limited amount of status through work and academic achievement, sport, and particularly
football, took precedence.
Calvin: If you're not good at football you’re not friends with anybody
who’s good at football, all the people who are good at football are
the best people, like the most/
Josh: Popular
Calvin: Yeah, popular
JS: [To Josh and Patrick] True?
Josh: Very true!
Patrick: Yeah
Josh: We’re sporty people
Calvin: And the sporty people are much preferred than the people who are
much more brainy
Football plays a central part in the production of (heterosexual) masculinities, and
establishing oneself as a good footballer goes a long way in helping to establish one as a
‘real’ boy (see, for example, Renold 1997; Skelton 1997, 2000, 2001; Benjamin, 1998,
2001; Connolly, 1998; Swain 2000; Epstein et al., 2001). At Petersfield, all ball games in
the playground using the feet were prohibited, and it soon became clear through the
interviews that the whole topic of football had been effectively marginalised in the peer
group culture. The headteacher, Mrs Flowers, felt football was associated with, and
attracted, the ‘wrong’ forms of masculinity. However, its attempted elimination (for
much of the year) did not mean that the more conventional and competitive macho types
of embodied masculinity disappeared, but rather that they appeared in other forms; they
compelled the boys to find and invent a range of alternative activities during their
breaktimes, and these were based particularly on the physical resources of speed and
strength, and this was also the case at Westmoor Abbey.
The ability to run fast was a particularly valorised resource and all the boys that I
interviewed could tell me who was the fastest boy in the class. There were frequent tests