Andrew Harvey

Regulating homophobic hate speech: back to basics about language and politics?

Recently, there has been an explosion of legislation, introduced by the previous Labour Government after 1997, designed to curb ‘hate crime’. This article takes the most recent instance of incitement to hatred on grounds of sexual orientation as its starting point. I discuss the legislation in the context of debates around free speech and artistic autonomy. Making use of post-stucturalist, psychoanalytic and discourse theories I argue that there are conceptual and practical difficulties attached to the regulation of hate speech if analysed through a politics of subversive repetition. I conclude that a better approach is to think about language as reciprocal communication and to develop a politics of sustained engagement with society that ultimately adopts a more voluntary approach to changing popular uses of language.

Match-fixing: working towards an ethical framework

How does match-fixing, or other unfair manipulation of matches, that involves under-performance by players, or refereeing and umpiring that prevents fair competition, be thought of in ethical terms? In this article, I outline the different forms that match-fixing can take and seek to comprehend these disparate scenarios within Kantian, Hegelian and contractualist ethical frameworks. I tentatively suggest that, by developing an ethical opposition to match-fixing in sport, we can give much greater substance to popular phrases such as ‘respect for the game’, encompassing the value of sport itself and respect for other players, fans, sponsors and organisers. Arguing that match-fixing denies recognition to these ‘others’ demonstrates how fundamentally match-fixing ‘hollows out’ sport because a fixed match is of no worth: the whole value of the game has literally been evacuated.

Team Work? Using Sporting Fiction as an Historical Archive and Source of Developing Theoretical Approaches to Sport History

This article seeks to explore some theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in a wider study into sport, gender and sexuality. The study aims to bring together, in creative ways, different academic traditions of history, literature and gender studies through a common medium – the novel. My foundational assumption is that knowledge may be both generated and uncovered through fictional representations such as Tom Browns Schooldays (1857), This Sporting Life (1960) and Fever Pitch ([1992] 2000). The questions the article poses are: what are the epistemological implications of reading sporting histories through fictional representations? How might we theorise about the lived reality of historical actors through a reading of sport novels? How can fictional texts be read alongside more traditional archival material? I argue that the novel allows access to theoretical thinking that enables an examination of human conditions such as the need for fantasy, intuition and myth, which other archival material might not reveal, thus enriching our understanding of the past.

Tom Brown's Schooldays: 'Sportsex' in Victorian Britain

Thomas Hughes’ idealised vision of life at Rugby public school is one of the best-known novels in the English language. It was regarded from the outset as a founding text of ‘muscular Christianity’. Contrary to the intentions of its author, it helped to inaugurate the cult of ‘manly’ athleticism that swept through the English public schools in the second half of the nineteenth-century. I argue that the novel reveals tensions around gender and sexuality that were in play among public schoolboys during the second half of the nineteenth-century. These tensions exploded into full public view in the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and were instrumental in helping to establish a structure of homophobia within homosocial settings that has lasted through to the present day.