Description
Scholarship in Feminist sociology and IR has emphasised that late-modern social structures are hierarchically-ordered along gendered lines. This is particularly evident in the social distinctions drawn between military and sporting subjectivities. While it is common for societies to refer to both subjects and their ostensible service to the nation as heroic, discursive frameworks emphasise that sporting subjects and their heroisms are hierarchically-inferior to the ‘real heroes’: the figure of the liberal masculinised warrior. While such distinctions are not immutable, the conditions under which they might transmogrify remain underexplored. In this paper, I argue that moments of ontological insecurity are instances in which such distinctions might be temporarily suspended. Using the case of FIFA’s controversial refusal in 2016 to allow the English men’s football team to wear kits adorned with red Poppy emblems associated with British war commemoration, I argue that the episode gave expression to broader anxieties expressed in Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and reassert itself on the global stage, leading to media framings of the controversy as a metaphorical war, structured along the lines of a Lacanian fantasy. Focusing on the discursive and aesthetic aspects of press coverage, I argue that positioning England footballers as vicarious proxies for the nation in a ‘war’ with FIFA was enabled by the collapsing of distinctions of sporting and military hierarchies, with soldiers discursively positioned using militarised terminology usually reserved for military veterans, with broader implications for the integrity of ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ subjectivities.
