Free, Hughson / SETTLING ACCOUNTS WITH HOOLIGANS Settling Accounts with Hooligans Gender Blindness in Football Supporter Subculture Research

Recent ethnographies of male football supporters have provided in-depth, highly engaged accounts from the supporters’subcultural perspectives. Although they are com-mendable for their ethnographic detail, this article’s authors take issuewith their theori-zation of the data, particularly their inadequate interrogations of gender construction and gender relations. The authors argue that McRobbie’s critique of earlier male youth subcultural ethnographies is equally applicable to football ethnographies. The authors make three principal criticisms. First, these ethnographies’authors falsely dichotomize the public and private domains, thus failing to provide complex pictures of the gendered social relations in which these subcultural activities are situated. Second, they ignore evidence, in their own data, of the performative role of such activities in the construction and reproduction of masculine identities. Third, their uses of the concept of “carnivalesque ” camouflage both the gender themes in the data and the authors ’ fail-ures to adequately address them theoretically. Key words: masculinity; gender; subcultures; ethnography; football; sport; hooligan-ism; carnivalesque This article critically assesses recent ethnographic research on male foot-ball supporter subcultures in theUnitedKingdom. The “new ethnographies,” as they have been called (Hughson 1998), are, principally, the work of Richard Giulianotti (1991, 1993, 1995a, 1995b) and Gary Armstrong (1998). The work of these writers differs from previous ethnographic studies of male football supporters, particularly those by researchers at the University o