Unruly Boys and Unemancipated Girls: Football Integration and Gendered Imaginaries of Difference

Abstract

Sport–and particularly football–is commonly seen as a technology for targeting “at-risk” populations and cultivating happy multicultural communities. Using discourse theoretical analysis, this study explores the intersection of race and gender in the public relations materials for the annual Integration Prize awarded by the German Football Association (DFB) and Mercedes-Benz. In the prize texts, the national sport transcends difference to transform racialized populations, symbolizing the virtues of the national ethos. The prize narratives involve the transformation of disaffected and thus risky populations into happy, liberated, and productive multicultural assets to the national project. The overarching pedagogy focuses on self-discipline, social competency, and hard work. However, they diverge on crucial points across gender. The corpus singles out boys for deviant behaviors like aggression and criminality. Meanwhile, it targets girls for liberation from traditional patriarchal cultures that presumably dominate Muslim communities. Analysis shows that football integration discourse ignores both structural inequality–economic and ethnic–and the patriarchal gender norms that suffuse majority German football culture.