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.Au Royaume-Uni, la participation passée et présente en soccer féminin est surtout le fait de structures organisationnelles et de pratiques discursives et légales qui différencient les joueurs selon leur sexe et, incidemment, leur genre. Dans cet article, l'auteur suggère que l'accent placé sur la différenciation de sexe et de genre en soccer sous-tend un système sportif qui ne peut dépasser la distinction sexe/genre ou le sexe, comme élément a priori. À partir de la théorie féministe et «queer», l'auteur illustre comment le sexe, le genre et le désir sont régulés de façon à soutenir les relations sociales de pouvoir. Le fait de se centrer sur le corps des joueuses démontre comment le corps sexué est construit socialement pour informer le genre et la sexualité. De plus, l'auteur mets l'accent sur la résistance au trio obligatoire femme-féminine-hétérosexuelle et présente des exemples de nouvelles expressions du sexegenre-désir.This article explores the openings of a deconstruction of the compulsory order sex-gender-desire might offer sport feminists. (Here desire is used to indicate sexuality.) The discussions that follow question the usefulness of the sex/ gender distinction and offer an opening for a move beyond the idea that sex is "natural" and pregiven. A queer-feminist approach is taken to analyze practice that upholds the sporting system of sex-gender differentiation in football contexts in England and Wales.First, I highlight and critique the ways social and discursive practices regulate and formulate "women's" sexed-gendered bodies. This involves an engagement with the body as a social construct and a focus on how sex-gender-desire are ordered. More specifically, I offer an exploration of the regulatory practices thatThe author is with the School of Leisure and Sport Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, LS1 3HE, UK.

In this paper, I discuss [transgender] young men’s social, physical and embodied experiences of sport. These discussions draw from interview research with two young people who prefer to selfidentify as ‘male’ and not as ‘trans men’, although they do make use of this term. Finn and Ed1 volunteered to take part in the research following my request for volunteers at a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth group. Their narratives provide valuable testimonies on transgender and transgender and sport: more specifically, their experiences of school sport, their embodied subjectivities, transitioning and sport participation. The focus on transgender and sport also highlights the taken-for-granted assumption that a coherent LGBT collective exists and that transgender is a fixed, definable and agreed-upon category. The paper, therefore, has two aims. First, it intends to privilege and document the views of two young people who identify with a group that is often marginalised. Their narratives raise significant questions in relation to transgender and sport participation in educational and recreational settings. Second, the paper seeks to expose the methodological and ontological complexities surrounding ‘LGBT’ and ‘transgender’ and place these debates within sport and educational studies

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In this paper, I focus on football culture in the UK and the presence of homophobia in the men’s professional game. In particular, I explore how football fans, through sound and visual display, produce homophobia within the spaces of the stadia. In this way, I offer a contribution to existing debate surrounding the spatiality of sexuality and the social and political significance of sporting spaces. I demonstrate the normalisation of homophobic chanting and homophobic gesticulation, and suggest that it is dominant ideas surrounding gay men’s sexual activity, penetrative sex and men’s bodies, which are central to these articulations of homophobia. I explain this emphasis on men’s embodied sexuality and sexual activity in relation to the materiality of men’s bodies in sport spaces. Moving on from this context, I draw on preliminary research to consider the possibilities that may work to contest dominant versions of homophobia and the existing spatialities of homophobia in men’s football. Discussion is based on semi‐structured interviews with two men heavily involved in The Justin Campaign – an ‘anti‐homophobia in football’ project established in Brighton on 2 May 2008. The Justin Campaign seeks to make visible the tragic death of Justin Fashanu (on 2 May 1998) and his plight as a young gay black player. Fashanu remains the only professional footballer to date – in the UK – to publicly self‐identify as ‘gay’. This is significant and I consider past treatment of Fashanu as well as the campaign’s celebration of him to drive their anti‐homophobia initiatives. In all, the paper has two fundamental aims, firstly, to address the lack of existing debate on the spatiality of homophobia in men’s elite football and secondly, to raise awareness of the recently established: The Justin Campaign

This article draws on recent quantitative and qualitative research material to show how gender functions in the cultural arena of women’s football in the United Kingdom. In particular, the questionnaire and interview findings show that the “butch lesbian” identity is a concern for those players who have taken part in the research. This supports other research on women taking part in sports traditionally defined as male. I will discuss the findings as they relate to the social construction of gender and lesbianism. The research suggests that our understanding of gender and sexuality is bound up in a structuralist analysis. I will offer a post-structuralist interpretation as a “new” way to theorize gender and sexuality as they function within women’s football culture in the United Kingdom.

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This paper draws from the findings of research that was initiated as a consequence of previous research activities related to University-LGBT community physical activity projects (2012–2018). Specifically, the research underpinning this paper centers transgender and non-binary experiences of recreational swimming and aquatic activity (2017–2020). To date, the research has received small amounts of funding from four sources and resulted in two public engagement activities (two art exhibitions). The findings that inform the discussion are taken from nine semi-structured interviews, three focus groups including a professionally drawn illustration of two of these focus groups, and sixty-three research participant's “drawings” as well as informal conversations with eight stakeholders. The findings concern transgender and non-binary people's feelings of un/safety in the public spaces of an indoor swimming pool and the accompanying display of their embodied self. These two elements of un/safety—spatiality and embodiment—are critically discussed in relation to physical activity and in/equality. In this way, the work contributes to sustained University-LGBT community links and provides possibility for evidenced-based intervention to address inequality.

This article is inspired by a dialogue that occurred between two feminist scholars in the journal Feminist Theory. The dialogue was initiated by Clare Hemmings, in 2005, in her article entitled “Telling feminist stories.” Rachel Torr challenged this original article with “What’s wrong with aspiring to find out what has really happened in academic feminism’s recent past? Response to Clare Hemmings” “Telling feminist stories” (2007). Hemmings, in the same issue (2007), gave her reply: “What is a feminist theorist responsible for? Response to Rachel Torr”. In this article, I explore the debates raised by their dialogue and I suggest that the tensions the authors highlight—in their written scholarly correspondence—are significant to sport feminisms and sport feminists. I focus on the ways feminist thinking, feminist theory and feminist politics have been framed in some sport feminist work in relation to “waves” of feminism and how this presents key developments as linear, progressive and in danger of missing the multiple, complex and fragmented nature of feminisms. More specifically, I seek to problematize the notion of a “third wave” of sport feminism.