FIFA makes things worse: Iran's women's team, FIFA & the Olympics

Few media outlets take the time to consider the particular way that FIFA makes things worse for women.

A few months ago, I reported on the slowly unfolding consequences of the decision of one xenophobic referee working in a youth tournament in Quebec (FIFA Makes its Islamophobia Official). This referee refused to allow an 11 year old girl play while wearing a headscarf, as per the practices of her religious community. Her team supported her, as did others in the tournament. An appeal was launched, and the IFAB (the board governing the official rule book) waffled by allowing each national association to set its own rules vis a vis its women's game.

The consequences of this problematic decision are unfolding in increasingly complex ways - most recently in relation to Iran's national women's team.

Athletic hijab is basic head covering worn by Muslim athletes all over the world, at every level of competition - including in the Olympics. It varies - some athletes will cover their skin head-to-toe, some with loose fitting track suits, some with form fitted bodysuits (worn underneath basic gear), some women wear athletic versions of headscarves.

The International Olympics Committee does not ban hijab. And it was at the Olympics that many of us were introduced to the idea of athletic hijab as we watched Bahrain's Ruqaya Al Ghasara (for example) compete on the track in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics. She is not alone.

So it is ironic that the Iranian national women's team is at risk of not being able to participate in Olympic qualifying matches because FIFA is incapable of showing real leadership on this issue.

Sadly, FIFA runs the soccer part of the Olympics. The Iranian FA requires that its athletes compete in hijab. The team withdrew from their latest match against Jordan when an official declared that their uniforms (which had been the subject of negotiation previously, with FIFA eventually agreeing to allow the team to compete in a regional tournament only after much drama on both sides). (Read around the blogosphere and you'll see some credible hypotheses which suggest that this official's decision may have been motivated by a desire to see the Iranian team eliminated from competition.) Anyway, Iran has filed a complaint. To be clear: the women are between a rock and a hard place - Fifa's incoherent ruling, and the Iranian association's grandstanding (as it won't agree with the headcovering that Fifa has approved). One can hardly imagine the nightmare this induces for athletes and managers trying to work in the women's game in Iran.

In any case, this is another indication of FIFA's poor stewardship of the women's game. As I wrote in one of the comments for my original post on this issue, when you find yourself almost rooting for Iran's national association you know that something has gone horribly wrong.

Stories on this:

CNN Wire: World soccer officials defend hijab ban after Iranian team forfeits match

The Guardian: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blasts Fifa 'dictators' as Iranian ban anger rises

Payvand News: Iran, FIFA Clash Over Hijab

NYT Goal Blog:  Iran Protests Hijab Ban

Note:  Before readers send me comments taking the moral high ground vis a vis Iran's national government (the pundit's equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel), and before readers send me rants which equate the whole of global sexism to the question of the "veil" - be warned, I won't publish most of that stuff. I rarely make this kind of warning in posts, but something about "the veil" makes people particularly reactionary. This post is - furthermore - ultimately - about the women athletes who are being put in this position, not only by Iran's state government (which requires full body coverage) but by FIFA and the IFAB's politicization of the participation of Muslim women athletes in the game.

The Case of the Runaway Referee (Soccer in the City of Angels, Part III)

Keith Hackett and Paul Trevillion, You Are the Ref (Lionel Messi, 2010)

It was our league's first season and one of our first really competitive matches.

A linesman walked off the field in the middle of play. He threw aside his yellow flag and muttered "Working this game isn't worth risking my life."

Amen to that, but....Was his life ever actually in danger? What on earth had made him think that it was?

The life-threatening situation involved a team called "Nikys," sponsored by a soccer shop across the street from our field.

They were an intimidating side. They had speed, stamina and intelligence. Each player seemed to know where the ball and everyone on the team was going. Nikys played a tight, fast and hard game.

They played like they owned field and were not above using theatrics and emotional manipulation to dispossess their opponents. They were aggressive, they never believed calls made against them, but they paid their dues, showed up and played a good game.

They started their season with us by destroying one team after another. Nevertheless, we really wanted them in the league. We knew that other sides would eventually catch up with them (and they did). But if Nikys didn't stick around, those teams would not benefit from the challenge of playing against them.

Given that they were sponsored by the shop across the street, we needed them, and they knew it. We wanted them to have a good experience with the league. I at least found myself wanting their games in particular to be well-run.

So, when I saw the referee walk off the field in the middle of play, I was upset. All I knew was that the ref felt threatened. I wanted Nikys in the league, but I wanted our referees to have a good experience of the league, too.

I was confused: the Nikys guys played hard, but they were one of the least problematic teams in the league, in terms of their organization and general conduct. I couldn't reconcile what I knew about the team with the referee's claim that his life had been threatened.

Refereeing is hard. A league needs to be experienced by players as fair - that fairness is the result of the referee's work. Referees need to feel secure in their authority in order to produce that fairness - on some level, that sense of security comes from within themselves, but it is also the product of the space. They need to feel that they have the respect of the league itself.

I wouldn't get the full story about what had actually happened until the day was over.

Nikys gave up a goal. The defenders complained to the linesman that it had been scored from an offside position (from where I stood, it had looked good).

It was a nasty goal. Their defense hadn't read the attack properly. They'd been caught sleeping.  It was kind of goal scored when possession and the run-of-play make it seem like you are dominating the match, so you let down your guard. And with that loss of focus, your defense breaks down. It's an error born of complacency. The players (in my view) masked their error by reacting as if the goal had been offside. From where I stood (and according to players from both teams), their complaints were well within a game's normal theatrical range.

A good linesman does not engage this kind of whining. On television, we see a stone-faced indifference to player histrionics. This linesman, however, responded by goading the defenders. According to witnesses (from both teams), the linesman said something like "that's what happens when your defense is shit."

Of course, one of those defenders said something back - and it wasn't nice. It might indeed have been menacing. The linesman then called to the center referee,and demanded that he throw the offending player out. He issued this demand as an ultimatum: "You either throw this guy out of the game, or I leave."

The very experienced and professional center ref supported the linesman's call vis a vis the goal, but did not give in to the ultimatum. Having given himself no other option, the linesman packed up his gear and went home. He was visibly angry, and told everyone who would listen that he felt his life was on the line.

It was definitely one for "You Are the Ref."

Someone volunteered in his stead, and the match was finished without incident. I'm not sure that was by the rulebook, but it was in the interest of a good game - which is what we had.

As I spoke to the remaining referees and to players from both teams, it became painfully clear that the linesman and a number of the players and spectators were nervous about playing in that neighborhood. Some of this nervousness seemed to express itself around Nikys, as the neighborhood team and the "scariest" team in the league. (By "scary," I mean that you knew, going in, that the game would be hard, and you'd probably lose.) I can imagine that driving across town to play in our league, only to have your ass handed to you by the "locals" was not fun. ("Locals" is in scare quotes because the Nikys guys weren't all based in the neighborhood.)

Nikys weren't the easiest squad to referee - but they were easier than the LAPD team. For some, however, the team looked like they've been called in from Central Casting to give face to the nameless ranks of TV Latinos - who still appear on the screen too often as criminals and crime victims.

LAPD forcing protesters out of MacArthur Park with rubber bullets and tear gas in 2007. Here, they are walking across the park's (then dirt) soccer field.

The linesman's nerves might have been triggered by the neighborhood rather than by the people on the field. Whether you call it Rampart or Pico Union or Westlake, this part of LA makes headlines - and not in a good way.

It is true that it is not the "safest" part of LA. In the months we played on this field, a beloved street vendor was shot and killed, a child was injured by a stray bullet, and an indigenous migrant was shot and killed by an LAPD officer. That's just three incidents - all of which happened within two blocks of us.

None of those bad things happened, however, while we were playing our games. Violent crime is down in Los Angeles. Studies show, too, that things like soccer leagues suppress incidents of violent crime by bringing more people outdoors on a regular basis. People get to know each other, they look out for one another and for the neighborhood.

Same spot in MacArthur Park as photographed by The Original Winger (2010).

It is in the city's interest to encourage community use of LAUSD fields - and adult leagues benefit the neighborhood as much as youth leagues do. Adult leagues bring not only families with children, they bring out young people and their friends. Soccer has a way of activating a space - a trip to MacArthur Park will show you just how good a scene can be when it has an organic relationship to the space, when it's relatively informal and open - when it encourages both participation and spectatorship.

To return to the linesman: I don't know what happened, really, or why he felt so at risk. It's possible he just had a horrible week and was not in the mood for arguing with people. I've never seen people yell at each as much as they do at a soccer match. It can be stressful. Add feeling like you don't belong there, feeling like an outsider on the defensive - he may have just hit a wall. Not everyone is up for having a match turn into a consciousness raising session.

The center referee set an ideal example. He kept the game going and minimized the drama - he didn't draw any more attention to what had happened. He shrugged it off as one more thing that happened. The whole incident passed very quickly, and was soon eclipsed by a really good game.

We adjusted: our referee assigner was very committed to supporting the league - this incident demonstrated that the referees needed to have a sense of what the environment was like, and be comfortable with it. They needed to be sure enough of their own expertise and authority to run the game, even if they were (like me) out of place.

We eventually had a stable team of referees of diverse backgrounds. They expressed a range of ability and experience - but they all cared about the work, and seemed to enjoy the challenging of refereeing well-played games, even when they got heated.  I wish I could say they were treated well by all the teams, but that would be a lie.

Even so, by our second and last full season, the referees were using our games regularly for assessment - that was a real compliment to us. 

The referees were one of the better sides of this story - even the guy who left, fearing for his life, had something to teach us.

Soccer in the City of Angels, Part II: "You don't belong here"

Michael Wells, Lafayette Park (2008)

"You don't belong here!"

It was a surprising turn in the argument.

We were standing on the sideline. I was in a heated discussion with an AYSO parent/volunteer who played in our league. (We were arguing about field 'security' - the subject of a forthcoming post in this series.) We were both angry. Apropos of nothing, he shouted "You don't belong here!"And then he shouted it again, and again. It was like a smack across the face.

I nearly lost my composure. Meaning: I thought I was going to cry, right there in front of the two teams, their supporters and the referees. I probably did, in fact. That was definitely one of my worst days with the league.

My interlocutor was, like me, a member of the professional class. I'm a professor, he's a lawyer. We are both in our 40s (am guessing on his account). Neither of us are very good players, not relative to the skill level of the league's best teams. His team - composed entirely of AYSO parents - was slaughtered in competition, week after week. (They got a lot of credit in my book, as they usually played with a good spirit and improved over the season.)

Yelling "you don't belong here" at me was clearly an unconscious projection: for he didn't "belong" on that field any more than I did.

It's funny, but the folks who live around the field never said anything like that to me or to my co-organizers. They never needed to - that I "didn't belong," that I was a guest, was patently obvious.

But I heard "you don't belong here" regularly from AYSO people. Mostly from white men who were visibly uncomfortable with the whole situation: A mixed league in a Latino part of town, run by three anglos who were supporters of the neighborhood's existing fútbol culture, but who had no obvious  link to it.  (Not obvious was that one of us grew up in LA, played AYSO and has strong connections to the neighborhood; I played pickup in the neighborhood for two years and joined a local team there before becoming involved with the AYSO experiment; the third participant had a good history of working with AYSO - our version of adult AYSO was really his brainchild.)

The first time an AYSO person shouted "You don't belong here" at us I thought he was joking.

One day, I saw an AYSO administrator standing on the outside of the chain-link fence framing the field, yelling at my collaborators and a couple supporters. I walked over to see what was going on. This dude was having some sort of nuclear melt-down, sparked by someone who had set their folding chair down on the turf - which one shouldn't do if its corners are sharp, as it can damage the surface. Not a crisis. One just tells that person not to use that chair, or to put it on top of a blanket. People are happy to fix the problem, especially when you ask them nicely.

For some reason, this man responded to an extremely minor problem by sputtering nonsense about the people participating in our league, whom he described as "dirty" (and he didn't mean their tactics). The stuff he was saying was so insane ("You people are dirty! You don't belong here!"), I honestly thought he was kidding around.

I accidentally made things worse by laughing the guy off and telling my collaborators not to take him seriously. "He's kidding," I said, looking at him and expecting an exchange of jokey recognition. It was right out of a Seinfeld episode, in which a character's behavior is so bizarre that at first everyone imagines it is all an act. I had to walk away: my unintentional dismissal of his lunacy only made him more lunatic.

Nearly two years later, I was doing it again: walking away from a white man about my age, maybe a little older, who was heaping pounds of rage on me (in response to my anger about the above mentioned 'security' problem).  Whatever our problems might have been, for him, they were explained by the simple observation: "You don't belong here!"

I'd become so used to moments like this that it was starting to feel normal. I turned my back on him and walked away, like a good referee might.

It was exhausting. In my work with this league, I was confronted again and again by angry men who resented my involvement, or resented the league itself and found me to be a non-threatening target for expression of that resentment - because I'm female? Because I wasn't playing as much as the guys, so I was available for being yelled at? To them, maybe at first glance I register as "some woman," or "somebody's girlfriend." I don't really know what was in their heads when they dished this kind of anger out, but I think it was easier to launch in my direction, because the consequences of doing so were minimal.  That's what it felt like.

If I'm turning the focus of my writing to myself, it's because that sentence "you don't belong here" made me think a lot about where I was supposed to belong, according to those guys, and why my presence was so provocative as to produce this constant reminder of my status as interloper - from people who were much bigger interlopers in that particular setting than me. (At least I had a history as a player in the neighborhood, an awareness of the existent fútbol landscape.)

It took me a while to absorb that I really didn't 'belong' there (working with AYSO), and that my departure was inevitable.

At best, I was at risk of allowing myself to be deployed like some sort of proto-colonial missionary, facilitating enough contact with the "population" so that the space could be properly "administered." (Again, that's what it felt like for me.)

My affinities are for pick-up scenes and neighborhood leagues. I liked being a part of that scene. I never wondered where I belonged in those games. Until the police or park officials or whoever asked you to leave, nobody owned that space - whatever that space was, it was created in the game.

As an organizer of a league, as the woman collecting cash, holding the checks and the clipboard, I was not an outsider - I was the host of a conflicted space over which, for a range of reasons, I had no actual authority.

Given the mission statement of AYSO and the national organization's open structure, I thought it would provide a great point of access to a valuable resource - I thought we could get one of the best competitive leagues in the city going in that spot. But there was always something going on there that I didn't understand - trying to run a league there was like trying to play soccer in a hall of mirrors.  Telling the story of what we did there is hard, because so much of what we experienced was just bizarre - like that guy screaming at us about how we were dirty.

"You don't belong here" could have been a way of disavowing the awareness "we don't belong here," or, it was just a command: "Get out." Which is what I did, eventually, for a hundred reasons - at the top of those reasons, though, was that I was tired of trying to get a good league going on a field from which the league would be regularly ejected, locked out, and undermined. By the end, we were playing in the outfield of a turf baseball field in an entirely different location. Even though we had as much right to the field at 7th & Union as anyone.

Organizations of all sorts are hollowed out from within by well-meaning people seduced by a sense of entitlement, by those attracted by the desire to control space and people (as if this were a form of "community service"), by the quick high of the power trip, and also, of course, by people who give in to the urge to make a quick buck from their own access to resources. A collective passivity allows this to go on, more or less in the open. In a way, such things are often mistaken for "professionalization" of the game.

One could say this about a youth league, or FIFA. Hell, these words could describe the administration at my university.

The above is a big statement, out of proportion with the incident I describe here - it was just a guy losing his temper at me. But hearing "you don't belong here" shouted at me for the umpteenth time in a setting in which such moments had become completely routine reconciled me to the likelihood that these guys were right, and that whatever "service" this league was providing to the neighborhood, it wasn't one I could be a part of. I'd definitely become a problem, in and of myself.

Next Up: The Runaway Ref

Soccer in the City of Angels, Part I: Usage Agreements

One of Pico Union's many murals (intersection of 7th and Westlake)

A couple years ago, I helped establish an adult men's soccer league in a neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles. Our league was affiliated with the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) and only lasted two years. It has taken me a little time to gain some distance on what was both an incredible and depressing experience.

Soccer (like most sports) is a bit of a red-light district. For all its beauty, it also draws a lot of shady characters - hucksters, geniuses, crazy people. It attracts people looking to run their game and, more often than is reasonable, that game is not football.

Before getting into this story, let me just put this on the record: The American Youth Soccer Organization is a fantastic model for community-run sports. Founded in Los Angeles in 1964, its core principles are egalitarian and anti-corporate. It is close to a 100% volunteer organization. A small staff runs a huge system. According to its website, AYSO has over 600,000 registered players and a quarter of a million volunteers (yes, you read that right).  Parents volunteer their time as coaches and referees, as treasurers, registrars, and league managers. Kids can referee age groups below theirs, they get involved with coaching, and learn how the organization of the game works on the daily level: it is not only an important access point for athletes, it is often the first place Americans get experience with the work of management.

The cost of participation is very low, and it is organized to maximize exposure. "Everybody plays." Everybody also contributes to the game's infrastructure - to its housekeeping. This aspect of AYSO fights against the gravitational pull of the consumer-mentality of commercialized sports. It is an important contrast to the prohibitively expensive and overly regimented club soccer system that is, sadly, the foundation of the development system for US soccer.

If there is an organization which demonstrates that the world can support a sports culture without requiring that the sport be capitalized for economic gain, it is AYSO. Rhizomic, fluid, anti-commercial and egalitarian, AYSO is, at its best, the absolute opposite of FIFA.

A system this open can be non-elitist, welcoming of difference, and flexible. It's what makes for a good scene. But it is also open to exploitation - it can be colonized by all sorts (the ambitious, the controlling, the crazy, Herbalife).

AYSO's openness is how I found myself spending Sunday afternoons on the field at the corner of 7th Street and Union Ave.

At the end of 2008, a couple friends asked if I wanted to help them start up a men's league on a fantastic new field a few minute's walk from MacArthur Park. I had been playing pick-up in the neighborhood, and had also played in a 6 aside league. There are not many full size fields in that area, but there is a lot of game.

The neighborhood is one of the densest in the city; it is also one of the most policed - this aspect of the Ramparts district figures often in this blog as the fútbol scene here has given me some of my happiest experiences in Los Angeles, as well as direct contact with the dramatic inequity of the city's distribution of its resources.

2010 street protest following LAPD shooting of Manuel Jamines. He was killed a block from our field.

AYSO has a relatively new program designed to create play for the adults in its community. Our idea was to use that platform to give guys aging out of the youth leagues in the neighborhood a place to play 11 on 11, on this extraordinary (turf) field at Leichty Middle School.

Many (if not most) of the best fields in Los Angeles are owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District. There is no accessible, transparent system at LAUSD administering use of its fields by the city's diverse communities.

The field at this particular location was built via a partnership between LAUSD and AYSO. In the words of a 2007 memo regarding construction projects in the school district:

A joint use partnership...established the first AYSO program in the Pico-Union community. As part of their contribution, AYSO agreed to offer youth soccer programming to the students of John H. Leichty MS and the surrounding feeder schools for five years. LAUSD matched AYSO’s programmatic contribution with funding to install artificial turf on the school’s main field to facilitate year-round community programming. (See this 2007 memo from LAUSD on new construction.)

If I understand the nature of this agreement correctly (and I may not), AYSO did not contribute money to the construction of the field (it is not a rich organization), but instead promised volunteers. LAUSD built the field; AYSO members administer the field and run leagues when it is not being used by the school itself. As the above statement indicates, this resulted in the first AYSO program in that part of Los Angeles.

In learning about this usage agreement, I began to have my first questions.

The above language from the LAUSD sidesteps the following: There are leagues in that neighborhood, and they have been there for years. Thousands of people play in those leagues. Many are low-cost (if not free), some work with the LA 84 foundation (funded by the last Olympics to actually bring money into a host city), and some work through community centers and with local businesses. Some work entirely outside of grant structures; many have relationships with larger and national youth soccer organizations (like Cal South or the California Youth Soccer Association).

This is a big part of LA life - in this neighborhood, which is something like 85% Latino, fútbol is woven tightly into the fabric of its social life. It's not a forth sport here, it's not an underground scene or a subculture. It's the dominant and most visible sports scene and a defining part of the neighborhood's character.

Many of the neighborhood's leagues are, like AYSO, volunteer operations - one such league offers a women's division that fields more teams (at the youth and adult level) than does the Los Angeles Municipal Soccer League. These are "Latin" or "independent" leagues - the two terms are used almost interchangeably in California to describe the loose, disconnected network of leagues across the region where Spanish is the lengua franca, and the majority of players and spectators come from the city's immigrant communities. The soccer scene in this location is strong enough that El Salvador is sending its association's scouts there on June 2, 3 and 6th for a series of open try-outs for the women's U17, U19 and U23 squads.

Having played in a league affiliated with a community center in the same neighborhood (which also offered tutoring, arts classes and academic counseling), I was surprised to see LAUSD hand administration of the field to an organization that had little to no existing relationship to the location. Why would the LAUSD do this?

On the surface, this agreement seems to serve AYSO more than the neighborhood. Their interests are not necessarily opposed, of course. But the five-year usage agreement prevents existing leagues in the neighborhood from using one of the best fields in the city. Those leagues do play on other fields - but those fields are smaller, and at least one organizer can't get enough field time to offer its program's women 90 minute games. In order to meet demand, their matches are compressed to 60 minutes. This problem has only grown more complex, as the city strikes more and more such deals with AYSO. So, at the very least, when it comes to field access, the interests of AYSO are opposed to those of the existing non-profit leagues in the neighborhood. [Youth soccer organizations in LA's under-served communities include HOLA; Anahuak; Y.E.S.S. (Youth Empowerment through Sports and Scholastics); Compton United Soccer Club.]

AYSO provides a great point of entry into the game, and kids in that neighborhood need support. So do adults. (See this LA Times profile of the neighborhood's socioeconomic profile.) But, again, there are existing local collectives with much more articulated relationships to the community - why not work with them?

The "independent" leagues are mostly Spanish-speaking (bear in mind the vast majority of kids are fully bilingual); AYSO is not - it is not totally white, but it is a lot whiter and more middle-class than are the leagues which were already there. The median household income for residents in Pico Union is just over $26,000.  The median household income for my neighborhood is just over $54,000 - about average for the city. My neighborhood has no single ethnic majority, but the largest group is Latino, at nearly 42%. AYSO has a stronger presence in Los Angeles in neighborhoods like mine, if not neighborhoods that are even better off.  But they are working hard to change that - with programs like that in Pico Union, and in Watts (South Central is also home to some amazing leagues and talented youth players).

If you have the energy and drive, you can do a lot through AYSO. Although the AYSO adult program was not imagined as a host for the kind competitive play we wanted to promote, there was nothing in the institution's structure that said it couldn't be used for this purpose. And so we decided to try and get something going at this location. I couldn't shake the feeling that this was a colonial project, that my whiteness & class privilege were facilitating my access, but I also wanted access to this field.

A day in the brief life of the Union Football League

The field at 7th and Union is dreamy. The school offers benches and tables off the field where players often gathered for their pre-game meeting. Bathrooms, floodlights, covered parking - the facilities are perfect for a recreational league. That stretch of 7th Street is lined with 'Mom and Pop' stores - a panaderia, a café, a gym, a Pentecostal church, and Nikys Sports - an excellent soccer shop which fielded the strongest team in our first season. 

It's nice to play right in the heart of things. In the evenings, music radiates out of the church. Pedestrians stop to watch matches from the sidewalk and often fetch wayward balls. People bring their families to games. Street vendors sell tacos, make passes with ice cream. Kids are everywhere. A fairly typical LA fútbol scene.

Union Football League played its first matches in February 2009 . We were immediately beset with problems. Some normal, as far as soccer goes, others less so.

Next in Soccer in the City of Angels: "You Don't Belong Here."

The Hangover: Soccer in the City of Angels, an Introduction

On Saturday, we indulge in the pleasures of the beautiful game. On Sunday, we wake up with a global headache.

A collective romance with fair play grounds the entertainment value of sporting events. We love the idea of a level playing field, stories in which the best competitor wins, or in which the well-played match is its own reward. We love our team even when they don't bring home a trophy. But, oh, when they do! Messi is a gift from the heavens. His team is a family. Més que un club. Ferguson says "No one has given United a hiding like Barcelona did." Guardiola declares "This is the way we want to play." The world wraps itself in a cozy blanket, the story of the perfect game.

But even casual participation in sports forces a break with this illusion - racism, sexism and homophobia; economic manipulation of a team's "brand" and "value" at the expense of the team and its fans; the hyper-leveraging of club assets; doping, mismanagement, cronyism and bribery. What name is now on Barcelona's shirt?

What sport is "clean," really? Being a sports fan is a lesson in bi-polarity. Manic highs, paranoid frenzy, and then you throw out your television and hide from the game ruining your life.

Over the next couple weeks, I'll publish a series of articles describing my involvement with a local league here in Los Angeles. These articles are inspired by FIFA's shocking (and yet not surprising) decision to proceed with its election of a single candidate whom everyone knows is a corrupt, sexist and homophobic bastard. (At the moment, he is accused of condoning heavy bribery in the bidding process for future World Cups.) At today's press conference FIFA's Secretary General and Official Cynic (Jerome Valcke) said that this decision was made in the interest of the organization's stability. Of course it is.

We are all wondering how long this can go on - how long the international stewardship of the game will rest in the hands of liars and thieves.

FIFA's corruption unfolds alongside complaint and ethics charges. Our collective relationship to it looks a lot like what Slavoj Žižek calls "interpassivity," in which "we are active all the time in order to make sure nothing will happen, that nothing will really change." ("A Plea for Aggressive Passivity") We tweet, update our statuses, we sign petitions and complain - but we turn on the TV, we buy our tickets, we go to sports bars and cheer.

How long can FIFA sell itself to the world using a language of social good, of unity and community? When will the world wake up to the fact that it's been playing a shell game? Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the shell game is what we want, after all.

As we ask for the king's head on a stick, we must also look closer to home and consider the game we say want, versus the game we actually play - the game we buy into, and sell out. That's the charge I've issued to myself....

Next: Usage Agreement

The Depression of a Super Falcons Fan

Cary Leibowitz, Misery Pennants (1989)

By the end of the summer, I was in a dark place in relation to the men's game: unable to care about who wins what international tournament or league's season, because who cares what a bunch of spoiled brats do in the service of hyper-leveraged clubs that look more and more like individuated versions of the real estate bubble. You know what I did after the World Cup? I gave away my television.

I thought following the women's game would reconnect me with the pleasures of fandom, but I am afraid it's having the opposite effect. At the moment I am demoralized by the media's apathy regarding the fact that the Nigerian national team coach conducted an anti-lesbian purge. (She gave a talk about this at a Nigerian conference on women's football, this was reported in Nigerian media, but has yet to raise interest from the football community at large.)

FIFA recently featured the team on the front page for its website for the 2011 Women's World Cup. In that article the coach made statements regarding the "fitness" of notable players absent from her squad. Who can believe such statements? Isn't it wrong for FIFA to feature that kind of discourse from someone who has so obviously discriminated against her athletes? What does "fitness" mean in that context? This kind of "press" is not just irresponsible, it actually collaborates with the original discrimination. (Latest from Nigera: The team just failed to qualify for the All-Africa tournament. This does not bode well for the summer.)

Why isn't overt discrimination news when it's practiced in the women's game? Why aren't we talking about the impact of homophobia on the women's game? Perhaps because it would require sports media to confront its own homophobia.

Anti-homophobia activists in football seem primarily concerned with the men's game. One could argue, however, that homophobia has a much more global impact on the women's game. I mean "global" here in every sense - internationally, and holistically - from the lowest levels of the game to its highest, as the media and FIFA maintain a scrupulously polite silence about the fact that some of the most gifted athletes in the game identify as lesbian - some have girlfriends, some resist gender normativity in body and attitude (muscled, boyish, mannish, aggro, full of bravado), and these women have huge impacts on fans through what they achieve and represent.

For every story we encounter about a female athlete's marriage, or a baby born within a straight couple, there are more stories regarding momentous events in the lives of gay players that are not represented, because the mainstream media considers such stories unrepresentable. This is old news in women's sports - fans are fluent in reading the silence, the biographical editing which mediates their relationships to the players they cheer from the stands. NEVER seen a reference to a player's life beyond, say, her experiences playing as a kid with the boys? Well...  A gay man in the sports world lives with a powerful, awful pressure demanding that he stay in the closet. A lesbian can live freely and relatively openly and we can trust the media do the closeting for her, on "our" behalf.

This leaves the marketing of women's soccer in the US particularly ineffective - claustrophobic and "old" or childish (and so "old" in its conceptualization of the consumer's relationship to childhood). It has yet to rise about the closeted mentality of another age. I just don't get it.

My mood is perhaps lifted by recent excellent coverage of homophobia in men's sports - most recently via the coming out of Rick Welts, owner of the Phoenix Suns. This is such a good story, a real chance to educate people.

The sexism of the world of sports is related to its homophobia; the feminism of women's sports spaces is related to the queerness of those space - which, given the sexism and homophopia of mainstream sports spaces, leaves little room for representing the specificity of the athletes in women's sports at all.

High time for change all around.

Cary Leibowitz,  Homo State (1989)

Brutal Attacks on Black Lesbians in South Africa Continue, Three Years After Simelane's Murder

I am re-posting a message I received this morning from the Forum for the Empowerment of Women in Johannesburg. Noxolo Nogwaza was raped and murdered this week, three years after the outcry over Eudy Simelane's murder should have brought these assaults to an end. Every few weeks, it seems, another woman is killed: Nokuthula Radebe, just 20 years old, was killed a month ago.

Ekurhuleni Pride Organizing Committee (EPOC) and the Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL) call on all supporters for equality and dignity for all, to join us in specific actions calling for justice for slain lesbian, Noxolo Nogwaza and all the other LGBT people who have lost their dignity and lives on the basis of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity in South Africa.

Background

The body of Noxolo Nogwaza, a 24 year old lesbian, was found lying in an alley in Kwa-Thema at about 9am on Sunday, April 24 2011. Noxolo’s head was completely deformed, her eyes out of the sockets, her brain spilt, teeth scattered all around and face crashed beyond recognition. Police and other witnesses at the crime scene say that an empty beer bottle and used condoms were pushed up her genitals. Parts of her body had been stabbed with glass. A large pavement brick that is believed to have been used to crash her head was found by her side.

Noxolo was raped and murdered in a similar manner as that in which another member of EPOC was murdered, 3 years ago today. Eudy Simelane’s body was also found in an open field in Kwa-Thema. She had been raped and murdered, crimes that the perpetrators confessed to. Just last year, a gay man in the same township was attacked by eight men, who attempted to rape him. Luckily, he escaped the “vultures”. The men, as they attempted to rape him, were heard saying, “We are determined to kill all gay people in this area and we will do it.” 

Noxolo will be laid to rest at a cemetery in Kwa-Thema on Saturday, April 30, 2011. EPOC and CAL call on all your support in this time of grief and shock. Please come and stand with us.

What can you do?

1. Come and join us as we lay Noxolo Nogwaza to rest. The funeral will take place in Kwa-Thema on Saturday, April 30, 2011. For those outside Gauteng and South Africa, you may send condolence messages that will be read out at the funeral to endhate@cal.co.za and wreaths/ flowers can be purchased online at www.netflorist.co.za for pick up on Saturday morning. Have them labeled EPOC for Noxolo and we will pick them up. For those around Gauteng, there will be a taxi to transport mourners to and from Constitutional Hill in Braamfotein and at the Baragwanath Taxi Rank, Soweto. Please be at your station by 7:30am on Saturday. Also confirm your attendance with Surprise@cal.org.za / 0733711556. The address of the home where the funeral will be held is 19206 JAQISA Str, Ext 6 in Kwa-Thema (behind BP Garage, Duduza Rank).

2. Call, fax or email Tsakane Police Station and demand for a speedy and thorough investigation into the rape and murder of Noxolo Nogwaza. The reference number of the case is 635/04/2011.
Tel: +27 11 363 5347/8/9
Fax: +27 11 363 3454
Email: Tsakane-saps@saps.org.za

3. Call, fax and/or email the South African Government and demand that they openly speak out and take action against the increasing violence towards LGBT people in South Africa. The contacts of the officials to contact are below;
His Excellency Jacob Zuma
President of the Republic of South Africa
Tel: +27 12 300 5200
Fax: +27 12 323 8246
Email: delsey@po.gov.za
His Excellency Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe
Deputy President of the Republic of South Africa
Tel: +27 12 300 0501/+27 21 464 2128
Fax: +27 12 323 3114
Email: malebo@po.gov.za
Mr. Jeffrey Thamsanqa Radebe
Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development
Tel: +27 12 357 8212/8217
Fax: +27 12 315 1749
Email: minprivatesec@justice.gov.za
Mr. Nathi Mthethwa
Minister of Police
Tel: +27 12 393 2810/2811
Fax: +27 12 939 2812
Gen. Bheki Cele
National Commissioner of Police
Tel: +27 12 393 2874
Fax: +27 12 393 1530
Email: mbathan@saps.gov.za

4. Hold demonstrations at South African Embassies in your countries demanding that they speak out against the increasing violence against LGBT people in South Africa. There will be national demonstrations held in South Africa before and on the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), come May 17, 2011 and we encourage that you hold a demonstration at the embassy around the same period.
For more information please contact:
1. Ntsupe
Chairperson, EPOC
Tel: +27 732 263 287
Email: ntsupe@mighty.co.za
---------------------------------------------------

2. Bontle
PRO, EPOC
Tel: +27 732 270 026
Email: bontle.khalo@yahoo.com
---------------------------------------------------

3. Victor Mukasa
Project Coordinator, Human Rights Defenders project
Coalition of African Lesbians (CAL)
Tel: +27 784 363 635
Email: victor@cal.org.za

US Soccer Fans: Actually, You Are Quite Divisible

As the fanfare surrounding the launch of a new uniform for the US Men's National Team died down, Nike quietly released the new uniform for the US Women's National Team - Is this the outfit the women will wear to Germany as they fight for the 2011 World Cup championship?

A USWNT shirt can always be distinguished from the USMNT shirt by the two stars that the women's shirt prominently displays over the USSF badge - one star for each World Cup trophy they've won (1991, 1999). That difference is not enough for Nike and the USSF. They want you to know, for sure, that this is a not a man's shirt. So the FIFA #1 ranked women's team will go to the Germany in a nurse's uniform.

This is quite simply the ugliest women's football jersey I have ever seen. It's central problem is the line someone has drawn down middle of the shirt - a purely decorous gesture meant to create the impression that the USSF would like its women to play in an open necked blouse. 

The uniform is an expression an ongoing effort to divorce the "branding" of the men's team from the legacy of the USWNT circa 1999 (when they last won the World Cup). In doing so, they create a host of problems for those of us who are USWNT and USMNT fans.

For example, women fans are supposed to buy separate shirts to show support for the men's team and for the women's team. Fine - I like those two stars, and I also support the men's team with or without those stars. But men who support both? Unless they want to look like a female jock dressed like a nurse, and they happen to also be small enough to fit in the limited sizes on offer, guys who support the USWNT won't have an option. Which is just as well - because Nike doesn't deserve money from us, for this and a thousand other reasons.

Very few countries offer totally different "looks" for the national uniforms for their men and their women's teams. Part of this is because very few care enough about their women's teams to even consider this. But perhaps it is also because women playing for Brazil (for example) represent that country's futebol tradition, and their style is as much a testament to the legacy of players like Pele, Garrincha, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho as it is to their triumph over the sexism of the country's futebol structures. It's a reminder that one ought not divide the women from the men, as if they play different sports - as if they don't admire and inspire each other on and off the pitch.

Germany and Adidas have gone down the same road as the USSF and Nike, and launched a new "look" for the Frauen:

Germany Men's Team, Away

Germany Women's Team, Away

I can't see why one would want to back away from the bad-ass look of the men's away kit, except in order to "feminize" the women's shirt. As is the case for fans of the USWNT, there is no man's option for fans of the Frauen - as a guy, you either wear that black shirt (for the men), or you wear a shirt cut for a slightly curvy woman. I should say, a lot of women fans don't particularly like these feminized designs: there is something fundamentally irritating about them.

It is one thing to build a shirt to be more comfortable for a woman (women fans who want such shirts can buy them to show their support for men's teams). It is quite another to design a shirt whose primary design function seems to be not the declaration "We are our country's national team," but the anxious apology "We are not the men's team." There is no real purpose to the difference in look other than the re-enforcement of gender division - as if the difference between three and two stars (Germany) and zero and two (the US) were not enough. And this all has really crappy implications regarding male fans of national women's teams, who are completely ignored as active participants in the women's game - the implication is that being a fan of the women's game is basically a form of cross-dressing. Which, in a way (the way of gender and sports politics), I guess it is.

But at least Germany's kit still looks like a football jersey. This is not something I can say about the USWNT uniform.

Maybe we can recover our relationship to that look by imagining it as "heads up" to the competition: By the time the USWNT get through with them, they'll be calling for an ambulance. Not quite the spirit I associate with the squad - Abby Wambach, perhaps, excepted.

One Nation, Indivisible?: Rebranding American History (#redallover)

The United States Soccer Federation has revealed a new uniform and a new motto to go with it: "Indivisible." The single world slogan is the product of a "crowd sourcing" campaign, in which fans were encouraged to submit their ideas to team-sponsor Nike. Dubbed "Red All Over," the project created a lot of buzz and raised a big question: Why would the USSF want to replace the old motto, "Don't Tread on Me"? 

Grant Wahl suggested (via Twitter) that the Red All Over re-branding was provoked by The Tea Party's appropriation of the colonial image of a coiled rattlesnake and "Don't Tread on Me" as its official emblem. (He also explained that "Yes we can" - another popular suggestion - is similarly partisan.) I can imagine a number of factors prompted this campaign, but this suggestion stands to reason and Wahl is as good authority on this matter as any.

Perhaps I just want to believe that the USSF is purposefully taking a step to disassociate itself with what the Tea Party represents.

The need to refuse any identification with the increasingly fascistic character of the anti-immigrant far right is particularly important for US soccer fans, given the political and social diversity of its community of players and fans. The sport has long been identified as an immigrant sport (which masks the very high profile of immigrant families in other sports, like baseball), it is played and watched by women (and this is a distinctive aspect of soccer culture in the US), and it is the one major sport in the US that is not isolationist - our participation in football culture expresses a desire for a relationship with the rest of the world, and we enter into that playing field not as a powerhouse, but as a respected, and hard-working side. (This is slightly different for the women, but more and more, the women's team is one good team among other good teams - a fact that fans celebrate.)

Before looking more closely at what that word "Indivisible" represents, let's consider the emblem the USSF has put to bed. As most readers well know, that emblem has a long and rich history - which is exactly why the Tea Party is drawn to it.
 
There are two separate aspects to the core image for this emblem - the image of the rattlesnake, and the motto. The conjunction of the two in a flag dates to 1775: the "Gadsden Flag" was flown on the flagship for the newly formed "Continental Navy" and found on revolutionary Marine corp drums - this image in fact still functions as an emblem for the U.S. Marine Corp.

Gadsden Flag, as we know it today.

Rattlesnakes appear all over colonial culture: on coins, flags, and in writing about American identity. They are paired with different slogans: In an 1751 political cartoon authored by Benjamin Franklin, "Join, or Die" captioned the image of a snake cut into pieces - a reference to the need for the colonies to band together in opposition to colonial power. In other images (e.g. the flag for the Culpeper Minutemen) the snake is coupled with the stark declaration: "Liberty or Death."

Benjamin Franklin's 1751 political cartoo

The venomous rattler is native to the Americas: this is the primary reason they emerge as a symbol of opposition and independence. Benjamin Franklin helped its career along with an essay, "The Rattlesnake as a Symbol of America" (1775). His observations in that essay help explain why it is still a compelling symbol for certain kinds of political formations - but they also suggest that its appropriateness as a symbol for the US soccer team is perhaps mixed, at best. In his view, it is an elegantly defensive reptile: "ever vigilant," "she never begins an attack," he observed, "nor, once engaged, ever surrenders." The snake, as he characterizes her, is wholly defensive - the rattles are there to warn "stay away," what poisons others is necessary to her survival. This makes a lot of sense as a military emblem (even if it conflicts with the US's post WWII "preemptive strike" ethos). The image is both nativist (in the right wing-sense) and isolationist.

In 1751, however, he used the same snake in an entirely different kind of polemic. Responding the practice of shipping felons to the New England colonies, Franklin suggested sending rattlesnakes across the Atlantic as a fair exchange: "this exporting of felons to the colonies, may be considered as a trade, as well as in the light of a favor. Now all commerce implies returns: justice requires them: there can be no trade without them. And rattle-snakes seem the most suitable returns for the human serpents sent us by out mother country." He goes on to say that England gets the better half of the trade, for at least the snake gives a warning before it strikes. Here the rattlesnake does not represent the colonists - it represents in fact a toxic element that endangers colonial health. Unfortunately, today we see Franklin's polemic cited by anti-immigrant groups - who are always on the hunt for bits of American history which they might re-purpose in order to legitimize reactionary politics.

Complicating this story is another national emblem involving a snake:

Mexico's coat of arms has its own complicated history - it is an appropriation of an image embodying the founding myth of Tenochtitlan - Mexico City. The cactus represents the island on which the city was built, and the eagle stands for the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. Within that tradition, the snake signals Coatlicue - who is something like "mother earth." From what I can tell (and I am far from an expert on Mesoamerican icons), the image of the snake being devoured is a colonial hybrid - a transposition of Judeo-Christian mythology onto a Tenochtitlan origin story. This may be why the Mexican football federation emblem does not feature said snake. El Tri may want to recuperate the hybrid image, however, as a nod to its border rivalry. Or not.

In any case, the rattlesnake is not much of a team player, it has a shady history, and it appears on the Mexico's flag, caught in Huitzilopochtli's beak. Not a place the USSF wants to be, really. But I digress: By losing the snake, the USSF is disassociating itself from Tea Party politics, and in choosing this word "Indivisible," it is also trying to disentangle itself from the generally hateful nature of nationalist rhetoric.

"Indivisible" is not an uncomplicated choice, however. The word is a clear reference to the pledge of allegiance - written in the 1890s by Francis Bellamy, a Socialist minister. (Yes, you read that right.) The original pledge went roughly like this:

"I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

It was first read to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage, and it was written - of course - in a wave of nationalist panic, formed in reaction to immigration patterns and the changing demographics of the U.S. That pledge was used in schools until the 1920s, when it was revised slightly to read:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all." 

The phrase "one nation under God" was inserted in 1954. Incredibly, given the name for Nike's campaign (Red All Over), this was during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, and was done as a way to distinguish the U.S. from "godless communists." 

Adding to yet another layer of complexity and ambivalence to this story: the word "indivisible" is a clear reference to the Civil War: It is an assertion of the triumph of "union" over secession - but, as is the way of such things, in asserting the indivisibility of the nation, the pledge of allegiance raises the specter of disunion as a latent possibility.

Which brings us back around to the current state of affairs. The assertion of "Indivisible" as the national team's motto could not be more apt, for, in signaling the team's unity as its strength, the USSF is doing so precisely in reaction against the culture of hate and fear propagated by the far right, in a campaign provoked by that movement's theft of the team's motto.

"Indivisible" is quite literally the least divisive (or do I mean divisible?) of the proposed slogans entertained seriously by Nike and the US Soccer Federation. That said, no slogan or motto for a national team will ever banish the sinister shadow of nationalism's enterprise.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (1989-90)

FALW Women's World Ranking

FIFA's latest ranking of women's national teams has just been released. As I can't figure out how the hell FIFA ranks the US Women's National Team #1 and places Nigeria below, say, Scotland, I figured I should post my own purely intuitive ranking.

My top 15:

     1           Germany

     2           Canada

     3           Brazil

     4           USA

     5           Nigeria

     6           Japan

     7           South Korea

     8           England

     9           Sweden

     10         Mexico

     11         Australia

     12         France

     13         Colombia

     14         Norway

     15        North Korea

Mind you, this is pure polemics. But I do actually think Canada looks stronger than the US. Mexico surely looks stronger than Iceland. To my fellow bloggers: I await your rankings - they will surely be more informative than the crap statistics that FIFA puts out.

In the Game: Documentary on impact of Title IX needs our support!

I'm really excited by In the Game. This film by the producers of Hoop Dreams looks the realities of the highest levels of professional women's sports and the daily grind of girls fighting for access to training and facilities at especially urban high schools.  From a leader in the WNBA, "Our biggest challenge is media coverage." Good segment at about 9 minutes in this clip on unbelievably sexist attitudes which define sports media. But this story is centered not on that shitty fact, but on the people who play, coach and manage women's sports. Watch this!

Ball & Chain: Notes on Anne Hathaway, James Franco & the Oscars

This has nothing to do with soccer. I wrote this rant last weekend and posted on my facebook page.  Some readers asked that I post it here. I'll be back to soccer stories as soon as I put the manuscript I'm finishing in the mail!

Anne Hathaway's performance as an Oscars co-host was heroic. When one focuses on her performance, the whole ceremony takes on a surreal aspect. Take the ULTRA real dynamic of soporific Franco and hysterical Hathaway: This was a rather extraordinary performance of a high-energy female/femme dragging the sad-dog-weight of her man behind her. It is the flipside of sexist narratives about the “ball-and-chain” in which women hold men back, rather than prop them up (as is, well, more usually the case).

My favorite study on sexism and the academy: according to an analysis of gender and faculty promotion at the University of California, the people most likely to advance are men with wives. Then men without wives, then women without husbands, then women with husbands. I could not see from this study if they accounted for same sex couples, or the ways in which being gay/lesbian might impede one’s progress in such a hetero-dynamic system. In any case, I think we can all agree that, according to such studies, one is “better off” having and not being the wife.

Anne Hathaway showed us how true this is - the mere presence of that man standing next to her impedes our ability to value her work. And it was pretty clear to me, at least, that her performance itself was commenting on this.

On Her Own

For example: In a deeply ironic moment she took the stage in a tux to sing “On My Own.” The song choice, she explained, was a reference to her all-too brief appearance on stage with Hugh Jackman in another Oscar ceremony – she had been plucked from the audience to sing a duet, in which they adopted the identities of Frost and Nixon. There was a hell of a queer subtext to that performance, given the take on Jackman and his having just belted out some fabulous gay-positive, out-loud-and-proud lyrics about Milk. Hathaway said she’d hoped the actor would perform with her this year, but he’d bailed at the last minute. She might well have been talking about Franco: Franco's non-performance was by this point in the broadcast clear to everyone in the audience.

Franco gave us plenty of warnings, including his recent discussion of "bad acting" and performance - a line of thought/fascination I pursued in my work own on Andy Warhol, esp in the introduction to Pop Out (co-authored with José Muñoz and Jonathan Flatley). As we worked on that project we talked explicitly about Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix et al in relation to the performances in Warhol's films.

Eventually, I felt that in my own work I could not talk about the performances of Joe Dallesandro etc without acknowledging the hyper-active energy that is produced by the women around those underperforming men. At times last night I felt like I was watching "Bike Boy" - in one infamous scene Warhol instructed Joe Spencer (Bike Boy) to ignore Ingrid Superstar, she tries for a minute to get his attention and then just fills the rest of the time with nearly diassociated babble while he stares off into space and strokes his manly arms every now and again. It took me a while to understand that the film is not about Bike Boy at all, but about the gay men and women around Bike Boy. Bike Boy is a void. Reeves and Phoenix in their own way played with that dynamic in their films - and in a queer setting one can. But in the straight-jacketed public sphere, it just reads as so much more heterosexuality. As women basically doing all the work, and getting none of the recognition.

Which brings me back to Hathaway. Taking the stage as if one's been left at the altar is an old gag: The performer sets herself up as abandoned, standing before her audience if she’d been left there alone and unloved. She proceeds to seduce an entire theater. This kind of performance toggles back and forth between “nobody loves me” and “love me or else." The genre has been remastered by diverse figures - Judy Garland and daughter Liza, but also Sandra Bernhard (e.g. “Without You I’m Nothing”). That dynamic shapes some of the most compelling queer performance, in which the artist emerges as both intensely vulnerable and invincible. (eg Franko B's "I Miss You!" or just about everything from Dynasty Handbag.)

THIS, I think, is why when Franco walked out in drag, it seemed like such a failure: not just because he was styled in a jokey sort of drag more apropos of a Judd Apatow movie than a drag club, but because "showy" Hathaway was always already working drag territory.

It would have been amazing if they’d found a way to give Franco the same kind of elegance that Hathaway has in a lady-tux – but that would have perhaps been too risky for the Oscars, as it’d have required making him look both gay and hot. Given who we are talking about here, that should have been easy. Instead, he looked like the next chapter of Hollywood's drag devolution (Jack Lemmon to Robin Williams to James Franco, each one being a worse version of his drag-as-gag predecessor). A more visionary look would surely have brought Franco's appearance in drag closer to Kalup Linzy's zone, and it might have allowed us to see Franco's look in relation to Hathaway's. For Linzy’s "bad drag" looks nothing like what Franco did last night. Linzy's version of drag is queer assemblage of signs. He doesn’t look any more “natural” or “realistic” in drag than did Franco – but he inhabits drag, fully, in a dialogue that makes sex and gender and race come alive, and feel both real and unsettled. That is no easy thing to do. And it is way more than a matter of his outfit.

The fact of the matter is that in last night’s performance the person on stage closest to Kalup Linzy’s universe was Anne Hathaway – producing a theatrical, desperate and frankly scary version of feminine performance, not just alone, but in compensation for someone else's failure - as if, if she worked hard enough, nobody would feel Franco's absence. As if, if she worked hard enough, it would feel like her presence mattered. As if, to matter, her performance must anchor his.

She was not being the person who could care less, but the person who cares too much. The less Franco put out, the more she had to make up for it. The worse his performance became, the more it obliterated hers. Because when we wake up in the morning, who is the press talking about? Not the show's "wife", but the show's drag - the sad-dog manchild bringing everybody down. Fine, that's what the media does.

The whole point of performance studies for me is not that it enables actors to expand their practice into the artworld. Although that’s an interesting effect, actors never needed the discipline of performance studies to do that (a few names at random: Andy Kauffman, Sandra Bernhard, Ann Magnuson). Performance studies, however, does give us a few tools for considering the political dimensions of moments like these, and resisting mass media's flow.

Female actors with comic sensibilities and wit are particularly hard for Hollywood to accommodate these days. Things on this point have not gotten better but worse. At least we have Tina Fey, and why isn't she hosting or better, writing - the show?

Hathaway’s performances (as, for example, The Brown Duck) were eye-opening. They gestured to a Hollywood legacy otherwise completely ignored by last night’s nostalgic gestures to its own past. Comic geniuses like Lucile Ball and Carol Burnett never hosted the Oscars alone (Ball never hosted at all). Many women have taken the stage as hosts, but nearly all were required to share it.*

Few have been allowed to be on her own. Perhaps in singing that song, Hathaway was trying to tell us something.

There are plenty of goofy, smart, chatty showboats out there in ballgowns. Not only does Anne Hathaway not need a straight man to make her audience laugh, that straight man is the very thing that’s holding her back.

*Note: For the record, many women have worked as co-hosts: Thelma Ritter in 1954; Claudette Colbert in 1955; Celeste Holme in 1957; Helen Hayesin 1972; Carol Burnett in 1973; Diana Ross in 1973; Shirley MacLain in 1974; Goldie Hawn in 1975; Ellen Burstyn and Jane Fonda in 1976; Lina Minelli in 1982; Jane Fonda in 1985; Goldie Hawn in 1986. (Thanks Wikipedia.) To date, Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopie Goldberg are the only women to have hosted alone, in the show's entire history. Goldberg hosted the show a rather miraculous four times.