous, in that the narratives of both Graflund and Bergmark express, on the one hand, the club’s communion, which, on the other hand, simultaneously legitimises an individual’s authority. What is of interest here is that this ambiguous dialectic generates stability, with a leader expressing altruistic ideals of the collective and a collective legitimising of the leader’s position. Put differently, it shows how men’s dominance is based on a contradictory ingredient in which some people are celebrated and others occupy a complicit or marginalised position. To paraphrase Connell, such dialectics can be interpreted as the contradictory content of a hegemony and an expression of how ‘the gender order itself is contradictory’.¹²¹

Limitations of the comparative approach and the study’s results

Historical comparison is a method that is filled with potential pitfalls. This is why in this study I try to handle the inbuilt inclination to draw linear conclusions carefully. I also give examples of each period’s inherent contradictions in order to illuminate that each investigated period is per se changing and non-linear. In the paper, de-amateurisation and commercialism have been understood as key factors for explaining the historical distinctions between the 1910s–1920s and the 1970s–1980s. Although these processes influenced the norms in the club, the disappearance of, for example, patriotic and militaristic ideals is a much more complex process that cannot solely be explained by a more intense commercialisation process. Although explicit uniforms and patriotic rhetoric disappear in the sources, research has shown that the nationalistic norms and local patriotism (with links to masculinity and men’s dominance) live on in both explicit and more subtle and implicit forms.¹²² The appearance of the foreign-born coach or player in the club is therefore not an example of a total shift towards transnationalism and ‘openess’. This utilisation of professional competence could also go hand in hand with other, more local patriotic norms.¹²³ The point here is that in order to anchor these new norms, professional positions in the traditional club milieu and a negotiation between conservative, traditional and new values became necessary. But again, the disappearance of patriotic norms should not be overestimated.

This limitation partially casts new light on this discussion and the outcome of the study, in that we cannot identify the exact explanatory cause of the changes taking place in the club. This is, of course, a weakness that comes with the comparative approach. Therefore, in order to be able to measure generalisability, this study’s findings must be related to other and future historical studies. In other words, more research on the relationship between men’s dominance and associative democracy at club level is needed before a watertight statement about the power and consequences of the gender order and hegemony is made. Notwithstanding, this study has contributed a piece of this puzzle.

Conclusion

This text has contributed to the importance of a more nuanced historical understanding of the relationship between associative democracy and the power of the gender order. The ambition has been to identify norms and ideals and to put them in relation to men’s dominance. Thus, narrative and photographic techniques that reinforce men and masculinities as norms have been identified. A hegemony’s flexibility and ability to reproduce itself has constituted a specific focus and thus technologies that reproduce patriarchal power have also been identified. Such knowledge is of great importance if a more progressive future is sought.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for fruitful and critical comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Thanks also to Jeff Hearn for reading and commenting on an earlier version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Daniel Alsarve http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4985-3595

Notes

1. Lindroth, J. Idrottens väg till folkrörelse : studier i svensk idrottsrörelse till 1915 [The Sport’s Road to Become a People’s Movement: Studies in the Swedish Sports Movement up until 1915] (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 1974). J.R. Norberg, Idrottens väg till folkhemmet : studier i statlig idrottspolitik 1913–1970 [The Sport’s Road into the Welfare State: Studies in Governmental Sport’s Politics, 1913–1970] (Stockholm: SISU idrottsböcker, 2004).

2. D. Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång? : föreningsdemokratins innehåll och villkor i Örebro sportklubb 1908-89 [The Everlasting Endeavours for Success? The Contents and Conditions of Associative Democracy in Örebro Sportklubb 1908–89] (Örebro: Örebro universitet, 2014); E. Olofsson, Har kvinnorna en sportslig chans? Den svenska idrottsrörelsen och kvinnorna under 1900-talet [Do Women Have a Sporting Chance? Organized Sport and Women in Sweden in the 20th Century] (Umeå: Umeå universitet, 1989); H. Tolvhed, ‘The Sports Woman as a Cultural Challenge: Swedish Popular Press Coverage of the Olympic Games during the 1950s and 1960s’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no. 2 (2012); H. Tolvhed, ‘Sex Dilemmas, Amazons and Cyborgs: Feminist Cultural Studies and Sport’, Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research 5, no. 2 (2013).

3. See for example T. Andersson, Kung fotboll : den svenska fotbollens kulturhistoria från 1800-talets slut till 1950 [King Football: The Cultural History of Swedish Football from the End of the 1800s until 1950] (Eslöv: B. Östlings bokförl. Symposion, 2002); J.A. Mangan, ‘“Muscular, Militaristic and Manly”: The Middle-Class Hero as Moral Messenger’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 1 (2010): 150–68.

4. J. Hearn et al., ‘Hegemonic Masculinity and Beyond: 40 Years of Research in Sweden’, Men and Masculinities 15, no. 1 (2012): 31–55; H. Larsson, Iscensättningen av kön i idrott : en nutidshistoria om idrottsmannen och idrottskvinnan [The Enactment of Gender in Sports: A Contemporary History of the Sportsman and Sportswoman] (Stockholm: HLS förl., 2001); J. Svender, H. Larsson and K. Redelius, ‘Promoting Girls’ Participation in Sports: Discursive Constructions of Girls in a Sports Initiative’, Sport, Education and Society 17, no. 4 (2012).

5. R.W. Connell, Which Way is Up? Essays on Class, Sex and Culture (London: Unwin Hyman, 1983); R.W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). R.W. Connell and J.W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–59.

6. Lindroth, Idrottens väg till folkrörelse.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.; Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

9. Norberg, Idrottens väg till folkhemmet.

10. P. Billing, M. Franzén and T. Peterson, ‘Paradoxes of Football Professionalization in Sweden: A Club Approach’, Soccer & Society 5, no. 1 (2004).

11. Ibid.; Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

12. N.-O. Zethrin, Mellan masskonsumtion och folkrörelse : idrottens kommersialisering under mellankrigstiden [Between Mass Consumption and People’s Movement: The Commercialisation of Sports between the World Wars] (Diss., Örebro University, 2015); Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

13. E. Apelmo, ‘(Dis)Abled Bodies, Gender, and Citizenship in the Swedish Sports Movement’, Disability & Society 27, no. 4 (2012).

14. B. Horgby, Dom där : främlingsfientligheten och arbetarkulturen i Norrköping 1890-1960 [The Others: Xenophobia and the working culture in Norrköping 1890–1960] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1996); H. Tolvhed, Nationen på spel : kropp, kön och svenskhet i populärpressens representationer av olympiska spel 1948–1972 [The Nation at Stake: Body, Gender and Swedishness in the Popular Press’s Representations of the Olympic Games 1948–1972.] (Umeå: h:ström – Text & kultur., 2008; H. Tolvhed, På damsidan : femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990 [On the Ladies’ Side: Femininity, Resistance and Power in Swedish Sports 1920–90] (Göteborg: Makadam., 2015); Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

15. Connell, Which Way is Up?; Connell, The Men and the Boys; Connell, Masculinities; R.W. Connell and J.W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–59. Inspiration is also drawn from Hearn’s concept ‘hegemony of men’, se for example J. Hearn, ‘From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men’, Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (2004): 49–72; J. Hearn, ‘Men, Masculinities and the Material(-)Discursive’, NORMA 9, no. 1 (2014): 5–17; J. Hearn, Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2015.

16. M.A. Messner, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992. M.A. Messner, It’s All for the Kids: Gender, Families, and Youth Sports (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).

17. D. Alsarve, ‘Addressing Gender Equality: Enactments of Gender and Hegemony in the Educational Textbooks used in Swedish Sports Coaching and Educational Programmes', Sport, Education, Society (2017). doi:10.1080/13573322.2017.1280012; I. Wellard, Sport, Masculinities and the Body (Vol. 1) (New York/London: Routledge, 2009).

18. L. Norman, ‘Bearing the Burden of Doubt: Female Coaches’ Experiences of Gender Relations’, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 81, no. 4 (2010): 506. L. Norman, ‘A Crisis of Confidence: Women Coaches’ Responses to Their Engagement in Resistance’, Sport, Education and Society 19, no. 5 (2014): 532–51. G. Pfister and S. Radtke, ‘Sport, Women, and Leadership: Results of a Project on Executives in German Sports Organizations’, European Journal of Sport Science 9, no. 4 (2009): 229–43.

19. C.C. Aitchison, Sport and Gender Identities: Masculinities, Femininities and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 2007); E.C. Berg, T.A. Migliaccio, and R. Anzini-Varesio, ‘Female Football Players, the Sport Ethic and the Masculinity-sport Nexus’, Sport in Society 17, no. 2 (2014): 176–89; Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Connell, The Men and the Boys; E. Dunning, ‘Sport as a Male Preserve: Notes on the Social Sources of Masculine Identity and its Transformations’, Theory, Culture & Society 3, no. 1 (1986): 79–90; J. Fundberg, Kom igen, gubbar! : om pojkfotboll och maskuliniteter [Come on, Boys! On Boyś Football and Masculinities] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2003); R. Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989); V. Krane et al., ‘Living the Paradox: Female Athletes Negotiate Femininity and Muscularity’, Sex Roles 50, no. 5 (2004): 315–29; J. McKay, Masculinities, Gender Relations, and Sport (Vol. 13) (London: SAGE, 2000).

20. J. Hearn, ‘Men, Masculinities and the Material(-)Discursive’; J. Hearn, Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2015).

21. J. Hearn et al., ‘Hegemonic Masculinity and Beyond’.

22. Connell, Masculinities.

23. Connell, Masculinities, 77.

24. Connell, Which Way is Up?; Connell, Masculinities; Hearn, Men of the World.

25. Connell, Which Way is Up?; Connell, The Men and the Boys; R. Connell, ‘Masculinity Construction and Sports in Boys’ Education: A Framework for Thinking About the Issue’, Sport, Education and Society 13, no. 2 (2008): 13145.

26. Connell, Masculinities, 77.

27. Ibid. 78.

28. N.Hammarén, and T. Johansson, ‘Homosociality’, SAGE Open 4, no. 1 (2014).

29. Connell, Masculinities, 77.

30. Hearn et al., ‘Hegemonic Masculinity and Beyond’; Jeleniewski V. Seidler, ‘Masculinities, Bodies, and Emotional Life’, Men and Masculinities 10, no. 1 (2007): 11.

31. For further discussion, see for example V. Burstyn, The Rites of Men; Connell, Which Way is Up?; Connell, Masculinities; Hearn, ‘Men, Masculinities and the Material(-)Discursive’; Hearn, Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times; M. Messner, ‘Gender Ideologies, Youth Sports, and the Production of Soft Essentialism’, Sociology of Sport Journal 28, no. 2 (2011): 151–70; A. Travers, ‘The Sport Nexus and Gender Injustice’, Studies in Social Justice 2, no. 1 (2008).

32. T. Tännsjö, and C.M. Tamburrini, Values in Sport: Elitism, Nationalism, Gender Equality and the Scientific Manufacturing of Winners (London: Spon., 2000), 101.

33. Burstyn, The Rites of Men; Travers, ‘The Sport Nexus and Gender Injustice’.

34. Connell, Masculinities, 54.

35. Jeleniewski Seidler, ‘Masculinities, Bodies, and Emotional Life’.

36. N. Edley, Analysing Masculinity : Interpretative Repertoires, Ideological Dilemmas and Subject Positions (189–228): Discourse as data (London: Sage in association with The Open University, 2001; M. Wetherell and N. Edley, ‘Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imaginary Positions and Psycho-Discursive Practices’, Feminism & Psychology 9, no. 3 (1999): 335–56.

37. L. Bryson, ‘Sport and the Maintenance of Masculine Hegemony’, Women’s Studies International Forum 10, no. 4 (1987): 349–60; Messner, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity; M. Price and A. Parker, ‘Sport, Sexuality, and the Gender Order: Amateur Rugby Union, Gay Men, and Social Exclusion’, Sociology of Sport Journal 20, no. 2 (2003): 108–26; R. Pringle, ‘Masculinities, Sport, and Power: A Critical Comparison of Gramscian and Foucauldian Inspired Theoretical Tools’, Journal of Sport & Social Issues 29, no. 3 (2005): 256–278; Tännsjö and Tamburrini, Values in Sport; Wellard, Sport, Masculinities and the Body; K. Woodward, Boxing, Masculinity and Identity : The “I” of the Tiger (New York: Routledge, 2007).

38. A. Godoy-Pressland, ‘Moral Guardians, Miniskirts and Nicola Adams: The Changing Media Discourse on Womeńs Boxing’, in Global Perspectives on Women in Combat Sports: Women Warriors Around the World, eds C.R. Matthews and A. Channon (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015).

39. This type of understanding of women sports is inspired by Iris Marion Young’s, On Female Body Experience “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

40. L. Capranica and F. Aversa, ‘Italian Television Sport Coverage during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games: A Gender Perspective’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 37, no. 3-4 (2002): 337–49; L. Crolley and E. Teso, ‘Gendered Narratives in Spain: The Representation of Female Athletes in Marca and El País’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 42, no. 2 (2007): 149–66; K.K. Davis and C.A. Tuggle, ‘A Gender Analysis of NBC’s Coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics’, Electronic News 6, no. 2 (2012): 51–66; M.A. Messner, M.C. Duncan and N. Willms, ‘This Revolution is Not Being Televised’, Contexts 5, no. 3 (2006): 34–8; G. Whannel, Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities (London: Routledge, 2002).

41. Crolley and Teso, ‘Gendered Narratives in Spain’, 193.

42. G. Clavio and A.N. Eagleman, ‘Gender and Sexually Suggestive Images in Sports Blogs’, Journal of Sport Management 25, no. 4 (2011): 295–304. doi:10.1123/jsm.25.4.295; M.C. Duncan, ‘Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference: Images of Women and Men in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games’, Sociology of Sport Journal 7, no. 1 (1990): 22–43; J.S. Fink and L.J. Kensicki, ‘An Imperceptible Difference: Visual and Textual Constructions of Femininity in Sports Illustrated and Sports Illustrated for Women’, Mass Communication & Society 5, no. 3 (2002): 317–39; M. Kane and S. Greendorfer ‘The Media’s Role in Accommodating and Resisting Stereotyped Images of Women in Sport’, in Women, Media and Sport: Challenging Gender Values, ed. P.J. Creedon (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 28–44.

43. C. Cooky, M.A. Messner, and R.H. Hextrum, ‘Women Play Sport, But Not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media’, Communication & Sport 1, no. 3 (2013): 203–30. doi:10.1177/2167479513476947.

44. T. Andersson, “Spela fotboll bondjävlar!” : en studie av svensk klubbkultur och lokal identitet från 1950 till 2000-talets början [“Play football Peasant Shits!” A study of Swedish Club Culture and Local Identity during the 1950-2000s] (Eslöv: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2011); P. Billing, M. Franzén and T. Peterson, Vem vinner i längden? : Hammarby IF, Malmö FF och svensk fotboll. [Who Wins in the Long Run? Hammarby IF, Malmö FF and Swedish football] (Lund: Arkiv, 1999). P. Billing, M. Franzén and T. Peterson, ‘Paradoxes of Football Professionalization in Sweden: A Club Approach’, Soccer and Society 5, no. 1 (2004); C. Ericsson, Fotboll, bandy och makt : idrott i brukssamhället. [Football, Bandy and Power: Sports in the Factory Society] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2004); C. Ericsson, Bandybaronen i folkhemmet : familjen De Geer, bruket och folket [The Bandy Baron in the People’s Home: the Family De Geer, the Factory and the People] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2013); T. Peterson, Leken som blev allvar : Halmstads bollklubb mellan folkrörelse, stat och marknad. [The Play that Became Serious: Halmstad Football Club between a People’s Movement, the State and the Market] (Lund: Arkiv, 1989). T. Peterson, Den svengelska modellen : svensk fotboll i omvandling under efterkrigstiden. [The Swenglish Model: Swedish Football during the Post War] (Lund: Arkiv, 1993). T. Peterson, ‘Split Visions: The Introduction of the Svenglish Model in Swedish Football’, Soccer and Society 1, no. 2 (2000); T. Peterson, ‘Landskrona BoIS as an Environment for Nurturing and Education’, Soccer & Society 8, no. 1 (2007).

45. Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?; J. Andreasson, Idrottens kön : genus, kropp och sexualitet i lagidrottens vardag. [Sports’ Gender: Gender, Body and Sexuality in Teamsports’ Weekdays] (Kalmar: Lunds universitet, 2006); Fundberg, Kom igen, gubbar!

46. H. Larsson, Iscensättningen av kön i idrott : en nutidshistoria om idrottsmannen och idrottskvinnan [The Enactment of Gender in Sports: A Contemporary History of the Sportsman and Sportswoman] (Stockholm: HLS förl., 2001); Olofsson, Har kvinnorna en sportslig chans?; J. Svender, Så gör(s) idrottande flickor: Iscensättningar av flickor inom barn- och ungdomsidrotten [Discursive Constructions of Girls in a Sports Initiative: How Sporting Girls are Represented and the Working of Power] (Stockholm: Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik, Stockholms universitet, 2012); H. Tolvhed, ‘The Sports Woman as a Cultural Challenge: Swedish Popular Press Coverage of the Olympic Games during the 1950s and 1960s’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no. 2 (2012): 302–17; H. Tolvhed, ‘Sex Dilemmas, Amazons and Cyborgs: Feminist Cultural Studies and Sport’, Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research 5, no. 2 (2013): 273–89. H. Tolvhed, På damsidan : femininitet, motstånd och makt i svensk idrott 1920–1990. [On the Ladies’ Side: Femininity, Resistence and Power in Swedish Sports 1920-90] (Göteborg: Makadam, 2015).

47. S. Hedenborg, ‘The Olympic Games in London 2012 from a Swedish Media Perspective’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 30, no. 7 (2013): 789–804.

48. T. Bruce, J. Hovden, and P. Markula, Sportswomen at the Olympics : A Global Content Analysis of Newspaper Coverage (Rotterdam: Sense, 2010).

49. A.-M. Hellborg and S. Hedenborg ‘The Rocker and the Heroine: Gendered Media Representations of Equestrian Sports at the 2012 Olympics’, Sport in Society 18, no. 2 (2015): 248–61.

50. L. Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye (Cambridge,A: Harvard University Press, 2006).

51. M. Brandt and A. Carstens, ‘The Discourse of the Male Gaze: A Critical Analysis of the Feature Section “The Beauty of Sport” in SA Sports Illustrated’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 23, no. 3 (2005): 233–44.

52. Ibid., 235.

53. J. Woolridge, ‘Cover Stories: English Football Magazine Cover Portrait Photographs 1950–1975’, Sport in History 30, no. 4 (2010), 524.

54. Ibid., 543; In a similar way, but in another context, Linkman has shown how men’s desired characters in Victorian family album were quite narrow representing dignity, nobleness and strength: see Audrey Linkman, The Victorians: Photographic Portraits (London: Tauris Parke, 1993).

55. Woolridge, ‘Cover Stories’,526.

56. M. Patterson and R. Elliott, ‘Negotiating Masculinities: Advertising and the Inversion of the Male Gaze’, Consumption Markets & Culture 5, no. 3 (2002): 231–49. See also D. Saco, ‘Masculinity as Signs: Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches to the Study of Gender’, In Men, Masculinity, and the Media, ed. S. Craig (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), Vol. 1, 23–39.

57. Connell, Which Way is Up?; Connell, The Men and the Boys; Connell, Masculinities.

58. R. Elliott et al., ‘Overt Sexuality in Advertising: A Discourse Analysis of Gender Responses’, Journal of Consumer Policy 18, no. 2–3 (1995): 207.

59. E.C. Hirschman and C.J. Thompson, ‘Why Media Matter: Toward a Richer Understanding of Consumers’ Relationships with Advertising and Mass Media’, Journal of Advertising 26, no. 1 (1997): 54.

60. Patterson and Elliott, ‘Negotiating Masculinities’.

61. N. Hammarén and T. Johansson, ‘Homosociality’ SAGE Open 4, no. 1 (2014).

62. Connell, Masculinities; M.C. Duncan, ‘Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference: Images of Women and Men in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games’, Sociology of Sport Journal 7, no. 1 (1990): 22–43.

63. Connell, Which Way is Up?; Connell, Masculinities; Hearn, Men of the World: Genders.

64. Örebro is a medium-sized Swedish city located between Stockholm and Oslo.

65. S. Hedenborg, and L. Kvarnström, Det svenska samhället 1720–2006 : böndernas och arbetarnas tid [The Swedish Society 1720–2006: the Time of the Farmers and Workers] (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2009).

66. See e.g. T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

67. Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

68. G. Raymond, ‘The Case for Comparing Histories’, The American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (1980): 763–78; C. Ericsson, B. Horgby, and S. Ishihara, Faderliga företagare i Sverige och Japan [Paternal Industrialists in Sweden and Japan] (Stockholm: Carlsson, 2015).

69. T. Skocpol and M. Somers, ‘The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 2 (1980): 174–97.

70. Ibid.

71. See for example Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty, 200.

72. Woolridge, ‘Cover Stories’.

73. Clavio and Eagleman, ‘Gender and Sexually Suggestive Images in Sports Blogs’.

74. Ibid.

75. B.A. Knapp, ‘Gender representation in the CrossFit Journal: A Content Analysis’ Sport in Society 18, no. 6 (2015): 699.

76. M. Arvidsson, ‘Fotografi som empiri : att använda fotografier som historisk källa’ [Photography as Empiri: to use Photographies as Sources to History’] in Visuella spår : bilder i kultur- och samhällsanalys [Visual Traces: Images in Cultural and Social Analysis] (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2003), 179–90; P. Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence: Picturing History (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

77. Knapp, ‘Gender Representation in the CrossFit Journal’, 690.

78. See for example Woolridge, ‘Cover Stories’; Burke, Eyewitnessing; P. Wombell and S. Barnes, Sportscape: The Evolution of Sports Photography (London: Phaidon, 2000).

79. Jens Ljunggren, ‘Kroppens Bildning: Linggymnastikens manlighetsprojekt 1790-1914 [The Body Education: Swedish Gymnastics’ masculinity projects 1790–1914]’ (Diss., Stockholm University, 1999).

80. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 6-7, 1919) 3.

81. R. Carr, ‘The Gentleman and the Soldier: Patriotic Masculinities in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 28, no. 2 (2008): 102–21.

82. Several researchers have shown the connectedness between masculinity and military; see e.g. R. Godfrey, ‘Military, Masculinity and Mediated Representations: (Con)fusing the Real and the Reel’, Culture and Organization 15, no. 2 (2009): 203–20. doi:10.1080/14759550902925369.

83. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 11, 1919), 2 (nr 6–7, 1920), 16 and 30 (nr 10–11, 1920). This, and subsequent citations, have been translated from Swedish by a professional translator.

84. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 6–7, 1919), 3.

85. Ibid.

86. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 10, 1918) s. 1 f.

87. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 4–5, 1919), 1.

88. Holt, Sport and the British; J. Lindroth, Idrott under 5000 år. [Sports During 5000 Years] (Stockholm: SISU idrottsböcker, 2011).

89. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 4–5, 1919) s. 1 f. Elis is a Swedish male name.

90. Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

91. P. Billing, , M. Franzén and T. Peterson, ‘Paradoxes of Football Professionalization in Sweden: A Club Approach’, Soccer and Society 5, no. 1 (2004).

92. Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

93. Örebro Sportklubb: Fotbollssektionens protokoll 1972-01-27 § 5.

94. Alsarve, I ständig strävan efter framgång?

95. See for example Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (vol 40, issue 1) where a whole issue deals with feminism, bodies and nudity in various ways.

96. See for instance Z. Salime, ‘New Feminism as Personal Revolutions: Microrebellious Bodies’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40, no. 1 (2014): 14–20.

97. Fundberg, Kom igen, gubbar!.

98. See e.g. Patterson and Elliott, ‘Negotiating Masculinities’.

99. ÖSK:aren (nr 25, 1977), 1.

100. Messner, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity; Wellard, Sport, Masculinities and the Body.

101. Woolridge, ‘Cover Stories’,539.

102. Connell, Masculinities, 77.

103. Duncan, ‘Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference’; Fink and Kensicki, ‘An Imperceptible Difference.’

104. ÖSK:aren (nr 14, 1971), 24. See also ÖSK:aren (nr 7, 1969) 10.

105. A.-M. Hellborg and S. Hedenborg, ‘The Rocker and the Heroine: Gendered Media Representations of Equestrian Sports at the 2012 Olympics’, Sport in Society 18, no. 2 (2015): 248–61.

106. Connell, Masculinities.

107. J. Woolridge, ‘Cover Stories: English Football Magazine Cover Portrait Photographs 1950–1975’, Sport in History 30, no. 4 (2010).

108. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (1918, nr 12), 1.

109. Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 12, 1918), 2.

110. See also Örebro Sportklubbs medlemsblad (nr 12, 1918), 4. ÖSK Protokoll 1909-06-07 § 3–6, 1913-02-01 § 2, 1917-09-06 § 12; Tillägg, 1917-09-23 § 5.

111. Connell, Masculinities, 116.

112. Ibid., 79.

113. ÖSK:aren (nr 1, 1967), 7.

114. Ibid., 5.

115. See e.g. Connell, Masculinities, 130–4; Kane and Greendorfer, ‘The Media’s Role in Accommodating and Resisting Stereotyped Images of Women in Sport’.

116. Connell, Masculinities; Hearn, Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times.

117. L. Capranica and F. Aversa, ‘Italian Television Sport Coverage during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games: A Gender Perspective’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 37, no. 3–4 (2002): 337–49; L. Crolley and E. Teso, ‘Gendered Narratives in Spain: The Representation of Female Athletes in Marca and El País’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 42, no. 2 (2007): 149–66; K.K. Davis and C.A. Tuggle, ‘A Gender Analysis of NBC’s Coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics’, Electronic News 6, no. 2 (2012): 51–66; M.A. Messner, M.C. Duncan, and N. Willms, ‘This Revolution is Not Being Televised’, Contexts 5, no. 3 (2006): 34–8; Whannel, Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities; Crolley and Teso, ‘Gendered Narratives in Spain’, 193.

118. Brandt and Carstens, ‘The Discourse of the Male Gaze’.

119. Clavio and Eagleman, ‘Gender and Sexually Suggestive Images in Sports Blogs’; Duncan, ‘Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference’; Fink and Kensicki, ‘An Imperceptible Difference’; Kane and Greendorfer, ‘The Media’s Role in Accommodating and Resisting Stereotyped Images of Women in Sport.’

120. A.-M. Hellborg and S. Hedenborg ‘The Rocker and the Heroine: Gendered Media Representations of Equestrian Sports at the 2012 Olympics’ Sport in Society 18, no. 2 (2015): 248–61.

121. Connell, Masculinities, 125.

122. H. Tolvhed, Nationen på spel : kropp, kön och svenskhet i populärpressens representationer av olympiska spel 1948-1972. [The Nation at Stake: Body, Gender and Swedishness in the Popular Press’s Representations of the Olympic Games 1948-1972.] (Umeå: h:ström – Text & kultur, 2008); Andersson, “Spela fotboll bondjävlar!”.

123. T. Andersson and H. Hognestad, ‘Glocal Culture, Sporting Decline? Globalization and Football in Scandinavia’, Sport in Society (2017): 1–13. doi:10.1080/17430437.2017.1389015.