Speaker
Description
Modern sports ethics are often adopted and referred to by the queer football communities in Europe. Given that the fair play principle emerged as a salient moral framework to discipline competitive masculine relations among elite or middle-class men as of the late 18th century and still serves a function in maintaining the normative order of sexualities in contemporary sports relations, it is puzzling and worth investigating that such regulatory framework is frequently adopted by queer football communities in the construction of principles and practices on the football field.
This research argues that (1) the engagement of queer football communities with modern sports ethics and (2) the existing symbolic and actual relationship between LGBTQIA+ rights and Europe are two main elements that provide queer communities with resources to mobilize for their right to play. The research investigates manifold engagements that reproduce, negotiate or challenge these elements through the following questions:
• How do the activist-amateur queer football communities in Europe engage with the normative frames of fair play and human rights in the process of constructing their discursive and embodied ethical-political practices on the football field?
• How and why do the frames vary across communities?
The theoretical framework combines social movements theory, Bourdieu’s theories of field and practice, and queer/gender/sexuality studies.
The research is an insider ethnography that combines multiple methods, namely in-depth interviews with athlete-activists, focus groups with three communities, frame analysis on community-produced materials, and participant observation in several queer sports environments.
