Abstract
This study examines how male hegemony in team sports, such as football, promote homophobia as a form of symbolic violence and a powerful mechanism of social control. The research included the survey administration of the Attitudes Toward Gay Men (ATG) scale (Herek, 1984, 1994) to one Division I college football team on the west coast of the United States, measuring participants’ relative levels of homophobia. Findings indicate that approximately two-thirds (n=65) of the members of this college football team reported a positive attitude towards homosexuality within this study, while roughly one-third of respondents had negative attitudes toward gay men. Level of religious faith, regardless of denomination, was the best predictor of participants’ attitudes toward homosexuality. Finally, the article discusses the study’s limitations, directions for future research and implications to enhance a more open and inclusive climate within American college football.
Highlights
As a former football student athlete at the University of California, Berkeley, a Division 1A program in the Pacific-12 athletic conference, Jake Ashton, the first author on this paper, witnessed several incidents that helped inspire this research project
This study focuses on homophobia in American college football, an example of men’s symbolic violence against both men and women
Implications and Concluding Remarks As Adams and Anderson (2012) remind us, we must recognize that assessing homophobia is always historically situated and contextually specific
Summary
As a former football student athlete at the University of California, Berkeley, a Division 1A program in the Pacific-12 athletic conference, Jake Ashton, the first author on this paper, witnessed several incidents that helped inspire this research project In his final season with this college football team, he was pursuing his Master of Arts (M.A.) in the Graduate School of Education, where he studied the Cultural Studies of Sport in Education (CSSE) as his M.A. concentration. As a young man who had participated in Pop Warner football, as well as high school and college football, Jake had been a part of an athletic culture with its subtle and not so subtle ideological messaging about what it meant to be a man in this sports context He witnessed first-hand the ways in which boys and men police one another in and out of the locker room. No one wanted to speak up to this symbolic violence for fear of retribution and becoming the target of ridicule and contempt
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