“We are Moving Up like a Hard‐On!”: Doing Sex/uality in Sport

Abstract

The object of this article is to describe how sex/gender and sexuality becomes visible in sports contexts when acted out by some sports participants, and how sport as a symbolic and social arena shapes and constructs discourses and practices of sex/gender and sexuality. The article focuses on theoretical issues concerning use of queer theory based on data from a study on how sex/gender and sexuality are acted out in Norwegian sports contexts. Doing sex/gender and sexuality is understood as communicating oneself to others, both through one's presence and participation in, for example, bonding rituals in a specific context, and through direct sexual approach such as, for example, flirtation, falling in love and sexual and erotic interaction. The sports arena as a site for leisure and physical activity has the potential to contain counter‐sites, which, in the words of Foucault, are effectively enacted heterotopias of deviation, with the potential of queering the traditional picture of sport as an arena for heterosexual flirting and coupling only. However, as argued in this article, most of the examples of practices of doing sex/uality in sport presented here (queer existence or queerness) appear as something deviant, and hence work as mere alternatives to heteronormative sexualities, more than having the ability to “crack” and threaten discourses of heteronormativity in mainstream sports contexts.