She's the man: Michelle Akers ‘unruly' game and the ‘potentiality' of queer failure in the early development of the U.S. women's national soccer team

Michelle Akers performance at the 1991 FIFA Women’s World Championship positioned her at the centre of U.S. soccer, a sport institution historically relegated to the margins of U.S. sport for its inability to represent hegemonic versions of American masculinity. Her ‘unruly’ performance of ‘female masculinity’ embodied the notion of ‘queer failure’, a gender performance that fails to comply with dominant logics of power, but was needed in order to (re)imagine the future potential for both soccer and female athletes in U.S. sport. Akers’ queer failure helped to locate U.S. soccer, and more specifically, women’s soccer, within the centre of American sport. With this shift, however, Akers queer failure became a liability and was rendered all but invisible within an emerging postfeminist context. Akers provided a recognizable queer performance until her retirement in 1999 as she opened new space for alternative femininities and queer bodies to be visible in women’s sport.