Give Line

A visual study of ritual, intimacy, spirituality and hedonism in Ultimate Frisbee. A window into an alternative sports community that subverts gender performance in sports and blurs the line between bodily movement and sacred experience

I started photographing the Ultimate Frisbee community I’m a part of in Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and the surrounding region about a year ago. I chose to focus this project specifically on Ultimate Frisbee communities in the American South because belonging to this subculture typically goes against the grain of conservative, traditional, heteronormative social and political ideals that surround this area of the country. While the sport has been around since the 1960’s, its main hubs are in liberal, urban areas of the country such as major cities in California and New England. Ultimate has picked up in the South in the last 20 or so years, but still in much smaller numbers than on the East and West Coasts. For many, the frisbee community acts as a liberal, progressive, inclusive safe haven in a sea of political red that is the South.

Ultimate is countercultural to many team sports in a few key ways, the most significant being that it is self-officiated, meaning there is no referee– players are in charge of settling disputes on the field themselves. Physical contact is not permitted, and any play seen as endangering others is seen as ‘unspirited’. It is also one of the only sports where mixed gender play is standard. All of these qualities serve to challenge hegemonic masculine culture found in most sports by rejecting aggression that is both physical and verbal, and emphasizing fairness over winning or dominating your opponent.

I’ve played sports all of my life, and grew up in the church; both of these experiences inform how I relate to this community, and how I see it through my viewfinder. Much of my work as an artist is concerned with the concept of indoctrination, the creation and enforcement of rules, gameplay, and the concept of belief, all of which are working in some way here. 

In photographing this group of people, its many events, rituals and lifestyle practices over the last year, it has started to become clear as to my goals for this project: to look at the ways in which the Ultimate Frisbee community queers and subverts what it means to be a part of an organized sport, and how being a part of this sport equates to religiosity. 

I want to show what a sport looks like through a queer lens; that an alternative to the hypermasculine, ‘win-at-all-costs’, physically violent, machismo, power-play behavior prevalent in most other sports. That it is not only possible, but exists and is thriving and so fulfilling for so many people who are a part of this community. 

In recording the various rituals, traditions, and bodily acts players engage in on the sidelines and in between points, I am thinking about how game play connects to spirituality: how seeking out hedonism can be a holy endeavor; a divine recreation; when movement and physical exertion transcend the body into a sacred experience.