Whose Beautiful Game? Representing Gender and Sexuality through Soccer

The 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup was an unprecedented success, attracting record crowds and television audiences. Yet despite the increased popularity of women’s soccer, the tournament reinforced gender inequity with controversies surrounding the compensation of women and the staging of matches on artificial turf. Such issues are hardly new as the soccer pitch has long been a contested site, a public space where various identities can be performed and projected. While many scholars research the sociopolitical implications of soccer in regards to nationalism, ethnicity, or political ideology, this paper examines visual representations of soccer, specifically those that question gender and sexuality. Through art historical analysis, the image of the footballer will be considered as a critical tool employed by artists to construct, and deconstruct, heteronormativity. While some artists celebrated the thriving women’s game prior to its banishment in Western Europe in the 1920s, subsequent generations of artists depicted soccer in strictly masculine terms. More recently, however, contemporary artists have recast the sport, parodying codes of machismo within English football, critiquing associations generated by sportswear, challenging assumptions about fans and athletes, and chronicling the lives of women in soccer. Artworks by Sarah Lucas, Karen Shaw, Wendy White, Nina Erfle, and Katrin Ströbel will be explored as critical commentaries, not only on soccer, but also the visual languages that frame athletic performance and social dynamics. In diverse ways, these artists contest identity politics through soccer, articulating the symbolic potency of sport and its consequences for gender and sexuality.