Paper Presentation X:
Gender and Participation in Sport
Monday, April 12, 10.00–13.00

Stacy Pope
UK

Sport continues to be construed and presented, both academically and in popular terms, as a profoundly ‘male preserve’ (Dunning, 1994). This appears to be reflected in the gendered dichotomy in research on fandom in the Academy, whereby males are typically presented and researched as sports fans, and females are usually depicted as ‘irrational’ media fans (Jones and Lawrence, 2000).

This paper challenges women’s marginalized position as sports fans, and aims to make a small contribution towards making women’s fan experiences visible. There is also little research on perspectives of female supporters across different sports. Drawing on 85 interviews with female fans of football and rugby union in the East Midlands city of Leicester in England, I examine women’s experiences of sports fandom in different sporting contexts in a single city.

Previous studies have shown how women’s status as sports fans has typically been undermined by male supporters; they have often been labelled as ‘inauthentic’ in their support (Crawford and Gosling, 2004). Respondents in my research were frustrated at their assumed absence of sporting knowledge, according to male fans, and I discuss the informal demands – especially among football fans – for women to ‘prove’ their sporting knowledge. Some women also openly express hostility towards other female fans who seem to confirm male stereotypes – those who attend matches because of a sexual interest in players, for example.

Stereotypes of women as ‘inferior’ sports fans are contested when I examine the ways in which sport is crucial to some women’s lives and identities. Drawing on the work of Giulianotti (2002), respondents were broadly divided into two main fan types which, crudely speaking, connected with two different kinds of gender performance: ‘hot’ committed fans (who typically performed ‘masculine’ femininities) and ‘cool’ more casual fans (who performed ‘feminine’ femininities). For ‘hot’ fans across both sports, fandom impacted upon family and work relations and played an important role in identity construction. There were also important differences between the two sports in the construction of female fan identities, which could probably best be attributed to a range of factors, including the effects of social class and adherence to either urban or non-urban affiliations. Hence, my research emphasises the need to examine the diversity and range of women’s sporting experiences, and to avoid previous approaches where women fans are often, as Crolley (1999) claims, treated as a homogenous group and simply defined by their sex.

• References
• Crawford, G. and Gosling, V. (2004) ‘The Myth of the ‘Puck Bunny’: Female Fans and Men’s Ice Hockey’, Sociology, 38:3, pp. 477-493.
• Crolley, L. (1999) ‘Lads will be Lads’. In M. Perryman (ed) The Ingerland Factor: Home Truths From Football, London: Mainstream Publishing.
• Dunning, E. (1994) ‘Sport as a Male Preserve: Notes on the Social Sources of Masculine Identity and its Transformations’. In S. Birrell and C. Cole (eds) Women, Sport and Culture, Leeds: Human Kinetics.
• Giulianotti, R. (2002) ‘Supporters, Followers, Fans and Flaneurs’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 26:1, pp. 25-46.
• Jones, I. and Lawrence, L. (2000) ‘Identity and Gender in Sport and Media Fandom: An Exploratory Comparison of Fans Attending Football Matches and Star Trek Conventions’. In S. Scraton and B. Watson (eds) Sport, Leisure Identities and Gendered Spaces, Eastbourne: LSA Publications.