Play as a Boy, Act like a Girl: Gender Performativity and Women's Soccer in the United Kingdom

Unlike the United States where soccer is largely associated with girls and women, in much of the world that sport is an iconic place for men to showcase their masculinity and heterosexuality. The United Kingdom is one such place where soccer is a male-dominated activity and its communities are masculine domains. For some female players, it means they exist in a liminal space, one where they must be aggressive – “playing like boys” and adopting masculine styles – to be accepted as good players, and yet, away from the field, they perform feminine behaviors that allow them to be accepted as “women.” The performance of femininity allows them not only to assert their womanliness but also can be understood to convey their heterosexuality. As soccer players, they are acutely aware that their participation in the sport invites questions about their sexual orientation. Within this complex web of gender performance, female players unknowingly follow Butler’s notion of gender as “shifting and contextual.”  Many of the female soccer players in the U.K. do not just exhibit masculine and feminine behaviors at different times, they sometimes do so simultaneously and to extremes. Based on personal experiences from playing women’s professional soccer in the U.K., this paper takes those reflections and connects them to studies of gender performativity to examine the ways that women prioritize the performance of different sets of behaviors or exhibit different configurations of masculine and feminine identities depending on the particular context in which they are situated.