Sports code identification
5.2. Narrative analysis findings
5.2.4. Racialisation in the school-based peer culture
the 'flash' of new cars and clothes as the signifiers of accepted masculinity among most Indian young men, as indicated in the closing words of the interview.
Aaron ... If you 'in' with the new trends the new fashions (.) you masculine think that's the whole masculinity in the new generation and that's what they see as important (.) that's my final thought on the matter (.) Visible consumption was positioned as a signifier of'having' a masculinity that was decided on the basis of peer-group affirmation.
themes converged on defended positions (or 'distances') in relation to perceived hierarchies of exclusion and inclusion. This perception was signified by a pronominal 'they' and the 'they're out of it' trope. This may have established a defensive boundary between the extradiegetic speaking position and the marginalised 'skaters'. Reinforced by his own 'invisible position', it may have been an unconscious tactic to defend against his own exclusion in the peer group. This narrative was extracted from a composite conversation in the focus group, and the peer context was an important background for it.
From a second speaking position, Jason maintained a grammatical and narrative distance from the 'sporty jocks' by locating this group in a fixed position, circled by the 'minions' and distanced from the peripheral and more mobile peer group configurations. Jason's observing position at this point appeared to be an undefined 'in-betweeness', neither part of the 'accepted' hierarchy or its peripheral alternative, the distant soccer players. Jason described with ironic ambiguity, the rugby playing 'jocks' as the 'hard okes', yet seemed not conscious that despite his sarcasm, the qualifier 'really' left unchallenged the core assumption that acceptability resides in being 'hard' in some way.
A pivot in Jason's narrative was the shift to intradiegesis in line 11, introduced by the trope 'everyone'. Here, the shift was from the confident though undefined 'everyone else' to a defensive individual T position. Thereafter, the 'break time soccer league' entered as a contender to the simple sport-related hierarchy that Jason had presented. The existence of another valid set of racial 'others' neither complicit nor marginalised, but rather 'subversive', was signified by the repeated pronominal 'they'. Whereas the 'sporty jocks' were located in the 'here', this other group was positioned 'there', in the peripheral environs of the school. Not without a sense of irony, the heterodiegetic re-positioning allowed Jason to be caught within opposing aspects of his imaginary social environment, there, he had to find a tactic to resolve these complexities. Unconsciously egocentric, and perhaps developmentally appropriately so, Jason took for granted that his perspective was the invisible normative, on the basis that the boy from the soccer players that he failed to recognise was not part of his assumed normative social environment.
Jason's racialisation of the break time soccer league was contradictory, being first associated with the Indian boys and then broadened and possibly displaced onto the 'black guys'. Here, distance was defended, and Jason settled for a position of apparent disinterest and doubt ('they might' to smooth over the contradictions. Distance was also defended by the analeptic presentation of these tensions, particularly as a speaking position as a 'doubting but duped innocent'. This suggested a sense of'pastness' that may have set a distance between the contradictions of a 'there-and-then' and the
conversational 'here-and-now'. Jason's conspicuous lack of intradiegetic positionality, somewhere in the 'in-betweeness', suggested ambivalent feelings towards the accepted hierarchy or its transracial alternative.
Sibusiso from School A was a very keen basketballer, and produced a set of narratives arranged around an opposition between the 'compulsory exclusivity' which he perceived in the rugby-orientated 'white' sports culture of the school and the 'voluntary
exclusiveness' that defined the 'black minority' basketball players and spectators (N15).
Sibusiso's collective intradiegetic speaking position as 'we', the basketball team, suggested a shared history, depicting peer 'bonding' around the notion of the 'team sport'. This was signified by the trope 'we know each other'. A change occurs in line 09 where the 'togetherness' assumed a racial meaning as the unity of the 'team sport' was re-inscribed upon the identity as a 'black player'. Further on, Sibusiso spoke from the position of the basketball spectators, contrasting an atmosphere of togetherness around an inclusive blackness with the compulsoriness of'white' sport.
Nkosinathi's narrative (N16) was a forthright response to a question on the changes he would like to see taking place in the school. Nkosinathi wanted soccer to be elevated and included in the 'official' sporting culture of the school, thus offering an alternative to Sibusiso's upbeat view that 'black minority' sports offered an alternative of tolerance and diversity. Nkosinathi amplified the core theme that soccer deserved an equal and valid place in the school culture by moving quickly from an intradiegetic biographical T to a collective speaking position that was ambiguously either racialised or identified with soccer players. The core theme of sporting polarisation was also amplified by the
addition of further markers of difference, the categories 'day boy' and 'boarder' added to 'black soccer player' and 'white rugby player'. As with Sibusiso's narrative, a core theme of voluntariness and tolerance emerged, signified by the trope 'everyone wanting to be there'. This was set against the word 'forced', a trope for the 'white' sporting culture that included 'compulsory' spectatorship of rugby games.
On the other side, Kevin and Warren, both white rugby-playing boarders, presented narratives (N17 and N18) that identified rugby as a defining standard of acceptable masculinity. Kevin varied between a speaking position as the intradiegetic 'we',
identified with the perspective of the 'white boarders' and an extradiegetic T spectator view. The trope 'everyone' used by both Sibusiso and here in Kevin's narrative, had a certain 'undecidability'. Used by Kevin, 'everyone' indicated the compulsory playing of rugby 'at least once' to accomplish through 'doing', a 'having' of acceptable masculinity.
In order to be deemed acceptably masculine, 'everyone' must try to play rugby, at least once. This was different from Sibusiso's 'everyone', which signified, at one level, an inclusive yet black identity. Warren's narrative drew on an opposition between 'team sport' and individual games as a means to elevate rugby without reference to racial identities. Both Warren and Sibusiso drew on a canonical narrative that situated
acceptability with team sports. For Warren, it was the secure sense of belonging offered in the team sport that made it preferable for 'people' over the threatening 'independence' of the individual player.
At a deeper level, the four narratives converged around tensions and ambivalences between isolation, exclusion and difference on one hand, and immersion, belonging and group identity on the other. Speaking 'for' the group - an intradiegetic collective speaking position - was used by all four respondents. This 'we' perspective was also juxtaposed with a threatening or threatened 'they', often ambiguously defined and
reinforced as a repeated trope.
Alongside the canonical narratives of racialised sport, however, there also emerged alternative positions in the school contexts, particularly from the participants who were
associated with the peripheral social soccer games, Thulani, Aaron, Ziyeed and Aslaam.
Thulani (N19) expressed an inclusive view on soccer and rugby as both equally
acceptable and masculine. One of Thulani's photographs was a close-up of a soccer ball in front of his suburban home in order to represent his life-long love of the game.
Thulani's route to an inclusive stance was to celebrate the difference between the sports, the skills of soccer and the physical strength of rugby. Unlike the intradiegetic 'us' versus 'them' perspective, Thulani spoke from an intradiegetic first person position, presenting a personal lived experience rather than the collective view.
Aaron's embedded narrative (N20) presented an ambiguously involved 'observer' view of peer social relations on the 'backstage' periphery. Aaron's core narrative was indicated by the tropes 'different' and 'people, both of which signified values of respect for diversity and equality of all people in a democratic South Africa. Aaron utilised a plural intradiegetic speaking position in explaining the situation of relative racial integration on the 'periphery'. The analepsis gave a sense of a shared journey in which valid transracial friendships had developed among the boys, as they themselves had been developing ('in the mud' together). At the same time, Aaron maintained a contradictory and possibly unconscious positional 'us' and 'them' throughout the narrative, which took as normative the social configuration of'us' that a somewhat deviant group of'them' had 'joined', traversing an interesting and othered 'jock stage' en route. Soccer was
introduced as the common interest that had facilitated the joining process. Perhaps this was an unconscious rationalising of the possibility that the boys may have simply enjoyed each other's company for its own sake. Aaron's use of the ungendered trope 'people' may have acted as an unconscious or dialogical distancing from the hyper- masculine racialisation narrative of the othered and invisible 'jocks'. Following this narrative, Aaron went on (N21) to describe himself as one of two 'types' of Indian in the school, the type who associated with those of other races, particularly whites and those who were more 'gangsterish' and assumed a defensive pose that maintained the boundaries of accepted racial identities.
The tactics of controlling racial boundaries through negative labelling and a reactive racialised identity pose, represented here as a 'gangster' masculinity, was also found elsewhere in the data. Aaron's qualifier 'more like me' (line 32) created a dialogical tension between the dichotomous social narrative that allowed only 'two types of Indian people in this school' and Aaron's subjective experience that he did not quite conform to either, although to a large extent he identified more with one position than with the other.
This dialogical tension was found elsewhere in the data. Nkosinathi spoke about the pressure to remain visibly identified with Zulu culture in a monoracial group through the speaking of his home language, and not wanting to appear to be violating the rules for acceptability.
Nkosinathi comes naturally (.) we speak it at home (.) it's easier (.) to put out your points in Zulu than in English (.) some words don't come out as easy (.) ja and (.) ja (.) it's mostly Zulu (.5) and because of the fact (.) because you are perhaps viewed as a coconut when you speak English in front of your black friends The data from School B shed very little light on the complexities of racialised sport.
This may have been because of the visibly monoracial context or the invisibilsation of the white farming community in the photographs, this was not clear. Jabulani's cameo narrative about watching white people playing rugby was a glimpse of an alternative narrative that matched Thulani's stance towards soccer and rugby. For Jabulani, living in a free South Africa, allowed the appealing possibility of being a black rugby player.