Sporting Gender: Women’s Footballing Bodies As Sites/Sights for the (Re) Articulation of Sex, Gender, and Desire

Past and present participation in the game of football (soccer) by women and girls in the UK is mostly through organizational structures and legal and discursive practices that differentiate players by sex and incidentally gender. In this article, the author argues that the emphasis on sex and gender differentiation in football underpins a sporting system that is unable to move beyond sex as pregiven and the sex/gender distinction. The author engages with feminist–queer theory to illustrate how sex, gender, and desire are regulated in order to uphold social relations of power. The focus on women’s footballing bodies demonstrates how the sexed body is socially constructed to inform gender and sexuality. In addition, the author highlights resistance to the compulsory order woman-feminine-heterosexual and presents examples of rearticulations of sex-gender-desire.