The place of social space: Classed identities in a regional sporting club

Abstract

The notion of 'place' means different things to different people. Beyond the usual 'geographical' references to 'place', sport scholarship has embraced the 'spatial turn' (Vertinsky and Bale in Sites of Sport: space, place, experience. Routledge, London, UK, 2004), especially with a view to examining how particular identities are (re)constructed in such contexts. Sporting clubs have long held a unique place in communities in relation to popular culture, pride, collective identities, attachment to place, localism and cultural geography (Spaaij in Sport in Society 12(9):1132-1146, 2009). In Australian rural and regional communities, the merging of football and netball clubs was largely driven by a wider social vision for sporting clubs to be more gender inclusive and diverse community settings. Viewed as community hubs, football and netball clubs represent one of a number of social spaces where a wide range of people can be drawn together around a shared interest. Among the cultural messages (re)produced within these contexts are understandings around both individual and community identities. In this contribution, we draw on semistructured and focus group interview data to examine the specificities that contribute to nuanced, localised accounts of the ways in which one regional football-netball club functioned as a social space to produce social connections, sensibilities and identities that are inherently classed. Drawing on the theoretical tools of Foucault (The Foucault reader. Vintage Books, New York, pp. 239-256, 1984) and Lefebvre (The production of space. Blackwell, Malden, MA, 1991), we examine discourse-power relations that permeate the club, set in a working-class community, to unsettle the taken-for-granted ways of thinking about class and identity for those that inhabit these clubs as stalwarts, or for a time, pass through them as transient members.