Boys investments in football culture: challenging gendered and homophobic understandings

This paper describes elements of a study concerning the peer group understandings of five male friends between the ages of six and eight years. In drawing parallels to related work, the paper supports the findings of previous research which links boys’ investments in football culture to their legitimation and perpetuation of gendered and homophobic understandings of masculinity. Through a feminist poststructural theorising of masculinities as multi-faceted, fluid and tenuous and thus amenable to change, the paper discusses how boys’ gendered and homophobic understandings might be interrupted and reworked within the sphere of early primary education. Within a framework of social justice, underpinned by anti-sexist and antihomophobic principles, ways through which schools can facilitate the development of more affirmative but equally legitimate understandings and embodiments are explored.