Ten minutes with the Boys, the thoroughly academic task and the semi‐naked celebrity: football masculinities in the classroom or pursuing security in a ‘liquid’ world

Abstract

This paper presents a tale about the classroom exploits of a cohort of male collegiate football players reading for a module concerned with gender at a university in the UK. It takes as its starting point a view of the social world as individualised and fluid but simultaneously connected to history and ideology and attempts to explain the behaviours of this small group of men. In doing so, the tale aims to problematise rather than disprove or remove ‘modern’ structural sociology and especially the concept of hegemonic masculinity by (re)drawing on empirical data and presenting it in a way that gives a better sense of ‘reality’ in the form of 10 minutes of ‘real‐time’ action. The paper concludes that these men appear to be actively seeking belonging and security in a world that offers little of either and may construct their own masculine discourse away from the bowdlerising of an itinerant society and vehemently defend it from the challenges of both others and the ephemerality of their own lives.

Keywords:

• narrative
• masculinity
• academia
• football
• postulated community

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Barbara Humberstone, Ina Stan, Emily Coates, Dorin Festeu and Alan Hockley for casting their critical eyes over earlier versions of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

1. Male hegemony refers to the strongly (neo)‐Marxist influenced idea that men’s and women’s behaviours are complicit to cultural norms of gender and thus reproduce those norms and sustain the dominant position of men and subordination of women. A certain degree of resistance to these norms is also implied in the concept, but pockets of resistance are small by comparison and therefore only contribute to very gradual change through history and do not fundamentally alter the status quo in the short term.

2. In referring to ‘modern’ sociology, I mean to imply ‘before postmodern’, or a focus on social structures and social differentiation by structures (as opposed to the postmodern emphasis on ‘dedifferentiation’). ‘New wave’ men’s studies and ‘pro‐feminism’ refer to studies in gender within this modern sociological dialogue that developed in the late 1970s and had considerable influence for the next two decades and beyond. They refer to gender research and theory that take a more holistic view of gender relations, bringing men more firmly into the sociological gaze, and placing a good deal of emphasis on ideology and the dynamic of power (and resistance) in gender relations.

3. What I mean by this perhaps warrants some more explanation here. As the tale will later demonstrate, the classroom environment and especially the nature of the subject being learned had consequences for the Boys’ identities. I use Foucault’s (1977) Panopticon – the functioning of power through the real possibility of being observed and judged – to describe the possibilities for challenge and disruption to the dominant discourse of the Boys in the academic environment. Central to this environment was the thoroughly academic task set by the Lecturer, the Lecturer himself and his all‐seeing standpoint at the centre of the classroom, and the Girls, whose values, beliefs and behavioural patterns differed markedly from those of the Boys. However, the perceived power to disrupt was both challengeable and usable (foilable) to an end of reaffirming the Boys’ positions within their own community – a cheeky retort, a visible apathy to academic work and the marginalisation of those that do work, for instance.

4. In developing this creative non‐fiction, I deliberated much the extent to which one can reasonably decontextualise witnessed events. The context in which actions occur must always be considered as significant, directly or indirectly influencing the action and the reaction. I use the term ‘decontextualising’ here referring to the tangible context – the place – rather than either the culture or circumstance. This kind of decontextualisation, I contend, is of less significance since the Boys’ naturally occurring talk did not appreciably alter by place or by audience (so long as the Boys themselves were a part of the audience). This same ‘licence to decontextualise’ might also be applied to the spoken words of the football players in focus groups, because the core audience was still the Boys. This left me with the spoken words of the Boys and the Girls generated in individual interviews, which perhaps require a different licence to decontextualise for we must consider that they may not have been uttered in the presence of others. This licence then is earned on the basis that the thoughts and feelings of the characters in this tale are of significance and must be relayed in a ‘realistic’ fashion, as part of the classroom dialogue, in order to tease out the motives and meanings of identities and reveal the full ‘lived experience’.

5. For Bauman, at this juncture in the history of modernity the social world, like a liquid, cannot easily hold its shape, dividing the plenipotentiary of reason, emancipating individualities and changing the existentiality of community. It is an individualised society often to the detriment of individuals, who seek, long for, and postulate communities that would both reaffirm their freedoms and nurse their anxieties about the irrational. Any reality of community in the liquid modern world, Bauman contends, is difficult to find and where ‘light cloak’ communities may exist, they must be vehemently defended to survive and appeal to their own members to secure that survival. It is in this sense that communities are postulated – ‘projects rather than realities, something that comes after, not before the individual choice’ (Bauman 2000, p. 169). The disorder of social life in the liquid world, and especially the disorder of social relations, renders community a seductive and apparently secure reality. For Bauman, communities are largely transient, constructed on a foundation of a ‘spectacle’ that appeals to similar interests of otherwise disparate individuals. These communities promise to replicate the long‐lasting communities of ‘solid modernity’, but usually fail and manifest themselves as hyperreal.