Marcus Free

Football’s 'coming out' : Soccer and homophobia in England’s tabloid press .

This article examines the current contradictory discourses on homosexuality and soccer within the British (specifically English) newspaper media. While support ostensibly is given in the press to the eradication of homophobia in relation to soccer, the continuing promotion of traditional masculine football stereotypes, such as the ‘hard man’, imagines an ongoing heterosexual normativity. Furthermore, the media fascination with professional soccer players ‘coming out’, although expressed in supportive terms, may be decoded as an attempt to publicly reveal the deviant other. Such ambivalent representation is even evident in coverage of the Kick It Out anti-homophobia campaign. News releases from the campaign have been reinterpreted within media representation to fuel a perceived public interest in wanting to know which Premier League soccer players are gay. Accordingly, by employing a psychoanalytic and post-structuralist perspective on the instability of discursive constructions of heteronormative masculinity, the article considers soccer and its related media as a site of hegemonic contestation in which the dominant discourse of male heterosexuality is at once undergoing challenge and reinforcement.

Diaspora and Rootedness, Amateurism and Professionalism in Media Discourses of Irish Soccer and Rugby in the 1990s and 2000s

This article explores the tensions between conceptualizations of the nation in terms of diaspora and rootedness, and between amateurism and professionalism, in Irish media discourses of Irish soccer and rugby in the 1990s and 2000s. Given the article’s broad scope and limited space, detailed theoretical elaboration and extensive examination of discursive data will not be possible. Rather, the article offers a tentative overview of how these tensions have been manifested in Irish print and broadcast media, and of how they have evinced fantasies and anxieties about sporting achievement as indicative of collective national achievement. The popularized notion of diaspora in Irish society in the 1990s facilitated the transformation of Ireland’s history of emigration into a narrative of emigrant success in the global economy. Emigrant profes-

Keeping Them Under Pressure: Masculinity, Narratives of National Regeneration and the Republic of Ireland Soccer Team

Since 1988 the Republic of Ireland soccer team has been cast, in Irish media, as both symbol and material example of social, economic and cultural regeneration in Ireland. This paper argues that such claims are narrative discursive constructions, ways of collectively imagining national identity and interpreting recent social change by elevating individuals within the national team to the status of heroic national representatives and conjunctural markers of the tension between tradition and modernity. Two versions of this narrative are identified. The first is the construction of the team in terms of a narrative of postcolonial national ‘becoming’, which characterised the early years of Jack Charltons managerial reign, Charlton himself being the key symbolic figure. The second is the more recent figuring of the team as symbol and example of the recent ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom, the key player in which was Roy Keane. In both narratives, aggressively competitive masculinity is romanticised as a gauge of national achievement, and narrative progression is figured as the progressive displacement of outmoded masculinities by new forms. The interplay of constructions of national identity and masculinity reflects the interdependency and contingency of both forms of collective identity.

On the edge: the Irish in Britain as a troubled and troubling presence in the work of Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale

Irish-born characters and characters whose names indicate Irish descent recur in the television and film work of Liverpool writers Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale. Their frequently troublesome dramatic presence often marks them as alien or marginal but problematic elements within British society, or suggests a troubled past and characteristic psychic dysfunction. Bleasdales have been depicted somewhat stereotypically as economically parasitic and anachronistically maintaining outmoded religious beliefs incompatible with the material interests of the working class. By contrast, McGovern has frequently used his ‘Irish’ characters to engage critically with his own ‘Liverpool Irish’ Catholicism and as the focal point for his distinctively moral vision of British society.

'He is my strength and my shield': the antinomies of Katie Taylor as female sporting celebrity in twenty-first-century Ireland.

This article examines various antinomic currents in Irish print and broadcast media representations of boxer Katie Taylor, Irelands only London 2012 Olympic gold medallist. Despite her visibly combative physicality she was persistently constructed as a figure of cultural and gendered conservatism through repeated emphasis on her Christian faith and her relationship with and dependence on her coach/father Pete Taylor. The personal characteristics and cultural significance ascribed to her in Irish media also intersected intertextually with pervasive neoliberal themes of personal-as-corporeal discipline and individual responsibility in the context of severe economic austerity following the collapse of Irelands ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom in 2008. It is argued that, despite her potential troubling or transgression of binary constructions of gender, the mediatized Taylor that emerged was neither an iconic embodiment of womens boxing as an assertion of female power and agency nor, as some Irish commentators claimed, an icon of Irish cultural conservatism.

The run of ourselves: Shame, guilt and confession in post-Celtic Tiger Irish media

This article examines the emergence of the themes of shame and guilt in Irish print and broadcast media in the wake of Ireland’s 2008 economic collapse. It considers how the potential search for explanation of the crisis as a manifestation of unregulated banking and development sectors was displaced onto a confessional discursive pattern in which emphasis was placed on rampant borrowing and consumption as reflective of collective narcissism and acquisitive greed. Hence the logic that ‘hubris’ led inevitably to a national fall from grace and the corresponding resurgence of postcolonial shame; and the interplay between cultural nationalist and neoliberal discourses of redemption through confession of guilt and disciplinary self-regulation as the purging of excess.

‘From there to here’: narratives of transition, migration and national identity in Irish media representations of rugby union in the professional era

Abstract Irish media representation of rugby union in the post-1995 professional era has become a vehicle for the rehearsal of fantasies and anxieties concerning national identity in the context of the Republic of Ireland as a neoliberal state. Irish rugby’s reorganization and competitive successes have generated comforting images and discourses of centralized management, national cohesion and continuity while successive Irish governments’ neoliberal policies have focused on deregulation, facilitating foreign direct investment and reduced social services spending. Representations of advancements in management intersected with pervasive managerialist discourses in Irish media and politics during and following the 2008 collapse of the Celtic Tiger boom, but with a heavy stress on serving the ‘national interest’. Relatedly, the targeted import of foreign players and coaches is often depicted as reflective of Irish rugby management’s successful negotiation of the neoliberal environment of contemporary European and world rugby. However, concerns regarding the potential hindrance of ‘native’ player/coach development and the threat of economically driven out-migration evince anxieties concerning Irish rugby’s fragile economy and cultural identity that interconnect with broader concerns regarding Ireland’s enduring economic vulnerability following the 2008 financial crisis.

‘Don't Tell Me I'm Still on That Feckin’ Island': Migration, Masculinity, British Television and Irish Identity in the Work of Graham Linehan

The article examines how, through such means as interviews and DVD commentaries, television situation comedy writer Graham Linehan has discursively elaborated a distinctly migrant masculine identity as an Irish writer in London. It highlights his stress on how the working environment of British broadcasting and the tutelage of senior British broadcasters facilitated the satirical vision of Ireland in Father Ted. It focuses on the gendering of his narrative of becoming in London and how his suggestion of interplays between specific autobiographical details and his dramatic work have fuelled his public profile as a migrant Irish writer.

Diego Maradona and the psychodynamics of football fandom in international cinema

Taking a psychoanalytic approach, the article examines and compares how three films explore the psychodynamic processes of fan investment in Argentine former football star Diego Maradona. These films illustrate how his meaning as an international cultural icon is refracted by specific fan experiences and fantasies, and are variously informed by, and critically explore, the myths of virtual death, resurrection, redemption and geopolitical opposition to global capitalism associated with him. In the 2007 British documentary In the Hands of the Gods, five ‘freestyle’ footballers from the UK embark on a pilgrimage to his home. Their geographical movement through North and South America is presented as an opportunity for psychological rebirth and self-realisation through their affinity with him as a supremely gifted individual, rather than a representative of the disciplined world of team sport and its international rivalries. The 2006 Argentine road movie El Camino de San Diego ironically depicts its fan protagonist’s obsession with Maradona as a misguidedly narcissistic distraction from a geographically fractured and enduringly economically weak post-crisis Argentina. Finally, Emir Kusturica’s 2008 movie Maradona by Kusturica reflexively explores how Maradona’s enigma and contradictions as an object of fan investment and political figure of redemption confound his attempts to explain him. Kusturica’s fantasies return inevitably to himself, raising the possibility that ‘Maradona’ may be a ‘neutrosemic’, or inherently meaningless, fan text.