Slap Shot! Sport, Masculinities, and Homelessness in the Downtown Core of a Divided Western Canadian Inner City

Abstract

This urban ethnography explores how a group of low-income (often homeless) men performed a range of masculinities through a sport-for-development program in the Western Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta. For more than two decades, weekly floor hockey games have been organized by local health workers as part of a broader sport-based intervention/corrective aimed, in part, at reforming Edmonton’s urban “underclass,” one that is decidedly Indigenous. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork, our intersectional analysis examines both the adaptive qualities of various classed and racialized masculinities and demonstrates the “symbolic violence” associated with their performance in the distinctive settler–colonial context of Edmonton’s inner city. Finally, we examine how these weekly sporting interludes also provided opportunities for more caring versions of masculinity and for more enduring forms of solidarity, support, and community to be enacted and experienced.