Identity

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I'm Laurie Taylor, and this is the Thinking Allowed podcast for BBC Radio 4. Now, as some of you may have already recognised, you're listening to A Displaced Person. Because my natural habitat, of course, is Wednesday afternoon at four o'clock. That's the time slot occupied by Thinking Aloud for the last 20 years. But here I am, courtesy of some remote but no doubt highly skilled scheduler, popping up...

on Wednesday evening. Boxing Day evening. And that's not the full extent of my displacement. Apart from being shuffled along the schedules, Thinking Aloud has also been expanded, stretched from its traditional 30 minutes to an epic 43 minutes. Back to business. Now, you'll be pleased to hear that I've finished the count.

Altogether, I sent out 140 Christmas cards and in return received 118. Now, when one takes into account people who've died but not been crossed off my address list, well, I've more or less broken even. But there has been one disturbing feature of this annual exercise in reciprocity. I cannot help but notice a shift in the motifs that adorn large numbers of my cards. You see, whereas in the past most of my cards featured illustrations of cheerful festivities, they now have a more sober agenda.

There are more wise men pursuing stars, forests of leafless trees, solitary robins on frozen fields. And I might have overlooked this austere shift if it hadn't been for the two cards that I've chosen not to feature on my mantelpiece. The one which announces, warning, if you get any older I'm going to have to pretend I don't know you, and the one showing Father Christmas cuddling a little girl with a tinsel legend.

to a wonderful grandad. Now, I can't deny the accuracy of the appellation. I do, do, do have a little grandchild, but it's not an identity that I've got any wish to assume. It reeks of dressing gowns and slippers and horlicks. But fortunately, it's an identity I can just about resist. Laurie doesn't like being called Grandad, my partner can explain. Other identities, though, are rather less malleable. One cannot readily deny being male or female or black or brown.

But, of course, in all such cases, people may dislike the characteristics which are associated with those identities. They may insist that some other identity should have priority. I'm a Catholic. I'm a vegan. I'm a revolutionary socialist. I'm a Brexiteer.

Probably no one has produced a more sophisticated analysis of the complex nature of identity in the modern world than my first guest today. He's Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, recent Wreath Lecturer, and author of The Lies That Bind, Rethinking Identity.

When I spoke to Professor Peer, I began by asking him why he started his study with the story about the ways in which taxi drivers around the world had made different assumptions about his race and nationality. I've had one seek. and one Egyptian taxi driver insists to me that I must be from their country. It's an opportunity both to talk about the fact that because of my origins...

It's sometimes quite hard for people to figure out who I am. Also, I think it's an opportunity to talk about the ways in which labels can be misleading. Appearances can be deceptive in the domain of identity. And it's a way to lead into a story about what I am, that I'm in fact half English and half Ghanaian. I mean, to an extent, the volatility, if you like, of your identities, it gives you a starting point.

entity is not a fixed quality at all. In your own case you have experience that you can be many things and are described in many ways. Yes, described in many ways and of course in many contexts so that the experience of being brown... is a very different experience in the city of Kumasi where I grew up and in the village of Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire where my grandmother lived and now in New York City. These are all places where my appearance elicits different kinds of responses.

If you are one of those rare modern people who doesn't move very much... You may not notice the ways in which the things you assume about your identity, in fact, depend upon being in a particular place. I mean, the nice, gently punning title of your book, The Lies That Bind, would you want to say then, if we are talking about...

that current conceptions of identity are deceptive. I think it's at least that we always risk misleading and that in general, when people start thinking a little bit theoretically about... race, gender, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, those kinds of things, what they are spontaneously inclined to think is not true of a significant number of people who fall under those labels.

concept of identity, the modern sense of identity, is a really new one. I mean, forming up in the 19th century, I think you suggest. Well, I think there's sort of two strands of it. The 19th century strand is the one that gives rise to this idea of authenticity. And it comes... out of romanticism, out of the idea that there's a real me. The 20th century addition to that is that the real me is defined by these social identities. The real me is a man.

an Englishman, a Catholic, or whatever, and that those are the central ones in defining who you are. If you'd asked an early 20th century English woman for her identity, I think, first of all, she'd have... been just a bit puzzled by the question, but if she'd finally gotten around to it, I don't think she would have mentioned those things. She would have mentioned other kinds of things, family maybe.

hobbies, professions. But we've sort of come into a place in the world where, for most people, they can answer a bunch of identity questions and they're convinced that those identities matter. for things that they should be doing. You know, another thing that happens in the 19th century is the rise of a new identity. It wouldn't have been called an identity, but that's the idea of a self-conscious working class.

People belonged to the lower orders in the 18th century, but you didn't say, I'm a proud member of the lower orders, that you wouldn't say that. But in the early 19th century, you get people thinking of themselves as working people, thinking that, well, I'm like all the other working people, thinking that we working people should stick together.

forming working men's associations and the beginnings of a trade union movement, which in the 20th century became enormously important. Let's just go back a little time a bit more to essentials. You want to challenge really essentialist notions of identity and you focus on...

on five categories, on creed, country, colour, class, culture. Perhaps I can ask you why you included these by also asking why you omitted gender. Well, I didn't. There isn't a chapter called Gender. But the initial theoretical chapter uses gender as an example.

to introduce some of the ideas about identity that I think I was hoping would be useful in thinking about the others. And there's a good reason for that, which is that a lot of the most interesting philosophical thinking about identity... in my lifetime, in my intellectual lifetime, has been done by feminists, theorists of gender, so that Ike was able to sort of pick up on elements from there thinking about the sex-gender question to think about race and other forms of gender.

identity. An identity which is based upon a biological and anatomical difference, but nevertheless an identity which women themselves may wish to resist. Resist and change. because the physical differences doesn't really fix the content of what it is to be a man or a woman. That's fixed by ideas about how men and women ought to be, everything from dress to patterns of...

deference and who does the cooking, who does the washing, who does the child rearing. Let's just talk briefly about some of the ways in which you undermine the essentialism of some of these categories of identity. I mean, let's first or perhaps... have a look at a look at religion i mean religious

Identity. Here I am. What's my religious identity? Oh, ex-Catholic. What about religious identity? But those people who say, this is what I am. You know, I am Muslim. I am Catholic. And how do you set about undermining those claims? Well, the first thing I think I would say about, especially about the great global categories, Catholic, Muslim, and so on,

is that whatever kind of Catholic you are, there are an awful lot of Catholics who aren't much like you. These are sort of ragbag categories. The range of ways of being a Muslim, the range of ways of being a Catholic is enormous. So there isn't really... one thing that holds together all the Catholics. And even if you might say there is, say that it's adherence to the view that the Pope in Rome is the head of the true church, that...

by itself, doesn't fix very much in your life. It doesn't do much work for you. You might think that and think that it's a sin to use contraception, and you might think that and think it's a sin to overpopulate the world. religious identity. I mean, long after I've abandoned any other claims to my identity, I might say, well, look, you know, I am a product of Western civilization. But you want to undermine that as well. Yes.

Not because I don't care about the things that are called Western civilization. Plato and Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and Shakespeare and so on are all scattered through my life and my books. But I want to undermine the thought. that those things, these high cultural, valuable, wonderful texts, are really central to the identity of any major modern...

group of people. Plato and Aristotle are central to the identities of classicists, sure. But most of us aren't classicists. And most Westerners have no idea about either Plato or Aristotle or the strikes or anybody else. Given that that's so, it's a rather strange idea that these texts are somehow hugely important to who they are. And if you want to think about what holds, as it were, the West together against Islam, which I... Frankly, I don't think anything very much does.

If you wanted to, this would be entirely the wrong place to look. And when people say, well, you're talking about ancient Western civilization, we don't mean that. We mean the modern stuff. We mean democracy, liberalism, toleration, and so on. Well, then I want to say...

Toleration doesn't seem to be a hugely important virtue in contemporary Hungary, which is part of Europe, I assume. It isn't hugely important to a large number of the followers of Mr. Trump, which is presumably somewhere in the West and so on. On the other hand, toleration is enormously important. to people in lots of other places in the world who have no particular connection with these European traditions. I also must talk about race. You have the lovely story of Anton Wilhelm Amo Affe.

But just tell me briefly why you picked that story. Just tell me the story briefly and why it's critical. A boy was picked up on the coast of West Africa in what's now Ghana and given as a gift, probably, to a German prince in the early 18th century.

The prince did an experiment. He had the boy trained with his children and he ended up getting a law degree and then a doctorate in philosophy and ending up as a professor of philosophy in Germany and then going home to retire in his mid-40s. He went back to Ghana. I think the most important thing the story shows is that...

The idea that Europeans have always thought that black people had to be intellectually inferior is just false. These godparents, these German dukes, were at the forefront of European thinking. I think it's really important...

to see that because if people say well it's inevitable that we engage in racial thinking inevitable that people will look down on other races the answer is no it isn't how do I know it isn't inevitable because it hasn't always been so but then as you point out in the book the ways in which the sort of pseudoscience, erected all sorts of essentialist claims about blacks' inferiority in a whole variety of dimensions.

Now, that has been really sort of poo-pooed and thrown out of court largely. I mean, it recurs just very occasionally, but largely thrown out. So why do you feel that the identification of someone as black...

persists and carries with it so many assumptions about that person's lifestyle, behavior, intelligence, whatever. Well, part of it is that the scientific story, while it's regularly repeated... isn't really one that has been fully absorbed I think into much of the culture but there's a second reason it's that this tendency to be essentialist this tendency to think well if there's

Two kinds of people, and we mark them out somehow. One lot have one lot of skins. Another lot have another lot of skins. They're bound to have some deep thing inside of them that explains not just the differences in their skin color, but it makes them different in all the other ways. And so you have to keep unteaching people that thought because in general, it turns out not to be true. It turns out that if you...

you take a boy from Ghana and give him the education of Immanuel Kant, you get someone who looks a bit like Immanuel Kant. It's really important to keep making this point because we fall so easily and so naturally back into...

these essentialist ideas about these categories. Black Lives Matter summons up, you know, a whole variety of black people to feel that their blackness... is what defines them. It's almost as though an attempt to lose that identification is given up. In order for a political point to be made. So I think very often identities, especially the ones that are ethnic and racial...

get their power, rise to power for the people who have them in the context of resisting oppression on the basis of that identity. Jewish identity in Europe has been profoundly shaped by anti-Semitism. And I think that a lot of the structure of black identity in the world, in the Atlantic world, is shaped by the history of racism in the Atlantic world. And so people come together in response to... on the basis of blackness, say.

And then they create solidarities, which they can then use to resist the oppression. Now, at some point, you might want to say, look, if we could get past the oppression, we might find that we could get away from these identities. course, in the midst of the struggle, the identities are so useful. If I had to take a lesson from your book, and this might sound rather a trite suggestion, but almost the lesson of your book...

He said, by all means, of course, you're going to have identities, you're going to identify yourself in a whole variety of ways, but perhaps you should wear your identities lightly and be somewhat aware of the manner in which they've been constructed and their, if you like, their malleability. their precariousness good

I'll take that. We all have many identities. And when an identity barrier is standing between you and another person, it's sometimes helpful to stand back and say, well, isn't there some identity that joins us as well? the ones that divide us. I think there is a large residue of cosmopolitan sentiment, of sentiment that says, look, yes, I'm this and you are that, but we're also all human. Or we're also all Americans and we're also all Germans.

We're all Europeans. And I think that is an enormous resource in the face of the horrors produced by the xenophobic forms of identity. I was speaking to Kwame Anthony Appio.

Now, one aspect of his discussion of identity had particular resonance for me, because in my early academic days, along with a group of other sociologists, I became particularly interested in those identities that were fashioned against the dominant culture. that celebrated different lifestyles and clothing and musical taste, that constituted not merely subcultures, acceptable differences if you like, but countercultures, ways of living that actively opposed or sought to subvert...

social norms. Such cultures could be particularly resistant to change. ... ... ... ... ... red neon socks, white shirt, narrow slim jim tie, thick crepe sole, brothel creeper shoes. Hello, Professor Taylor, he said, indicating himself with the forefinger. Signs of trouble. As I came to realise, my ageing teddy boy was referring to a short TV series I'd made about subcultures, and what he wanted to tell me was that I was dead wrong to write off teddy boys as only a passing trend.

He'd been a teddy boy for 20 years and had absolutely no intention of ever going straight. He'd never give up on the clothes or on Bill Haley or Eddie Cochran or Elvis. Well, it's one for the money, two for the show. Three to get ready now. Go, can't go, but don't you step on my blue suede shoe.

Well, I now recognise that my new friend was right to question the manner in which I'd failed to recognise the sheer persistence of such different cultural identities, the ways in which they did... in not just clothes and music but enduring philosophies of living.

Well, fortunately, I've now got a chance to get up close to another alternative culture and discuss its ramifications because I'm joined in the studio by the co-author of a new book entitled The Evolution of Goth Culture. He's Carl Spracklin, who's Professor of Sociology... of leisure and culture at Leeds Beckett University.

Carl, I was there just running through a few typical aspects of Teddy Boys in terms of their clothes, musical taste. I mean, just so that people can recognise what we're talking about, could you do the same for Goth? Goth is a form of music that emerged in the 70s, early 80s. Typically, goth bands are...

jangler guitars, drum machines. Typically, there's some lyrical themes that are around radical ideologies at first, but very quickly it becomes about darkness and alienation. Essentially, there's a kind of a love of romance. a love of everything sepulchral and morbid, I guess, that typifies goth as it enters into the kind of 90s and into this century. I mean, you draw parallels in the book between the old goths of late antiquity and the new...

Goths for the 20th century. So let's talk about the original Goths and the 20th century Goths. Well, the original Goths, of course, they were labelled as outsiders and barbarians by the Romans and Greeks who were writing in the period. But the Goths themselves also... told stories about themselves as Goths. Goths also invited other people in to become Goths. So there was this strange kind of liquid identity construction at work, even back in late antiquity. OK, now what about you?

You and your co-author, I think, have a long-standing interest in goth culture. Well, I've kind of dipped in and out of the years. I've never been a musician, but I've always been a goth fan. The Sisters of Mercy were one of my biggest kind of bands when I was growing up. My wife was probably a bit more serious as a goth than I ever was. But since we've been living together, we've hung around in goth nightclubs since.

1997. Well, listen, I've got a reading here. These are the words of the academic Paul Hodkinson. He's talking about goth music in 2002, and also a little music we hear from the Bauhaus band. The most important starting point for Goth was probably provided by the images and sound of Bauhaus, notably the single Bela Lugosi's Dead. The performance of this song, and indeed much of the band's set, contain most of the distinctive themes which still pervade the goth sea.

rom-macabre funereal musical tone and tempo to lyrical references to the undead to deep-voiced, eerie vocals to a dark, twisted form of androgyny in the appearance of the band and most of its following. A dark, twisted form of androgyny in the appearance of the band and most of its followers. But flesh that out a little bit more for me. What kind of look are we talking about? Black dyed hair, black jeans, black T-shirts, corpse paint.

white makeup, black lipstick. For women, a very striking, punky kind of appearance. Now, as you've said, it was really, in a way, a culture driven by musical identity originally. But, I mean, how's it developed from there? How's it changed?

shifted. It's essentially grown in two ways. It's grown through getting confused with heavy metal in the 90s and heavy metal then taking the best bits of this kind of alternative goth subculture, the black jeans, the black teeth.

shirts the interest in the morbid and that then made heavy metal very globalised you were prompted to write this book, as I understand it, because of a sort of slight fear or a claim that was being made that Goth is dying, that really it is, well, rather like, I mean, rather like my assumption about Teddy Boys, that this was a passing trend which is now...

over with goth it's the same thing because most of the people who were around when goth started out were young in the late 70s and early 80s now you know these are people in their 50s 60s 70s there's a lack of a new generation coming through

I mean, there are, if you like, the self-proclamations of identity. This is what I am, this is what I wear, this is who I am. But you also, I mean, as a sociologist, you want to draw attention to the ways in which identities... are imposed upon people by the outside, the way in which the final identity is, if you'd like, a combination of these two.

And Kwame was absolutely right when he said, you know, identity is fluid. It's definitely not essential. But on the other hand, all identity work is constrained by the social structures and by, you know, the people who've got power who can impose. their view about the world on people without power. So goths...

now make their own identity but that is kind of also given to them by other people. How have they been characterised? I mean I suppose they've always been presumably negatively characterised in the press and elsewhere. For a brief moment, goths were fashionable. In the early 80s, being a goth was seen as something cool. The Sisters of Mercy were on the John Peel show way back in 1982. But then John Peel...

turned against the Sisters of Mercy quite quickly. Then the music media turned against Goth as it got popular. So Goths always had that love-hate relationship with the media. I think the internet probably saved Goth. Because in the 90s, when Goff became unfashionable, the internet was just kind of appearing and it allowed...

people who wanted to continue to be goths, to make music, to sell music, to write about goth music, all of a sudden they could do so. And so people around the world could find each other as goths. And it became, I think, I mean, it began to be in a way distorted, I think you might want to say. Goth culture was reconstructed and it turned into stories about S&M and vampires. There were all sorts of...

Yeah, the vampires came in because Anne Rice was writing at the time. Anne Rice's novels were incredibly popular. So I think people started to kind of assume that was the same thing as goth. Then Whitby Goth Weekend started because Whitby is one of the homes of Bram Stoker and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Because of this, Whitby has become a Guth thing, which has become a Guthic thing, which means...

Goth has now become a vampire thing because of a Dracula connection. Well, interestingly enough, I've got a reading here. These are the words of Matthew Bridson. He wrote this piece entitled Getting to Grips with Whitby Goth Weekend. and he published it on the Sykes Cottages website in 2017. Black attire, eyeliner and fangs galore. Think Whitby is all fish and chips and scenic views? Think again.

Twice a year, this little seaside town is transformed into a marvellously macabre mecca as thousands of goths and other self-styled creatures of the night gather to celebrate Whitby Goth Weekend. What started as a meet-up between pen pals back in 1994 has grown to become one of the world's key events in the goth calendar.

Well, I mean, that reading, I suppose you might want to talk there about the commodification of goth culture there. It sounds that all sorts of things are being packaged up and described as goth. Well, people now go to Whitby just to look at the goths. Whitby Goth Weekend probably gets more non-Gophs than Goths. It started out as a festival purely for Goths and Goth bands, but it's just become...

absolute kind of carnival, a spectacle. And the people we interviewed for the book, the older Goths that we interviewed, find it very troubling because to them Whitby is the place that they go to be Goths and enjoy themselves. be transgressive and be subcultural and be part of this underground identity. So what would you say about the future of goth culture? I mean, according to your research, it's set to continue, but if so...

How? I mean, it seems to have to sort of dispel some of this media coverage. It has to dispel the commodification going on at Whitby. I mean, how is it going to go on? Well, we think the only way it can continue is if guffs themselves actually... go back to the original purpose of goth the original purpose of goth was it came out of punk it was transgressive but it was radical too

So it had that radical politics about, you know, do it yourself, about challenging the mainstream. If Goths can do that themselves, they will get new people coming along. If they don't do that... We think goth will fade away, like the teddy boys. Some of the opposition to goths, some of the concern about goths, has had really quite tragic outcomes. I've got a clip here. This is from a BBC News report from 2007. This is about the murder of Sophie Lancaster.

Well, Sophie Lancaster, who was 20, and Robert Mulby, who was 21, were both students. They were attacked in August last year while walking through Stubby Lee Park in Bakeup. In that attack, both suffered serious head injuries. Robert survived. Sophie died. 14 days later from those injuries now she was a very individualistic young girl she dressed in gothic style and her funeral attracted people from all over the country from the gothic subculture now now of course that tragic death does

It reminds us of the price people pay for daring to look different and live lives outside the mainstream. And you'll remember that in large part of the campaigning by Sophie's mother, Sylvia, several police forces, including Greater Manchester, now treat... crimes against goths, punks and other alternative subcultures, very much as they do racist or homophobic attacks.

It raises interesting questions, doesn't it, about the nature of identity. I mean, some commentators argued at the time that being goth was a chosen identity, whereas people could hardly choose the colour of their skin. But as Anthony up here suggested in his talk...

At the start of the programme, racial identity may not be as fixed as sometimes imagined. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argued once that the idea of identity stemmed from the need for a sense of belonging and security in an increasingly liquid and shifting way. world just let me put that to you i mean why is it that people want to search out a distinctive identity i mean how would you explain you might want you can be biographical if you like well i i guess because the modern world is

So commodified, it's ruptured by political violence, subcultures and musical identities are just places where people feel it's the only place that they can go to get some kind of meaning and purpose in their lives. It's community. its belonging, its inclusion is just a way of finding a space where people can be themselves in this alienated world. Thank you very much, Carl Spracklin. Thank you so much.

Now, like a lot of boring men, I have a little list of football jokes. The goalkeeper who was called Dracula because he was frightened of high crosses. The lower division team that did a lap of honour when they were awarded a corner. And, of course, my favourite, the Liverpool fan who wore his Liverpool scarf and shirt every day and sang, we all live in a red and white cop over the breakfast table. And one morning you remember, I'm sure you know.

know the joke. His wife glared back at him. Some days, she said, I think you love Liverpool more than you love me. And of course, he stopped chanting, looked back across the table and said, listen, darling, he said, some days I love Everton more than I love you.

Now, I felt pretty safe telling and retelling, yeah, retelling, retelling that joke in mixed company, because even though it is crassly sexist, yes, it is. It is, after all, about a sport that's, well, fundamentally, fundamentally a male presenter. something men talk about and men joke about and sing about. But now... Now, after reading an excellently written and well-researched book, I found such jokes and such songs and such sentiments rather sticking in my throat, you see.

The book I'm talking about tells a compelling story about a group of people who repeatedly denied an identity that they richly deserve. female football supporters. It's called Female Football Fans, Community, Identity and Sexism. And its author is writer and researcher Carrie Dunn.

We just heard the masculine sound of three lions, David Baddiel, Frank Skinner, hosts of other men conjuring up the passion hopes of the English football fan and also reminds us rather of the 90s lad culture. Now, you yourself, you've had a lifelong passion for football.

So tell me first, let's begin with your own story and how it led in the direction of your research into female football parents. How did you get started? I was probably about three or four and my dad went to football and he would come home every Saturday. with the Football Match Day programme.

And he would sit there and read it with me. So that's how I started reading. When he got his football yearbooks every year, he would go through the teams with me and I would learn who the players were. What was his team? He's a Luton fan. I grew up in Bedfordshire.

was just adamant that I wanted to go to football too because it looked so much fun and so when I was eight they got me my first season ticket so I went down to Kenworth Road with my dad and then from that I was hooked. I was a home and away girl. And when you were going you didn't really think of

yourself as you didn't really think it's a bit odd here I am a girl going to football I never ever thought about it I was just going with my dad to football like hundreds of thousands of millions of other children have done for decades it wasn't until I was a teenager I started to think, actually, this is a bit unusual. I remember not going to one of my friend's birthday parties. I was about 13 or 14 because, you know, Luton had a match that weekend. So, you know, why would I go to her party?

I kind of realise now why I should have been annoyed by that. And then when I was a bit older, I started getting some heckles from the back of the stands before I was walking to my seat and I was just like, OK. And I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. And that was the first time I'd ever kind of thought, OK.

I'm a woman at this ground and that's not what some people want to see. And I think you say when you began to read more about football, you began to realise even more how it was really masculine in orientation. Absolutely. I went to university to study English literature. And I was doing my master's degree and I wanted to do my dissertation on life writing and sports life writing. And I was reading all this research from people in the 70s, early 80s about football hooliganism.

about football being male bonding, a way of fathers to pass on to their sons, a family tradition. And I was reading this and I was thinking, there's nothing about my experience. When you talk about popular culture, there's a tension. to think of fans as female. But as you're implying, the assumptions reverse when you come to football. I mean, even when you get such a sensitive book as Fever Pitch, which always captures really what it's like to be a fan so well. He does talk about...

his fandom as a quick fix of masculinity. And you find that a recurrent theme across all the publications. I really do, yeah. And Fever Pitch is a fantastic book. And I think he deals with this idea of... The quick fix at the masculinity supermarket, filling up his trolley with something that is male. I think he encapsulates that really brilliantly.

Obviously, that wasn't the reason I went to football. It wasn't the reason that my dad took me. It wasn't male bonding. It was something else, and that's what triggered my interest in this kind of research. Now, you refer in particular to a 1968 book, The Football...

man by Arthur Hopcraft, which was an attempt to construct a social history of the game which made it clear, this book, that women had a very marginal role in football. It's this idea that it's a place to go with your friends, it's a masculine working class identity, it's...

It's something you do at the weekends after a hard-working week. With the lads, it's a place to let off steam. You get home and the wife has cooked your dinner. I mean, I think that you quote J.B. Priestley talking about the way in which he wrote, you get away from your wife and your kids by going to...

women don't get that uh entitlement to that kind of exciting leisure time but when you your research you you do you uncover quite a history of women attending football games from the first world first world war onwards i mean to what extent did You just briefly mentioned before about the crowd disturbances, the hooliganism. I mean, can we talk perhaps about women were going to football matches in greater numbers at one time, but then when we got this hooliganism outbreak...

of the sort of 60s onwards that this deterred them? I think casual fans certainly were deterred.

Other fans still went. Women have always gone to football matches. Again, this identity of football fan has been constructed as male. It's been stereotyped as male. And women have always been there, but they've been invisibilised almost. They've been written.

out of this mainstream dominant narrative. Turning specifically to your own research, I mean, there wasn't any research before on female football fans before you came along, in which you tried to correct with your PhD and your book, and you conducted a range of interviews. groups over a couple of years covering a wide range of the country so you've got a good geographical spread. Now the youngest respondent I think was in her early teens and the oldest in her 80s.

Is there any way in which we can talk about how these women first got interested in the game, what got them going? Quite often it was, you know, about half the time it was women going with their fathers as small children. But also I was quite interested to note a lot of women started to go in.

as teenagers in a group of girls, which I really wasn't expecting. A group of girls, perhaps it feels like they've got more protection, strength in numbers to go along to this male domain and see what it's all about. And what about your older ones, the older individuals?

I mean, going back, they had experiences, didn't they, of what it was like to be going in the earlier days to football matches, their exclusion, their treatment at those matches. Tell me about what they had to say. There was a fantastic story of a... One fan, let's say that she had an androgynous name like Alex and she was involved with a supporters club.

And she'd been writing letters to one of the away teams they were visiting. They were saying, when you get here, come into the supporters club, bar, have a drink with us. And she was like, yeah, great. Got there. And she wasn't allowed in.

Because it was an old school working man's club and they'd assume that she was a man. So she had to sit outside and have a lemonade instead. No toilets, presumably. I'm just thinking about things like that. Things like that. Quite often having to ask for a toilet to be unlocked because there wasn't a...

women's toilet being regularly used obviously no things like sanitary facilities for for women and even kind of up to more modern days having to ask for you know bigger gates to be unlocked if they're you know heavily pregnant and they couldn't fit through the turnstiles and

stewards being very unhappy about having to unlock big gates for these pregnant women to get through you talked about being having names directed in your direction at some time but these people also had a number of negative experiences catcalling being called inside names, being assumed to have no understanding of football, whatever. But they didn't necessarily characterize these in terms of sexism. And I think that's probably...

one of the most significant and certainly to me interesting findings. It's a way of negotiating identity as a football fan because... Authenticity as a football fan is so often assumed to be male. This is kind of idea that if you're a man, you know about football. This is kind of a conversation opener.

And if you're a woman, you're assumed not to know about football. You've gone along with a husband or a boyfriend and you're going along just to please them or you're going to look at men. And yes... My respondents so often didn't want to categorise these things as sexist because it kind of marks them out as women. If you're saying this is sexist and other fans are treating me as other, then you're making yourself a target.

almost. How interesting. So they wanted their fandom to be seen as authentic and autonomous. A lot of them kind of talked about men challenging them to trivia quizzes if they met them for the first time to prove that they know about football. It's something that I'm sure that female football fans listening to this will know. Explain the offside law then. name all the last 10 FA Cup winners, that kind of stuff.

It is a challenge to prove your knowledge, for example. But they sort of did downplay their gender a little bit. I mean, they wouldn't wear high heels. Absolutely. They would not emphasise, as it were, femininity. Absolutely.

you're right it's kind of adopting this male form of expressing fandom so you wear club colors you'd wear trousers and kind of boots and trainers not not heels you wouldn't take a big handbag you wouldn't wear too much makeup you wouldn't do your hair for example you want to kind of blend and not mark yourself out as feminine. Now we heard, I mean, Carl was talking about goths as a specific subcultural identity. What is interesting, of course, about female football fans is...

is that that identity is sort of denied to them, isn't it, in a way? But is there a way in which they feel, when you get together with other female footballers, that you almost feel, like, counter-cultural? You almost... feel as it were like a distinctive group that has almost your own identity i am a female football fan rather than just a football fan yes and it's so interesting

I really felt that way myself when I was doing some of the focus group interviews and you're kind of getting to kind of share experiences and getting into having a conversation about kind of things that have happened, having these trivia quiz challenges thrown at us and, you know, the first head. echo that you heard at a ground and the way that you kind of play this stuff down. But also...

Often female football fans reject the label. I'm not a woman when I'm at the ground. I'm just a football fan. Now, a slightly sad element in your research was the finding that... Being a fan for a woman, it was a question of time constraints. I think in Nick Hornby's book, there's a point where he says he's worried about getting married, isn't it? Because if he gets married, who's going to look after him? He'll have to go to the match on alternate week.

But, I mean, what did the respondents tell you about this? Was there time for them to go to the matches? Yeah, certainly women who were getting married and having children in the 70s and 80s were saying that they fell away from fandom. because there was an expectation that it would be them staying at home with the children of a weekend. And I was interested that younger fans who were getting married and having children in the late 90s, early 2000s, that was different.

As I said, I had pregnant fans talking about going through the turnstiles, but also there were fans going with newborns and they asked their clubs to organise rooms where they could breastfeed in slightly more private conditions. And I thought that was absolutely amazing. Look, I've got a reading here. These are the words of a woman that you call Beth. I always read the letters page on Teletext just for a good laugh.

There was someone this time last week saying women should be banned from football because they always squawk and they always get upset the wrong things. You think, this is something that's always worried me about the move to go back to the standing areas. You listen to the people who are wanting to be in a standing area. A lot of them. It's this attitude, oh, football was so much better when a lot of women didn't go and families didn't go. And I think there still is some of that there.

Now, I should say that you wrote this book a couple of years ago. Is there some progress in making female football fans much more welcome? I mean, we are seeing much more women's involvement in the game. women's own game, sports writers, referees. Is there somehow now...

considerable progress. Yeah, I think there is certainly quite a lot of progress and just in the interviews that I did, there was certainly different experiences as we got nearer to the present day and we see now there's been a really successful campaign running for period products to be available at grounds for free for women which is just incredible something I wouldn't have imagined seeing kind of 10 years ago

But I think there is also a certain amount of backlash. I think there is still a certain element. in football in men's football certainly that think that women shouldn't be there if women want to go to football they should go to their own game they should referee their own game they should report on their own game and not be involved in men's football at all because that's for men

Carry down. Thank you very much. Last word on identity to cartoonist Martha Gradescher, whose drawing depicts, just like you to imagine, a psychoanalytic scene with a distressed-looking young woman lying on a couch, and her analyst is turning towards... and saying sympathetically, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but your identity crisis has been stolen. It started with a plane crash, my father and Mayflower.

A global conspiracy involving medical experiments. And it ended with Shanghai and... But what if it didn't end? The embryo inside me is two millimeters long. And the heart has already started to beat. But I'm not pregnant. How can I be pregnant? Something is beginning here. It's beginning again. At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens.

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