Our Queer-Selves: Design Practice as Self-Portrayal & Collective Expression 

by: Roxanne Bottomley , November 10, 2025

During lockdown, the world seemed to pause in suspended silence—a stillness settling over everything, while within me the foundations of who I was began to shift. I was questioning my identity, discovering parts of myself I’d buried beneath layers of societal expectation, and reckoning with truths that had previously lingered on the periphery. Without the distractions of routine, I was left with nothing but myself, a growing sense of unrest, and the realisation that I was gay.

Both Design research and football gave me a lifeline in those uncertain months. At 27, I joined a beginner’s football space for women, transgender, and non-binary people, as football was one of the few outdoor activities permitted during the pandemic. What began as an escape quickly became a sanctuary—a place where I could play, laugh, and begin to understand myself in ways I hadn’t before. The pitches I played on were spaces of connection, where identities were worn as boldly as the kits, and the joy of togetherness echoed louder than the shouts of competition.

The stark inequalities in football, however, were impossible to ignore. The sport remained structured around male-dominated, commercialised visual narratives, standing in stark contrast to the inclusive and joyful environments I experienced each week. This tension became a focal point for my practice-led doctoral project, which explored identity, community, and the transformative power of participatory design in grassroots football contexts.

Participatory practices involve the active engagement of stakeholders—such as community members, end-users, or employees—in decision-making processes that affect them. This ensures that diverse perspectives are considered for outcomes that are inclusive, contextually relevant, and widely accepted. Participatory design (PD), a specific subset of these practices, focuses on involving users directly in the design process to co-create solutions that better meet their needs. Originating in Scandinavia during the 1970s, PD was initially developed through collaborations between designers and trade unions in response to the limitations of top-down approaches to the introduction of workplace technologies (Ehn 1988; Bjögvinsson et al. 2012). Key figures such as Kristen Nygaard and Pelle Ehn played foundational roles, with Nygaard’s dual contribution to object-oriented programming and democratic design processes particularly influential (Bjögvinsson et al. 2012).

PD promotes the democratisation of design by including users as co-designers, acknowledging that those affected by design should have a say in its development. It emphasises collaboration, iterative development, and the co-creation of artefacts, systems, or services. This orientation values the lived experience and situated knowledge of participants, aiming to produce outcomes that are not only functionally effective but also socially and politically empowering (DiSalvo et al. 2012; Ehn & Kyng 1991). Bannon and Ehn (2012) highlight the significance of design in participatory design, arguing that it is not just about the inclusion of users but also about the nature and quality of the design activities that facilitate meaningful participation.

In the context of grassroots football, participatory design practices manifest through collaborative activities such as identity design workshops, where players collectively create logos and club badges as visual representations of their team’s identity. These sessions are typically informal and non-hierarchical, fostering an environment where all voices are heard and creative expression is encouraged. By engaging in these participatory design processes, team members not only produce meaningful artefacts but also strengthen their sense of community and shared purpose.

Similarly, my doctoral project aimed to explore how creative practices such as identity design, banner crafting, and zine production reflected the lived experiences and values of queer and female footballers. The designs I documented served as collective expressions of identity, while the project itself, and my role within it, became a self-portrait, reflecting my place within these communities.

Grassroots queer and women’s teams, often unsupported by official bodies, were not just playing football: they were reshaping the sport. Through informal and DIY participatory design practices, these teams created visual markers of their identities and communities. They were creating banners in their gardens, making zines in community spaces, and designing kits in local pubs on the back of Ladbrokes betting slips.

Cathkin Blazes C.F.C., 2021.

Drawing on what Costanza-Chock (2018) describes as ‘design justice,’ their work challenges hegemonic, cis-heteronormative structures by prioritising inclusivity and lived experience over commercialised aesthetics. Costanza-Chock’s research includes community workshops and participatory design sessions with marginalised groups, co-creating solutions that centre their voices and address systemic inequities. This framework emphasises collaboration and co-creation in informal, non-hierarchical environments, fostering trust and creative freedom by minimising power imbalances. In this spirit, an example from my doctoral project is a banner-making workshop that allowed participants to collectively design a banner reflecting their shared values and identities, prioritising the act of creating together over polished final products.

This approach aligns with feminist ethics of care, rejecting patriarchal norms and celebrating lived experiences. Ultimately, these practices embody Costanza-Chock’s (2018) assertion that design should empower those most impacted by inequities, using authentic, community-driven expressions to challenge cis-heteronormative and capitalist paradigms, while fostering representation and collective empowerment (2018). The ephemera being designed were more than club banners and football kits—they were acts of self-representation, crafted in informal, non-hierarchical spaces.

One significant element of the doctoral project was the creation of an Alternative Football Archive, which emerged as a repository for grassroots football ephemera donated to me at football tournaments and interviews during the PhD research process. This initiative was born out of necessity. When I first began researching women’s and queer grassroots football, a visit to the National Football Museum revealed how few items existed to represent these communities. By documenting identity designs, kits, and other creative outputs, the repository became a platform for marginalised narratives to be seen and remembered. Working collaboratively with participants, this informal collecting process created a repository that reflected their values, politics, and shared experiences, forming a collective self-portrait of a community historically excluded from mainstream football.

Participatory banner-making workshop, Republica Internationale, 2022.

Another way the project captured these collective identities was through participatory banner-making workshops. These workshops, often held during tournaments or Pride events, brought players together to design visual representations of their shared values and politics. The process of collectively creating banners emphasised inclusion and collaboration, prioritising the act of making over the final product. This approach can be situated within what Buckley (1986) describes as feminist design practices, foregrounding collective agency and rejecting patriarchal ideals of individual authorship or polished perfection. These banners were not just visual statements; they embodied the ethos of the community—a mix of activism, creativity, and camaraderie.

Banners, Republica Internationale, 2022.

The ethos of the teams that collaborated on this project was defined by informality, silliness, and non-competitiveness—qualities that stood in direct opposition to mainstream football’s focus on performance and results. This ethos aligns with Sian Bonnell’s concept of wilful amateurism (2013), which explores the deliberate rejection of professional standards and conventions in creative practices. This approach values intuition, experimentation, and the authenticity of non-professional methods over the polished aesthetics and technical perfection often associated with professional artistry. Bonnell (2013) emphasises that wilful amateurism is not about a lack of skill or knowledge but rather a conscious decision to embrace imperfection, playfulness, and spontaneity as critical tools for creativity and subversion.

A chant from the Easton Cowgirls, a grassroots team based in Bristol, encapsulates this spirit:

‘We are the Easton Cows
Our home is down the plough
We like to kick the balls
But not into the goals.
We’re shit at everything
But we can really sing,
And if you love women,
Then you will fit right in.’

This light-hearted humour, the celebration of imperfection, and the prioritisation of queer connection over competition mirrored what I had been searching for in both my creative and personal lives. These teams showed me that the value of participation lay not in polished results or commercial appeal but in the stories, relationships, and identities forged through the process. In this way, their practices resonate with Fountain’s (2023) concept of queer craft, where making becomes a site of resistance, intimacy, and joy. Fountain’s work situates craft within queer activism, showing how the act of making becomes a means of fostering connection and disrupting dominant cultural narratives.

It was liberating to witness both football and design freed from professional constraints, with non-professional designers and footballers shaping work and communities that mattered deeply, unhindered by the demands of competition or commodification.

As a Graphic Designer, I saw how these practices functioned as collective self-portraits. Messy, layered, and deeply personal, they reflected the teams’ values, politics, and sense of collective selves. Turning the lens inward, I began to see parallels with my own creative practice. It was like standing before a glittering queer disco ball: each fragment of glass reflecting an individual piece of a larger, messier, dazzling whole. I realised that in my doctoral project, and even earlier in my MRes work, I had been doing something similar: creating work that reflected my identity, carved out space for the topics I cared about, and affected me.

This recognition aligns with Poletti’s (2020) exploration of life-writing practices, where personal narratives are embedded in creative forms, complicating distinctions between personal and collective storytelling. Poletti’s concept of life-writing redefines autobiography, presenting it as an iterative, fragmented process that blurs individual and collective experiences. Whether through publication design or experimental writing, my practice had long been a way of grappling with my place in the world and showing a sense of self, much like the grassroots teams were doing through their design practices.

Roxanne Bottomley 2020, Writing myself into football, Experimental writing tasks

This article reflects on that journey, exploring how practice research blurs the boundaries between personal and collective narratives. By examining the DIY design practices of queer and women’s grassroots football teams, it reveals how design becomes a reflective surface—projecting identities, claiming space, and resisting inequalities embedded in sport.

The researcher’s self is rarely absent in practice research. My positionality as a cisgender lesbian woman, designer, and grassroots footballer shaped every aspect of this project. Being part of the community that I was researching blurred the lines between observer and participant, whilst also reflecting Donna Haraway’s idea of ‘situated knowledges’ (1988), which roots understanding in embodied, specific experiences. Haraway’s work argues for knowledge production as inherently partial, shaped by the positionality of the researcher, which aligns closely with my approach to this project.

This closeness also evoked Sara Ahmed’s reflections on ‘nearness’ in queer phenomenology (2006), where habitual actions and shared spaces shape not just identities but the bodies moving through them. Ahmed’s notion of ‘nearness’ emphasises the relationality of space and movement, arguing that identities are not static or inherent but are formed and re-formed through repeated encounters with objects, people, and environments. This process situates the body as an active participant in meaning-making, where proximity and interaction play a vital role in how individuals come to understand themselves and others.

Rain on Me F.C., 2020.

In the context of grassroots football, this means that the shared spaces—whether at a football tournament or in the design workshops—become sites where identities are negotiated and embodied. The act of moving together reinforces a sense of belonging and mutual recognition. Ahmed’s reflections suggest that the physical and social proximity of these activities does more than foster camaraderie; it reshapes how participants inhabit their bodies and understand their place within a community. This interplay between space, action, and identity portrays the transformative potential of participatory practices, where the act of doing together becomes integral to the experience of being.

The concept of ‘queer-selves’ introduced in the title of this writing emerged during the corrections stage of my PhD, as I reflected on how participatory design illuminated diverse, multiple, yet collective identities within football. Rooted in DIY and non-commercial traditions, the research embraced bricolage methodologies (Yee & Bremner 2011), combining interviews, thematic analysis, and collaborative workshops. Yee and Bremner describe bricolage as an adaptive and flexible methodology that allows researchers to draw from diverse methods and disciplines, reflecting the layered and complex realities of their subjects.

By reframing the research through this lens, the connections between design, identity, and the collective became even more apparent. Multiplicity was central, with an understanding that identity is not singular or fixed but layered, fluid, and ever-changing: a tapestry of diverse experiences.

Ultimately, this research revealed how design nurtures community, amplifies personal narratives, and carves spaces where diverse identities are visually communicated and celebrated. It challenges conventional self-portraiture, showing how collective and situated knowledges intertwine to tell stories that are deeply personal yet also shared. Through this work, I engage with feminist and queer design principles (Place 2023) that centre lived experience as a form of critical resistance. Place’s work highlights the interplay of personal and political in feminist design, emphasising lived experience as a catalyst for change. Centring queer and feminist perspectives, this work highlighted the transformative power of design already thriving in marginalised communities, not merely as resistance but as a declaration of belonging and a collective sense of self.