“The Future of Football is Feminine”: A Critical Cultural History of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team,focuses on the historical and cultural construction of the U.S. women’s national soccer team. The public and academic discourse that constitutes women’s soccer in the U.S. consistently links the game with the feminist legislation of Title IX, and positions male coaches as benevolent patriarchs who grant young girls and women the right to play. The combination of these two dominant narratives confronts the historical narrative of women’s soccer from an uncritical and celebratory space, which represses and decenters lines of power. I challenge these steadfast discourses by locating this team, and thus, women’s soccer, in the larger cultural frame of neoliberal, postfeminist, post-racial, and sexual politics. Through an examination of U.S. newspapers and magazines, United States Soccer Federation (USSF) and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) documents, and extensive soccer-specific journals and magazines, I explore the intersection of capitalism, feminism, and racism in women’s professional sport. This research also examines how the media and other corporations have cultivated the U.S. women’s national team and its individual stars, such as Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Kristine Lilly, Abby Wambach, and Hope Solo to promote themselves as consumer conduits through which moral and ethical behaviors circulate and influence civil society. Since the mid-1990s, young female soccer players find themselves at an ideological crossroad of individual choice and self-discipline. The soccer field has been promoted as a space of gender and racial inclusion as well as economic and political freedom while subtly reinforcing the exact opposite. Moreover, I examine the historical and ever-shifting landscape of women’s soccer, and how neoliberalism as an economic and cultural theory is central to the use of race, class, gender, and sexual ideologies to develop women’s soccer in the United States.

Although the reality of Swedish race relations is very complex, Sweden presents itself to the world as a colorblind utopia where race does not exist. Since the mid-1900s, Sweden has embraced an anti-racist rhetoric that developed into post-racism and colorblindness, where race is not seen, and racial discrimination is not acknowledged as a societal problem. This study seeks to problematize the complexities of Swedish post-racism and colorblindness. By drawing on previous research, it is clear that the Swedish hegemony has not been thoroughly deconstructed, which necessitates further studies in this area. By drawing on the WPR approach to poststructural policy analysis, this study looks at how Swedish law is influenced by the narratives of colorblindness and details the shortcomings of excluding the term ‘race’ from legislation. Furthermore, this study employs expert interviews to access the knowledge of experts on how colorblindness and post-racism came to be. It is concluded in this thesis that the post-racist and colorblind perception of Sweden influences Swedish law in negative ways and that the removal of the term race is a denial of the existence of a racial hierarchy in Sweden.