Category: Uncategorized
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Currently Researching: Pleasurable Labors- An Oral History of Professional Women’s Soccer Fandom in the United States (1999-2026)
An interdisciplinary book about the queer women-led organized fan groups that form around professional women’s soccer teams in the United States. Following the US women’s national team victory at the 1999 World Cup, fans showed up for leagues and franchises that started up and disappeared, supported players who struggled to carve out a living, and…
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Tricorns and Rainbow Flags: Contestation over Practices, Identities, and Feminism in U.S. Women’s National Team Fan Spaces (2025)
Co-authored with Eileen Narcotta-Welp. This study evaluates the community building practices of United States National Team fans apart from US Soccer’s neoliberal post-feminist empowerment branding and the jingoistic practices of its highest profile fan groups. Organized fan groups in the National Women’s Soccer League, primarily led by queer women, have built inclusive communities centered on…
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If You’re Not Anti, You’re Pro: Cultural Extraction and Subcultural Resistance in US Professional Soccer (2024)
Co-authored with Pratik Nyaupane. In US professional soccer, organized fan groups practice a subculture that sustains the lives of marginalized people within the group and provides a platform for resistant politics. In order to materially and ideologically control their spaces and brands from potential disruption, soccer leagues and teams engage with these groups through what…
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This Means More: Branded Solidarity at Liverpool’s Soccer Clubs (2023)
Co-authored with Thomas P. Oates. Liverpool’s elite soccer clubs are at once carefully managed global brands and local institutions infused with community values. As billion-dollar companies, Liverpool FC and Everton FC deploy a tactic we call “branded solidarity”: leveraging the historical enactment of leftist politics in the city to appeal to a broader, global audience…
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From Death to Spectacle: English Football’s Neoliberal Revolution (2019)
Co-authored with Thomas P. Oates & Travis Vogan. Building on the context outlined in Stuart Hall’s The Neoliberal Revolution we show how transformations in commodified football in 1980s and 1990s England did not merely reflect larger trends, but were a central site of political innovation constitutive of the country’s larger cultural shifts. Addressing the Crisis:…
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Two balls is too many: stadium performance and queerness among Portland’s Rose City Riveters supporters club (2018)
Portland, Oregon’s Rose City Riveters is the largest independent organized supporters group for a women’s soccer team in the world. They support Portland Thorns with an organized, expressive and organic performance of songs, musical instruments and displays that envelopes the entire stadium. Utilizing ethnographic subject-centred methods, this empirical study argues that the group’s performance reflects…
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Dissertation: Activist Fandom, Sport Communities and the Performance of Place
A comparative analysis of two contemporary soccer fan activist communities in Liverpool, England and Portland, Oregon. Together, Liverpool’s Fans Supporting Foodbanks and Portland’s Rose City Riveters illustrate how the particularities of place impact fan resistance within the transnational formation of soccer. Ethnographic fieldwork serves as the basis to discuss the ways in which the fan…
Chris W. Henderson 