“You’re a Feral, Man”: Banter as an Index of Footballer Identity

Abstract

Dressing room banter, a key discourse strategy among footballers globally, is a traditional way of performing the macro identity of footballer. Given that linguistic processes operate at both global and local levels (Blommaert, 2003), we should expect that each team’s banter has a local dimension as well. This article examines how one university team employs dressing room banter both to align with the global footballer identity and to construct a local identity. Using a discursive approach to identity and an ethnographic methodology, I analyse naturally occurring examples of dressing room banter. I pay particular attention to the local manifestation of global discourse strategies and ideologies, especially masculinity, focusing on the manner in which macro norms are enacted in ways compatible with local ones. The analysis demonstrates how the participants construct multifarious identities, emergent at different structural levels. While they engage with the discourse strategy of dressing room banter, thus indexing membership at the global level, the players also negotiate a localised form of banter, one that is more supportive and less face-threatening than the normative masculinity which underpins stereotypes of footballers. To account for the players’ varying levels of alignment, I propose a tiered model following the principle of layered simultaneity (Blommaert, 2005), which conceptualises the team’s banter as a multifunctioning index of the footballer identity.