Читать книгу Intersectionality - Patricia Hill Collins - Страница 10

Across the globe, there is no way of knowing exactly how many people play football. Yet surveys by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) provide a good guess: an estimated 270 million people are involved in football as professional soccer players, recreational players, registered players both over and under age 18, futsal and beach football players, referees, and officials. This is a vast pool of both professional and amateur athletes and a massive audience that encompasses all categories of race, class, gender, age, ethnicity, nation, and ability. When one adds the children and youth who play football but who are not involved in any kind of organized activity detectable by FIFA, the number swells considerably.

Intersectionality’s emphasis on social inequality seems far removed from the global popularity of this one sport. Yet using intersectionality as an analytic tool to examine the FIFA World Cup sheds light on how intersecting power relations of race, gender, class, nation, and sexuality organize this particular sport, as well as sports more broadly. Rich nations of the Global North and poor nations of the Global South offer different opportunity structures to their youth to attend school, find jobs, and play sports, opportunity structures that privilege European and North American nations, and that disadvantage countries in the Caribbean, continental Africa, the Middle East, and selected Latin American and Asian nations. These national differences align with racial differences, with black and brown youth from poor countries, or within neighborhoods within rich ones, lacking access to training and opportunities to play. Girls and boys may want to play football, but rarely get to be on the same teams or compete against one another. As a sport that highlights physical ability, football brings a lens to the phrase “able-bodied” that underpins analysis of ability. At its foundation, football is big business, providing financial benefit to its backers as well as to a small percentage of elite athletes. Differences of wealth, national citizenship, race, gender, and ability shape patterns of opportunity and disadvantage within the sport. Moreover, these categories are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the patterns of their intersection determine which individuals get to play football, the level of support they receive, and the kinds of experiences they have if and when they play. Using intersectionality as an analytic tool illuminates how these and other categories of power relations interconnect.

Because it is a global phenomenon, the FIFA World Cup is a particularly suitable case to unpack in order to show how intersecting power relations underpin social inequalities of race, gender, class, age, ability, sexuality, and nation. Power relations rely on durable, albeit changing, organizational practices that, in this case, shape the contours of FIFA World Cup soccer regardless of when and where the games occur and who actually competes. Four distinctive yet interconnected domains of power describe these organizational practices – namely, the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal. These domains of power are durable across time and place. FIFA’s organizational practices have changed since its inception and have taken different forms in Europe, North America, continental Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Yet FIFA is also characterized by tremendous change brought on by new people, changing standards, and a growing global audience. Using intersectionality to analyze the FIFA World Cup sheds light on specific intersections of power relations within the organization; for example, how gender and national identity intersect within FIFA writ large, as well as the specific forms that intersecting power relations take within distinctive domains of power. Here we briefly discuss intersecting relations within each domain of power within FIFA, thereby laying a foundation for analyzing intersecting power relations.

The structural domain of power refers to the fundamental structures of social institutions such as job markets, housing, education, and health. Intersections of class (capitalism) and nation (government policy) are key to the organization of sports. In this case, ever since its inception in 1930, the World Cup tournament has grown in scope and popularity to become a highly profitable global business. Headquartered in Switzerland, FIFA enjoys legal protection as an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) that allows it to manage its finances with minimal government oversight. Managed by an executive committee of businessmen, FIFA wields considerable influence with global corporations and national governments who host the World Cup. For example, for the 2014 games in Brazil, FIFA succeeded in having the Brazilian parliament adopt a General World Cup Law that imposed bank holidays on host cities on the days of the Brazilian team’s matches, cut the number of places in the stadiums, and increased prices for ordinary spectators. The law also allowed beer to be taken into the stadiums, a change that benefited Anheuser-Busch, one of FIFA’s main sponsors. In addition, the bill exempted companies working for FIFA from Brazilian taxation, banned the sale of any goods in official competition spaces, immediate surroundings, and principal access routes, and penalized bars that tried to schedule showings of the matches or promote certain brands. Finally, the bill defined any attack on the image of FIFA or its sponsors as a federal crime.

Hosted by different nations that compete for the privilege years in advance, FIFA events typically showcase the distinctive national concerns of its host countries. Brazil’s experiences illustrate how national concerns shape global football. Fielding one of the most successful national teams in the history of the World Cup, Brazil has been one of a handful of countries whose teams have played in virtually every World Cup tournament. In 2014, the potential payoff for Brazil was substantial. Hosting the World Cup signaled its arrival as a major economic player on the global stage, minimizing its troubled history with a military dictatorship (1964–85). A victorious Brazilian football team promised to enhance Brazil’s international stature and foster economic policies that would help its domestic population. Yet the challenges associated with hosting the matches began well before the athletes arrived on the playing fields. Brazil estimated having to spend billions of US dollars in preparation for the event. The initial plan presented to the public emphasized that the majority of the spending on infrastructure would highlight general transportation, security, and communications. Less than 25 percent of total spending would go toward the 12 new or refurbished stadiums. Yet, as the games grew nearer, cost overruns increased stadium expenses by at least 75 percent, with public resources reallocated from general infrastructure projects.

In several Brazilian cities, the FIFA cost overruns sparked public demonstrations against the increase in public transportation fares and political corruption. On June 20, 2013, 1.5 million people demonstrated in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest metropolitan area, protesting the exorbitant cost of stadiums, the displacement of urban residents, and the embezzlement of public funds (Castells 2015: 232). As the countdown to the kickoff began, Brazilians took to the streets in more than 100 cities, with slogans expressing objections to the World Cup, such as “FIFA go home!” and “We want hospitals up to FIFA’s standards!” “The World Cup steals money from healthcare, education and the poor. The homeless are being forced from the streets. This is not for Brazil, it’s for the tourists,” reported a Guardian article (Watts 2014). This social unrest provided the backdrop for the games in which, despite making the semifinals, Brazil suffered a historic loss to Germany.

Because FIFA is unregulated, it should come as no surprise that for years it has been accused of corruption. Disputes over where to hold the event, the competition of nations and their financial backers, have characterized the World Cup since its inception. Corporate sponsors, wealthy backers, and the global media outlets appear to be the primary beneficiaries of the World Cup’s global success. There appears to be little if any financial benefit to countries that actually host the World Cup – South Africa recouped approximately 10 percent of its outlay on stadiums and infrastructure for the 2010 World Cup, and many of the 12 stadiums that Brazil constructed for the 2014 event were investigated for graft. Yet nations may have reasons beyond financial gain for hosting the games. Qatar was granted the right to host the 2022 World Cup, suggesting that the fiscal and political controversies that characterize FIFA’s operation will persist.¹

An intersectional analysis of capitalism and nationalism sheds light on structural power relations that enabled FIFA as a global business to influence the public policies of nation-states that host the games. But other categories of analysis in addition to class and nation are also hardwired into FIFA’s structural power relations. Take, for example, gender inequalities. Sports generally, and professional sports in particular, routinely provide more opportunities for men than for women. Thus far, we’ve focused on FIFA’s male athletes, primarily because the first FIFA World Cup held in 1930 was restricted to men. Yet since 1991, when the first women’s games were held in China, FIFA has also administered women’s World Cup soccer. When the US hosted the landmark 1999 World Cup, only a few countries were considered contenders. Since then, women’s World Cup soccer has grown in popularity, reaching unprecedented global audiences by the 2019 event in France. Despite this growing interest, financial benefits that accrue to elite female football players pale by comparison with those offered their male counterparts. These gendered structures within football – for example, the men’s FIFA World Cup launched in 1930 and the women’s FIFA World Cup launched 60 years later in 1991 – foster accumulated advantages and disadvantages based on gender within FIFA’s structural domain of power.

The cultural domain of power emphasizes the increasing significance of ideas and culture in the organization of power relations. The FIFA World Cup is an excellent example of how the power of ideas, representations, and images in a global marketplace normalize cultural attitudes and expectations concerning social inequalities. Significantly, the World Cup is the most widely watched sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games. For example, FIFA’s audit of the 2018 World Cup in Russia reports that a combined 1.12 billion viewers worldwide watched the final. Over the course of the games, a combined 3.572 billion viewers – more than half of the global population aged 4 and over – tuned in to watch some aspect of the games at home on TV, in public viewing areas of bars and restaurants, and on digital platforms. From the perspective of FIFA’s organizers and financiers, the possibilities of reaching this massive global consumer market of sports fans are limitless.

Given the growth of mass media and digital media, it is important to ask what cultural messages concerning race, gender, class, sexuality, and similar categories are being broadcast to this vast global audience. In this case, promoting and televising football offers a view of fair play that in turn explains social inequality. Broadcast across the globe, the World Cup projects important ideas about competition and fair play. Sports contests send an influential message: not everyone can win. On the surface, this makes sense, but why is it that some individuals and groups of people consistently win whereas others consistently lose? FIFA has ready-made answers. Winners have talent, discipline, and luck, while losers suffer from lack of talent, inferior self-discipline, and/or bad luck. This view suggests that fair competition produces just results. Armed with this worldview concerning winners and losers, it’s a small step toward using this frame to explain social inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as their intersections.

What conditions are needed for this frame to remain plausible? This is where the idea of a level or flat playing field, one advanced by professional football and sports in general, becomes crucial. Imagine a tilted football field installed on a gently sloping hillside with the red team’s goal at top of the hill and the blue team’s goal in the valley. The red team’s players have a clear advantage: when they try to score, the structure of the playing field helps them. No matter how gifted they are, because they are helped by the invisible force of gravity, their players need not work as hard as those from the blue team to score. In contrast, the blue team’s players have an ongoing uphill battle to score a goal. They may have talent and self-discipline, but they have the bad luck of playing on a tilted playing field. To win, blue team members may need to be especially gifted. Football fans would be outraged if the actual playing field were tilted in this way. Yet this is what social divisions of class, gender, and race that are hard-wired into the structural domain of power do – we all think we are playing on a level playing field when we are not.

The cultural domain of power helps manufacture and disseminate this narrative of fair play that claims that we all have equal access to opportunities across social institutions, that competitions among individuals or groups (teams) are fair, and that resulting patterns of winners and losers have been fairly accomplished. This myth of fair play not only legitimates the outcomes of the competitive and repetitive nature of major global sporting competitions such as the World Cup and the Olympics, it also reinforces cultural narratives about capitalism and nationalism. Mass media spectacles of all sorts reiterate the belief that unequal outcomes of winners and losers are normal outcomes of capitalist marketplace competition. Sporting events, beauty pageants, reality television, and similar popular competitions broadcast on a regular basis the idea that the marketplace relations of capitalism are socially just as long as there is fair play. By showcasing competitions between nations, cities, regions, and individuals, mass media reinforces this all-important cultural myth. As long as they play by the rules and their teams are good enough, 195 or so nation-states can theoretically compete in the FIFA World Cup. Yet because rich nations have far more resources than poor ones, a handful of nation-states can field men’s and women’s teams, and even fewer can host the World Cup. When national teams compete, nations themselves compete, with the outcome of such competitions explained by cultural myths.

These mass media spectacles and associated events also present important scripts of gender, race, sexuality, and nation that work together and influence one another. The bravery of male athletes on national teams makes them akin to war heroes on battlefields, while the beauty, grace, and virtue of national beauty pageants are thought to represent the beauty, grace, and virtue of the nation. Women athletes walk a fine line between these two views of masculinity and femininity that draw meaning from binary understandings of gender.

Why is this myth of fair play so durable? Because many people enjoy sporting events or play sports themselves, sports often serve as the template for equality and fair play. Football is a global sport that theoretically can be played almost anywhere by almost anyone. Children and youth who play football typically love the sport. Football does not require expensive lessons, or a carefully manicured playing field, or even shoes. Recreational football requires no special equipment or training, only some kind of ball and enough players to field two teams. Compared with tennis, American football, ice skating, or skiing, football seemingly creates far fewer barriers between individuals with athletic talent and access to opportunities to play the game.

The fanfare granted to the World Cup is a small tip of the iceberg of how football draws upon categories of class, gender, and race, among others, to shape cultural norms of fairness and social justice. From elite athletes to poor kids, football players want to compete on a fair playing field. It doesn’t matter how you got to the field: all that matters once you are on it is what you can do. The sports metaphor of a level playing field speaks to the desire for fairness and equality among individuals. Whether winners or losers, this team sport rewards individual talent, yet also highlights the collective team nature of achievement. When played well and unimpeded by suspect officiating, football rewards individual talent. In a world that is characterized by so much unfairness, competitive sports such as football become important venues for seeing how things should be. The backgrounds of the players should not matter when they hit the playing field. What matters is how well they play. Mass media spectacles may appear to be mere entertainment, yet they are essential to the smooth working of the cultural domain of power.

The disciplinary domain of power refers to how rules and regulations are fairly or unfairly applied to people based on race, sexuality, class, gender, age, ability, and nation, and similar categories. Basically, as individuals and groups, we are “disciplined” to fit into and/or challenge the existing status quo, often not by overt pressure, but by ongoing disciplinary practices. Within football, disciplinary power operates when some youth are forbidden to play, others are discouraged from playing, whereas others receive top-notch coaching in first-class facilities to cultivate their talent. Many are simply told that they are the wrong gender or lack the ability to play at all. In essence, intersecting power relations use categories of gender or race, for example, to create pipelines to success or marginalization, and then encourage, train, or coerce people to stay on their prescribed paths.

Within athletics, intersections of race and nation are important dimensions of disciplinary power. For example, South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup highlights the obstacles that African boys face in playing professional football. Lacking opportunities for training, development, and even basic equipment, African youth look toward European clubs. European football clubs offer salaries on a par with those offered within US professional football, basketball, and baseball to play for teams in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain. The surge in the number of Africans playing at big European clubs reflects the dreams of young African football players to have successful professional careers. Yet the lure of European football also makes youth vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous recruiters. Filmmaker Mariana van Zeller’s 2010 documentary Football’s Lost Boys details how thousands of young players were lured away from their homelands, with their families giving up their savings to predatory agents, and how they were often left abandoned, broke, and alone, a process that resembles human trafficking.

The increasing racial/ethnic diversity of elite European teams that recruit African players, other players of color from poorer countries, and racialized immigrant minorities may help national teams to win. But this racial/ethnic/national diversity of elite football teams also highlights the problem of racism in European football. The visible diversity among team players upends longstanding assumptions about race, ethnicity, and national identity. When France’s national team defeated the Brazilian team to win the 1998 World Cup, some fans saw the team as non-representative of France because most of the players were not white. Moreover, although white European fans may love their teams, many feel free to engage in racist behavior, such as calling African players monkeys, chanting racial slurs, and carrying signs with racially derogatory language.²

FIFA’s gendered rules also reflect disciplinary power in ways that produce significantly different experiences for male and female athletes. An intersectional analysis suggests that the convergence of class and gender translates into pay inequities and differential opportunities after a professional soccer career. Beyond the initial division between male and female athletes, different rules that set FIFA policy reflect gendered assumptions about women and sports. Recognizing the disparity of support for men’s and women’s soccer, on March 8, 2019, International Women’s Day, the US players filed a federal gender discrimination lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), the national governing body for the sport. In response, in a legal filing, the USSF denied unlawful conduct, attributing gendered pay differentials to “differences in the aggregate revenue generated by the different teams and/or any other factor other than sex.” In other words, from the perspective of USSF, any gendered economic inequality reflects marketplace structures and cultural norms that lie outside FIFA’s purview, not gender discrimination within FIFA itself.

The fight for equal pay within US soccer generated considerable attention, especially since the US women’s team had consistently outperformed the men’s team, on the field, in media interest, and in revenue. The US men’s team failed to qualify for the 2018 games, whereas the women’s team won the World Cup in 2015 and 2019. Viewership for the women’s team also outpaced that for the men’s team. In 2015, some 25 million people watched the US women’s team win the World Cup final – at that time, a record US audience for any soccer game, with their 2019 victory breaking that record. But while important, gender-only frameworks miss intersectional dimensions of how both the rules as well as the tools for fighting social injustice discriminate. In 2019, the US women’s team was paid less than the men and had the legal rights and means to file a lawsuit. In contrast, the Reggae Girlz of Jamaica, the first national soccer team from the Caribbean to qualify for the World Cup, had difficulty raising the funds to attend the games. They fared better than the Super Falcons, the Nigerian national team, which, even though they were nine-time winners of the Africa Cup, were not paid at all. Chronically underfunded, the Super Falcons protested at the house of Nigeria’s president and eventually received increased financial support to attend the games.

These gender differences between men’s and women’s soccer intersect with differences of race and class within both the men’s and the women’s game. The rules of soccer in turn shape team rankings that discipline players through differential expectations. Rankings among the women’s teams correlate with race and nation and, by implication, with the different levels of support provided to women athletes in rich and poor countries. Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in continental Africa, South Africa sent its first women’s team to the 2019 World Cup, joining Nigeria and Cameroon as one of only three African teams that qualified. All three were ranked at the bottom of the list of teams that qualified and lost in the first round to better-funded teams. Intersections of race and gender characterize both men’s and women’s football, with important financial implications for all players.

The interpersonal domain of power refers to how individuals experience the convergence of structural, cultural, and disciplinary power. Such power shapes intersecting identities of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and age that in turn organize social interactions. Intersectionality recognizes that perceived group membership can make people vulnerable to various forms of bias, yet because we are simultaneously members of many groups, our complex identities can shape the specific ways that we experience that bias. For example, men and women often experience racism differently, just as women of different races can experience sexism differently, and so on. Intersectionality highlights these aspects of individual experience that we may not notice.

For the FIFA World Cup, intersecting identities are hypervisible on a global stage. New information and communications technologies (ICTs) have increased the visibility and scope of individual identities, in the case of FIFA offering sports competitions that are designed to entertain and educate, but that also provide a window into people’s lives. Like everyone else, FIFA’s athletes must craft their identities within intersecting power relations. Moreover, the visibility granted athletes’ bodies within sporting competitions means that the embodied nature of intersecting identities is on constant display. Much is at stake in cultivating the right image and brand. The ways in which athletes handle their identities can result in lucrative endorsements, contracts as sportscasters, and opportunities to broker their excellence and visibility in coaching and ancillary opportunities. Given the global scope and mass media intensity of the FIFA World Cup tournament, individual players have to decide not only how they will play the game, but how their individual image both on and off the pitch will be received by fans. As the aforementioned name-calling and racist commentary within European football suggests, fans can be fickle, rooting for the home team that has players of color, yet hurling racial epithets at players on the opposing team. The commodification of identity is big business.

Because gender is a foundational social division in everyday life, managing identities of masculinity and femininity takes on larger-than-life significance in this global public area. Regardless of sport, women have faced an uphill battle to play sports at all, to do so on an elite level, and to receive equitable compensation for doing so. Moreover, because women’s sports ostensibly disrupt longstanding norms of femininity, the treatment of women athletes in sports where they have managed to establish well-paying careers as is the case of women’s tennis – or a living wage as is the case of women’s basketball – offers a lesson to the female athletes in World Cup football. Women’s sports have been fraught with consistent efforts to manage women’s dress and appearance.

The treatment of women athletes who appear to violate norms of femininity offers a window into the broader issue of how elite athletes deal with hegemonic masculinity and femininity in professional sports. As more women play professional sports, they increasingly contest the rules of het-eronormativity. For example, tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams have been legendary in challenging the dress code of women’s tennis and both have been accused of being overly masculine because they ostensibly play like men. At the inception of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the league’s overwhelmingly black female players were encouraged to model traditional femininity to counter accusations of lesbianism. Athletes attended to their hair and makeup and brought children and male partners to games to signal their sexual orientation. As the league has matured, players are increasingly embracing an androgynous fashion style that is more in tune with contemporary notions of gender fluidity.

As individuals, FIFA athletes may have comparable talent, aspire to the same things, or hold similar values. Yet norms of heteronormativity are closely aligned with these disciplinary practices that shape individual decisions about identity, masculinity, and femininity. Playing an elite sport is one thing. Being accepted by the fans that fund that sport is another. Intersecting identities and experiences reflect power plays across the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal domains of power, identities that play out in everyday social interactions as well as public images. Overall, professional football is not just a game, but rather offers a rich site for using intersectionality as an analytical tool.