Brenda Elsey, Hofstra University

“Unbearable Whiteness of Women’s Soccer”

This lecture examines the landscape of women’s soccer, arguing that it is a significant space for the production of racial, gender, and class hierarchies. Deep inequities in state support, public space, and recreational resources plague women’s programs. These inequities are anchored in a global history of empire and racism.   

Brenda Elsey is associate professor of History at Hofstra University. She is the author of Citizens and Sportsmen: Fútbol and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Social History and Radical History Review. She is currently writing Futbolera: Sport, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America.

Ben Carrington, University of Texas at Austin

“Forgivable Whiteness: Race, Family and the Last of the Great White Hopes”

This talk examines the emergence of a particular form of white masculinity, encapsulated in the term “the Great White Hope”. Carrington will argue that sport is the preeminent public space for the performance of a (fragile) white heterosexual masculinity that is underpinned by supra-national discourses of family and nostalgia. 

Ben Carrington teaches sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and is a Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University in England. He has published widely on the politics of popular culture, especially in relation to the intersections of race, gender, class, and nationalism in the context of sports.