Establishing and Challenging Masculinity: The Influence of Gendered Discourses in Organized Sport

TLDR

The study investigates how coaches and players construct and regulate masculinity in organized sport. The authors used participant observation to examine how discourses shape sporting masculinity within a semiprofessional British football team. They identified two dominant discourses—masculinity‑establishing and masculinity‑challenging—where coaches employed war, gender, and sexuality narratives to encourage aggression, yet these discourses had limited impact outside the field, indicating a separation between sporting and social identities and a weakening of sport’s role in shaping narrow masculinity.

Abstract

This study examined how coaches and players constructed and regulated masculinity in organized sport. Using participant observation, the authors examined the role of discourses in the construction and regulation of sporting masculinity within a semiprofessional British football (soccer) team. Two predominant discourses were present: (a) masculinity establishing discourse and (b) masculinity challenging discourse—heuristic tools to understand the use of toxic language in the construction and maintenance of masculinity. Coaches frequently used discourses that drew on narratives of war, gender, and sexuality to facilitate aggressive and violent responses for enhancing athletic performance. However, the authors also found that these discourses have limited influence beyond the playing field, highlighting the segmentation of the sporting and social identities of these players and a loosening of the traditional and empirically evidenced ability of sports to socialize men into narrow forms of masculinity.