The Football Wiki

Football are sometimes called a "pigskin," which makes people think footballs might be made out of pigs. But nope! The NFL's official footballs are made of premium cowhide leather. According to the NCAA, college teams also use leather footballs, but they're a little bit smaller than NFL balls. Younger kids (six to eight years old) use smaller footballs made of rubber. That makes it easier for little hands to grip the ball. Older kids can use footballs made of both rubber and leather, and kids age 13 and up should use an all-leather ball that's the same size as college footballs. Teenage males draw variously on signifying contexts in football to construct their understandings of who they 'are'. As such, football is a widely revered human activity that is strongly implicated in the construction of masculine identity. By examining how football has evolved as a site of controlled masculinity, and how involvement in football is imbued with a dominant set of meanings about what constitutes a 'normal' male, this article will indicate how identity formation for young males is a precarious process. Furthermore, by drawing predominantly on the research of Burgess [(1992) TGs, dags and normals: the construction of masculinity in a ruling-class school (unpublished honours thesis, Griffith University, Brisbane); (1998) Struggle and performance: the construction and identity for teenage males (unpublished PhD thesis, Griffith University, Gold Coast)], in an Australian school setting, it will illustrate that for teenage males there is a seductive resonance in the narrative that violence and toughness in football is indicative of a natural predisposition in 'real' males.

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