Sporting Frenchness: Nationality, Race, and Gender at Play.

Abstract

Concerned with modern sports in French culture since 1870, this dissertation explores how gender, class, and race, as well as local identity, shape and are shaped through interpretations of cultural events, through literature, and through images that are imbricated with sports. Primarily through literary analysis but also employing postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and feminist theory, it will examine sports’ entanglement with postcoloniality, commercialization, and immigration. Chapter one looks at the construction and performance of masculinity in three short stories about rugby published in a 1961 collection by Henri Garcia, Les Contes du rugby. I argue that the prevailing cultural climate combined with rugby culture to foster a localized interpretation of masculinity in Southwest France that permitted certain classed variations of gender roles within its own confines. In contrast, chapter two examines the more contemporary Dieux du Stade commercial ventures of the Stade Français rugby team and details the impact of professionalization and globalization on rugby’s particular brands of masculinity. Players’ masculinities have become more homogeneous as market demands push the men to train more and play more internationally. Their bodies have become, in addition to the tools of their trade, commodities to be traded and flaunted. The Dieux du Stade calendars exemplify these phenomena, as players transform their already marketed and marketable bodies into differently consumable objects and rupture the traditional rivalries among different rugby teams and different sports. Finally, chapter three focuses on soccer, a sport whose long history of professionalism contrasts with rugby’s recent shift from amateurism. The salaries earned by the sport’s stars as well as those stars’ diversity have contributed to soccer’s construction as a meritocratic vehicle for upward social mobility, but in readings of two recent novels involving soccer, race, and immigration (Banlieue noire by Thomté Ryam and Le ventre de l’Atlantique by Fatou Diome), I argue that these books demystify certain perceptions of the game’s power to help individuals transcend social marginalization. Taken together, these three chapters examine questions of Frenchness and sports’ roles in defining nationality, class, race, and gender, proposing sports as a new site for thinking through intersectionality.