"What's the Footballer Doing Here?" Racialized Performativity, Reflexivity, and Identity

Abstract

In this article I argue for the importance of ethnography and the efficacy of reflexive autobiography within sociological work in understanding the complexities of racial identity formation. I offer a rereading of some of my earlier research as a way to draw out some of the elisions embedded within that work. I suggest that understanding such moments of "silence," those passages where the ethnographic narrator disappears from view, are central and not marginal to any theorization of "race," culture, and identity. This is because such literary and symbolic suppressions point to both the ontological gaps within identity formation and subjectivity and the continuing shortfalls within our theorizing of those concepts. The article thus develops both an epistemological framework for a reflexive cultural studies/critical sociology of sport methodology that is sensitive to questions of racialization and an analysis of the conceptual problematics in thinking through the contingent nature and embodied performance of race. The article concludes by noting the limitations to the autobiographical turn and the use of reflexivity within ethnographic accounts such as those found within autoethnography. It is argued that although critical interpretive perspectives offer a needed correction to positivistic approaches founded on a naive objectivism, the production of subjectivity and the use of autobiography always need to be located within broader frameworks that map the historical forces and social formations that make (racial) identity possible.