Recent ethnographies of male football supporters have provided in-depth, highly engaged accounts from the supporters' subcultural perspectives. Although they are commendable for their ethnographic detail, this article's authors take issue with their theorization of the data, particularly their inadequate interrogations of gender construction and gender relations. The authors argue that McRobbie's critique of earlier male youth subcultural ethnographies is equally applicable to football ethnographies. The authors make three principal criticisms. First, these ethnographies' authors falsely dichotomize the public and private domains, thus failing to provide complex pictures of the gendered social relations in which these subcultural activities are situated. Second, they ignore evidence, in their own data, of the performative role of such activities in the construction and reproduction of masculine identities. Third, their uses of the concept of “carnivalesque” camouflage both the gender themes in the data and the authors' failures to adequately address them theoretically.
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