Streakers in Sport by Karl-Heinrich Bette, Felix Kühnle

This book presents the first comprehensive sociological analysis of streakers and streaking culture in elite sport, examining how these transgressors disrupt and affect sporting events.

Streakers are difficult to ignore, bursting into stadiums and arenas naked, sparsely clothed or in disguise and bringing competitions to an abrupt halt by transgressing boundaries in factual, temporal, spatial and social terms. This book employs a rigorous sociological methodology to move beyond interpretations offered by psychiatrists, journalists, security officials and lawyers to explore the “how” and “why” of this curious behaviour. The authors address two key questions: What does observing streakers reveal about elite sport? And what does analysing elite sport reveal about the social figure of the streaker? Through this lens, sporting competitions can be seen as socially constructed scenarios of controlled crises, where streakers act as parasitic second-order troublemakers, adding a secondary layer of chaos to events already centred on the strategic conflict between opponents.

Written for a broad audience, this book will appeal to students, academics and researchers in sociology, sports studies, cultural anthropology, ethnology and social psychology.