'This is my team... we’ve got this and we’re not going to stand for any of this shit!'

Seminar summary

This presentation critically explores the experiences of nine football players who identify as women, transgender and non-binary, and their perceptions of playing in queer DIY footballing spaces, focused around four key themes. The themes that emerged were the outsider identity, the decentring of competitiveness, queer community and temporalities and prefigurative practice and proliferation. Participants cited the political bottom-up structure of these football spaces as important to their (re)engagement with football. Furthermore, participants felt they were able to act out forms of queer activism through DIY practice and by playing a sport that they had previously been marginalised from due to their gender and/or sexuality. Drawing on a queer anarchist lens, this article examines how participants seek to disrupt hegemonic discourses within a sport that is often perceived as a masculine pursuit. This article argues for more prefigurative and diverse sporting practices to allow freer participation for marginalised identities within football.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar will take place online on Wednesday 20 November 2024 at 12pm.

It is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

Speaker bio

Alice Hoole

Alice Hoole is currently undertaking a PhD that critically examines the experiences of women, transgender and non-binary players who participate in queer radical and subcultural football spaces. She is utilising a poststructuralist queer anarchist theoretical framework to deconstruct how gender and sexuality are experienced within alternative footballing spaces. Additionally, she has an interest in other DIY radical cultures, such as the DIY punk scene, and seeks to understand how other subcultural practices and leisure time can influence these football spaces.

Alice’s main research interests lie within qualitative sociological research that considers the intersectionality of gender and sexuality for those within football who don't identify as CIS-gender men and how their experiences of the male-dominated game have been shaped by these identities. At a broader level, she is interested in social justice within sport and, in addition, she is currently employed as a research assistant for a project commissioned by the Disability Football Collective. This involves conducting interviews with those working in leadership positions within football who live with disabilities and how this may impact on their experiences of employment.