Idrottens kön. Genus, kropp och sexualitet i lagidrottens vardag

Sammanfattning: This dissertation analyses and describes how gender, the body and sexuality are constructed within Swedish team sports. The study is based on qualitative, ethnographic field work with the male handball team Kula HF and the female soccer team Solby IK. With the help of interviews and observations, the dissertation describes how the athletes perceive themselves, their physical bodies and the communal spirit of sports that they are a part of. The members of the two sporting collectives are studied in an every day context consisting of team practice, games, locker-room jargon, parties and road trips to tournaments. The study reveals that the athletes? own understanding of team sports is essentially a construction created within the frame-work of hegemonic masculinity. In their attempts at being a part of what is considered normal or desirable in sports, the members of the two sporting collectives adjust their behaviour according to this formation of masculine ideology. A consequence of this is that they contribute to a power structure that legitimises the different conditions that exist for men's and women's partaking in sports. However, the results also show that there is an ambiguity in the athletes? behaviours, and that they are able to, in different ways, transgress or oppose the social dynamics that dominate the two collectives. From this perspective, the athletes? negotiation of identity consists of a dialectical game between traditional assumptions regarding gender and individual actors? attempts at tearing down existing boundaries. By studying different sporting practices, it is possible to acquire an understanding of the individual's understanding of himself or herself and of the social structures that contain this understanding. This study describes team sports as a social arena where gender identity is constructed through ambivalent and contradictory processes that both bring stability and change the current gender order.