A Changing Game: Ethnicity, Gender, and Nation in the US American Soccer Film

Abstract

Both sport and film play a key role in contemporary US American popular culture. They are widely regarded as legitimate carriers and formative instances of social identities such as ethnicity, gender, or nationality, and they have capitalized upon one another with increasing success. Soccer and soccer films provide a case in point, as both the sport and its treatment in US American feature films are currently undergoing a change from a rather marginal position to a somewhat secure place within the cultural mainstream. This essay analyses five recent American soccer films with a particular focus on how they frame soccer as an ethnic, gendered, and ‘national’ game in a US context.

Keywords:

• United States
• soccer/football
• sport films
• gender
• ethnicity
• migration

Notes on contributor

Astrid Haas is lecturer in American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. Her research interests include travel writing of the Americas, drama and autobiography, Science Studies, as well as African American and Latino Studies. Among others, she has published the monograph Stages of Agency: The Contributions of American Drama to the AIDS Discourse (2011) and edited a special issue of FIAR: Forum for Inter-American Research, titled The Harlem Renaissance from an Inter-American Perspective (2014). She is currently working on her second monograph, Lone Star Vistas: Constructions of Texas in US American, Mexican, and German Travel Narratives, 1821–1861.

Notes

1 Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman define ‘hegemonic sports culture’ as referring to ‘the sports culture that dominates a country’s emotional attachments rather than its callisthenic activities. This domination need not be exhaustive or total’ (2001: 10; see also 9–13).

2 On the history of MLS, see Hopkins (2010: 74–191) and Wangerin (2006: 264–68, 272–81, 288–91, 300–10, 323–36).

3 On the stereotyping of Latinas/os in mainstream US media, see Haas (2011: 155, 160).