Game-Changers: Re-Imagining Sports as a Diverse Social Field in Young Adult Graphic Narratives

Building upon representations of sport in children’s literature, this article interrogates how young adult graphic novels depict sport and sporting environments as ‘fields’ in which aspects of identity are embodied and contested through rivalry and competition. To do so, we discuss a range of international, English-language graphic novels that feature rugby, fencing, and basketball: the British series Heartstopper (Oseman 2020–2026), the American series Fence (Pacat 2017–ongoing), and the American book Dragon Hoops (Yang 2020). We argue that graphic narrative texts invite readers into multi-modal, imaginative spaces that showcase bodies in motion at the same time as they allow insight into experiences around identity and belonging. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, we examine how the sporting zones in these stories are sites in which rules are both established and broken, allowing certain characters to thrive and relegating others to the sidelines. In doing so, we demonstrate how the graphic novel is a medium that can be utilised for aesthetic and political purposes related to marginalised identities, especially those traditionally excluded from sporting environments.