Ben Clayton

Femininity, Masculinity, Physicality and the English Tabloid Press: The Case of Anna Kournikova

This article is an examination of how femininity, masculinity and physicality are created and (re)presented within the English tabloid press. In identifying mechanisms for the construction and maintenance of (hegemonic) femininity and masculinity within sport, a gendered sports formula has been developed to analyse and explain sports coverage within this particular medium. Copies of the Sun and Mirror newspapers were collected and analysed over the course of the summer of 2000. The study highlights that idealized conceptualizations of femininity and masculinity are prevalent within the dominant narratives of both publications, not least through the disproportionate ratio of male/female sports coverage where only 5.9 percent of the sports reporting focused upon women’s sport. Our analysis of this mechanism is explicated through focusing upon one of the most photographed athletes in the world today, the Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova. Kournikova, we posit, is the most powerful symbol of the masculinity/femininity nexus within media sport and accounted for one-third of all articles on women’s sport. She is presented as the masculinists’ transcendent image of the idiosyncratic sportswoman, whereby masculinity is maintained through ideological representations of femininity. While the analysis does not focus exclusively on Kournikova, it is argued that she, more than any other athlete, epitomizes the gendered sports formula within the tabloid press.

A battle for control: exchanges of power in the subculture of snowboarding

This article uses a Gramscian perspective to explore the subculture of snowboarding, suggesting that cultural power is both resisted and reproduced. It examines the impact of commercialization on a snowboarding subculture from a participant perspective, gained from semi-structured interviews with boarders and skiers at a resort in British Columbia, Canada. The paper discusses new ways that snowboarders differentiate themselves from wider sporting cultures, in addition to how they do not outrightly reject the ideologies of mainstream sport but instead attempt to involve themselves more in the snowboarding industry. Through linking themselves with traditionally non-snowboarding institutions and creating alternatives to them, snowboarders become actively involved in the organization of snowboarding.

David Beckham and the changing (re)presentations of English identity

David Beckham is, arguably, the most high profile association football player in the world, securing global media interest in all aspects of his life. Contradiction and inconsistencies are prevalent within the narratives that accompany the conflicting images of Beckham where media discourse has been adjusted to position him as both hero and villain. This paper examines the inconstant nature of the nationalistic and masculine discourses applied to Beckham and the diversity of roles played by him in upholding and distorting ideologies in sport. Beckham has become a cultural icon and a symbol of national identity and masculinised sporting pride. Yet many of his exploits, both on and off the pitch, have led to allegations of non-conformity. His role, therefore, is a complicated one as he is both symbol of, and an exception to, conceptualisations of Englishness and of the hegemonic model of masculinity.

Our Friend Jack: Alcohol, friendship and masculinity in university football

Abstract Masons (1980) research noted how the public house has been an integral part of the ‘football experience’ in England for more than a century. Drinking alcohol has been positioned both as central to the experiences of those watching the game in their leisure time and as an important activity for professional footballers to relax and bond with their fellow players. In England the consumption of alcohol is also central to the leisure lifestyles of many students, and although organised sport is often promoted as a ‘healthy’ alternative to alcohol consumption in reality the two are implicitly linked. This paper critically examines the ‘locatedness’ of alcohol consumption in the construction of samesex friendships of male football players at a university in the south of England. It posits that the student bar provides a ‘safe’ environment for homosociability and a pretext for a postulated community of footballing men where the imperatives of male hegemony can be realised and defended away from the interference of an itinerant society.

Initiate: Constructing the ‘reality’ of male team sport initiation rituals

This article re-enacts a typical experience of male sport initiation at a university in the south of England and presents a confessional account of my own shifting epistemological position and desire to create more balanced, ethical, reflexive and self-effacing research. The tale of initiation is constructed from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with male collegiate football (soccer) players and subsequent purposive conversations with male collegiate rugby players. It aims to confront the reader with the lived experience of male student sport initiations, providing a platform for unremitting reflection and greater possibilities for academic recourse. In particular, I suggest, the tale constructs a dais for sociological dialogue about the existentiality and configurations of, and relationships between, deviance, masculinities and subcultural identities in a student sport setting.

Positive emotions: passionate scholarship and student transformation

This paper challenges the practical and conceptual understanding of the role of emotions in higher education from the twin perspectives of transition and transformation. Focusing on the neglected area of positive emotions, exploratory data reveal a rich, low-level milieu of undergraduate emotional awareness in students chiefly attributed to pedagogic actions, primarily extrinsically orientated, and pervasive throughout the learning experience. The data conceive positive affect as oppositional, principally ephemeral and linked to performative pedagogic endeavours of getting, knowing and doing. A cyclical social dynamic of reciprocity, generating positive feedback loops, is highlighted. Finally we inductively construct a tentative ‘emotion-transition framework’ to assist our understanding of positive emotion as a force for transformational change; our contention is that higher education might proactively craft pedagogic spaces so as to unite the feeling discourse, the thinking discourse (epistemological self) and the wider life-self (ontological) discourse.

The jouissance of learning: evolutionary musings on the pleasures of learning in higher education

This paper presents a philosophy and method for an ongoing investigation into the cause and effect of student emotions in higher education. In particular, it presents the possibilities for exploring students’ positive emotions as ‘jouissance’ experiences linked to the transgression of power relations and social structures. The paper takes the form of ‘evolutionary musings’ that guide the reader through a confessional account of the research programme, the epistemological and methodological challenges, the limits of data already produced, and suggestions for a future approach. The musings maintain that descriptions of causal relationships of pedagogic action and the phenomenology of students’ feelings of gratification are not enough to plausibly interpret the locatedness and meaning of emotions, and that the emotional nexus is shaped by and continues to inform social relationships.

Negotiating the climb: a fictional representation of climbing, gendered parenting and the morality of time

This paper employs fictional techniques to convey the competing discourses of parenting and ‘serious’ climbing in relation to time and risk as they are experienced by heterosexual couples with at least one child and a history of commitment to traditional climbing. The resultant story is constructed from data produced by topical life-history interviews with seven white-British, middle-class couples and is interrupted, but not overlaid, by a late-modern and Foucauldian analytic thread through which we posit that the parents must negotiate a number of discourses of modernity in their pursuit of an authentic identity. The story, however, is intended more as dais for sociological dialogue, to allow the situated reader to inhabit the lifeworld and respond to its imagery. The story replicates the parents’ leisure time and space on a typical weekend and shows the contradictory and gendered nature of the discourses experienced by these climbers.

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

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.

Performativity and enjoyable learning

This paper takes critical lenses to interpret what students find enjoyable in their learning in specific ‘subject’ environments within the prevailing socio-economic climate in higher education. It considers student dispositions that emerged from dialogues with two groups of students attending a non-traditional university and taking vocational degrees within England, UK. We argue that although each higher education institute can become its own destiny, it can only do so within the boundaries of state policy and its technologies. Higher education, when affected by cultures of ‘performativity’, is arguably focused less on knowledge for ‘emancipation’ and its own sake and more on the ‘use value’ of its products. This paper argues that what is valued by these particular students in their learning and what gives them positive feelings as they engage with this process of learning is not altogether independent of the current governances shaping higher education.