for fighting social injustice discriminate. In 2019, the US women’s team was paid less than the men and had the legal rights and means to file a lawsuit. In contrast, the Reggae Girlz of Jamaica, the first national soccer team from the Caribbean to qualify for the World Cup, had difficulty raising the funds to attend the games. They fared better than the Super Falcons, the Nigerian national team, which, even though they were nine-time winners of the Africa Cup, were not paid at all. Chronically underfunded, the Super Falcons protested at the house of Nigeria’s president and eventually received increased financial support to attend the games.
These gender differences between men’s and women’s soccer intersect with differences of race and class within both the men’s and the women’s game. The rules of soccer in turn shape team rankings that discipline players through differential expectations. Rankings among the women’s teams correlate with race and nation and, by implication, with the different levels of support provided to women athletes in rich and poor countries. Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in continental Africa, South Africa sent its first women’s team to the 2019 World Cup, joining Nigeria and Cameroon as one of only three African teams that qualified. All three were ranked at the bottom of the list of teams that qualified and lost in the first round to better-funded teams. Intersections of race and gender characterize both men’s and women’s football, with important financial implications for all players.
The interpersonal domain of power refers to how individuals experience the convergence of structural, cultural, and disciplinary power. Such power shapes intersecting identities of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and age that in turn organize social interactions. Intersectionality recognizes that perceived group membership can make people vulnerable to various forms of bias, yet because we are simultaneously members of many groups, our complex identities can shape the specific ways that we experience that bias. For example, men and women often experience racism differently, just as women of different races can experience sexism differently, and so on. Intersectionality highlights these aspects of individual experience that we may not notice.
For the FIFA World Cup, intersecting identities are hypervisible on a global stage. New information and communications technologies (ICTs) have increased the visibility and scope of individual identities, in the case of FIFA offering sports competitions that are designed to entertain and educate, but that also provide a window into people’s lives. Like everyone else, FIFA’s athletes must craft their identities within intersecting power relations. Moreover, the visibility granted athletes’ bodies within sporting competitions means that the embodied nature of intersecting identities is on constant display. Much is at stake in cultivating the right image and brand. The ways in which athletes handle their identities can result in lucrative endorsements, contracts as sportscasters, and opportunities to broker their excellence and visibility in coaching and ancillary opportunities. Given the global scope and mass media intensity of the FIFA World Cup tournament, individual players have to decide not only how they will play the game, but how their individual image both on and off the pitch will be received by fans. As the aforementioned name-calling and racist commentary within European football suggests, fans can be fickle, rooting for the home team that has players of color, yet hurling racial epithets at players on the opposing team. The commodification of identity is big business.
Because gender is a foundational social division in everyday life, managing identities of masculinity and femininity takes on larger-than-life significance in this global public area. Regardless of sport, women have faced an uphill battle to play sports at all, to do so on an elite level, and to receive equitable compensation for doing so. Moreover, because women’s sports ostensibly disrupt longstanding norms of femininity, the treatment of women athletes in sports where they have managed to establish well-paying careers as is the case of women’s tennis – or a living wage as is the case of women’s basketball – offers a lesson to the female athletes in World Cup football. Women’s sports have been fraught with consistent efforts to manage women’s dress and appearance.
The treatment of women athletes who appear to violate norms of femininity offers a window into the broader issue of how elite athletes deal with hegemonic masculinity and femininity in professional sports. As more women play professional sports, they increasingly contest the rules of het-eronormativity. For example, tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams have been legendary in challenging the dress code of women’s tennis and both have been accused of being overly masculine because they ostensibly play like men. At the inception of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), the league’s overwhelmingly black female players were encouraged to model traditional femininity to counter accusations of lesbianism. Athletes attended to their hair and makeup and brought children and male partners to games to signal their sexual orientation. As the league has matured, players are increasingly embracing an androgynous fashion style that is more in tune with contemporary notions of gender fluidity.
As individuals, FIFA athletes may have comparable talent, aspire to the same things, or hold similar values. Yet norms of heteronormativity are closely aligned with these disciplinary practices that shape individual decisions about identity, masculinity, and femininity. Playing an elite sport is one thing. Being accepted by the fans that fund that sport is another. Intersecting identities and experiences reflect power plays across the structural, cultural, disciplinary, and interpersonal domains of power, identities that play out in everyday social interactions as well as public images. Overall, professional football is not just a game, but rather offers a rich site for using intersectionality as an analytical tool.
Economic inequality: a new global crisis?
When it comes to highlighting global economic inequality as an important social problem, 2014 was a pivotal year. Drawing more than 6,000 participants from all over the world, the Eighteenth International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology convened in Yokohama, Japan. In his presidential address, Michael Burawoy (2005), a distinguished Marxist scholar, argued that inequality was the most pressing issue of our time. Burawoy suggested that growing global inequality had spurred new thinking not only in sociology, but also in economics and related social sciences. Burawoy had long been a proponent of public sociology, the perspective holding that sociological tools should be brought to bear on important social issues. Interestingly, he stressed the significance of the 2013 election of Pope Francis. As the first pope from the Global South, Pope Francis expressed a strong commitment to tackling the questions of social inequality, poverty, and environmental justice, even qualifying economic inequality as “the root of social evil.” It is not every day that a Marxist scholar quotes the Pope before an international gathering of social scientists.
That same year, more than 220 business leaders and investors from 27 countries assembled in London at the May 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism. As Nafeez Ahmed reported in a May 28, 2014 Guardian article, the attendees gathered to discuss “the need for a more socially responsible form of capitalism that benefits everyone, not just a wealthy minority.” Representing the most powerful financial and business elites, who controlled approximately US$30 trillion worth of liquid assets, or one-third of the global total, this group was concerned about, as the CEO of Unilever put it, “the capitalist threat to capitalism.” The stellar guest list for the conference included Prince Charles, Bill Clinton, the governor of the Bank of England, and several heads of global corporations. Interestingly, in her keynote speech, Christine Lagarde, then head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), invoked the same reference to Pope Francis’s depiction of increasing inequality as “the root of social evil.” Referencing Marx’s insight that capitalism “carried the seeds of its own destruction,” Lagarde argued, something needs to be done. Here again, it is not every day that the head of the IMF quotes both the Pope and Marx before the global financial elite.
Since the 1990s, economic inequality in income and wealth has grown exponentially, both within individual nation-states and across an overwhelming majority of countries, affecting 70 percent of the world’s population. And this economic inequality contributes to social inequality more broadly. Nearly half of the world’s wealth, some US$110 trillion, is owned by only 1
