‘This is my team … we’ve got this and we’re not going to stand for any of this shit!’: A queer anarchist do it yourself approach to football

Abstract

This article critically explores the experiences of nine football players who identify as women, transgender and non-binary, and their perceptions of playing in queer DIY footballing spaces, focused around four key themes. The themes that emerged were the outsider identity, the decentring of competitiveness, queer community and temporalities and prefigurative practice and proliferation. Participants cited the political bottom-up structure of these football spaces as important to their (re)engagement with football. Furthermore, participants felt they were able to act out forms of queer activism through DIY practice and by playing a sport that they had previously been marginalised from due to their gender and/or sexuality. Drawing on a queer anarchist lens, this article examines how participants seek to disrupt hegemonic discourses within a sport that is often perceived as a masculine pursuit. This article argues for more prefigurative and diverse sporting practices to allow freer participation for marginalised identities within football.