The Feminization of Sports Fandom

A Sociological Study

Stacey Pope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317425380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women fans have entered the traditionally male domain of the sports stadium in growing numbers in recent years. Watching professional sport is important for women for so many reasons, but their expectations and experiences have been largely ignored by academics. This book tackles these shortcomings in the literature and sheds new light on the many ways in which women become sports fans.

This groundbreaking study is the first to focus on the phenomenon of the feminization of sports fandom. Including original research on football and rugby union in the UK, it looks at the increasing opportunities for women to become sports fans in contemporary society and critically examines the way this form of leisure is valued by women. Drawing upon feminist thinking and intersectionality, it shows how women from different social classes and age groups consume the spectacle of sport.

This book is fascinating reading for any student or scholar interested in sport and leisure studies, sociology and gender or women's studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Billions of people around the globe watch live sport. In huge numbers, people attend sporting events, watch sport on television and use live-streaming of matches on phones, tablets and laptops. Sport is ubiquitous and fans who are consumed with interest in sport immerse themselves in sporting issues through, for example, sport-related discussions in the street, cafes and pubs, or online within WhatsApp groups, on Facebook, through blogs and social media platforms such as Twitter (The Football Collective, 2016). This is not just a one-way process: increasingly, athletes, sport celebrities and pundits use social media to communicate and interact with fans (Frederick et al., 2012). Thus, sports fandom has become a multifaceted form of ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins, 1992) for many people – including women. Recent statistics show that, in England, of the 13.7 million Premier League fans attending matches over one season, just over 3.5 million were women, and of the 1.7 million fans attending rugby union Premiership matches, approximately 300,000 were female fans.¹ But, despite the importance that watching professional sport clearly holds for so many female fans, the overwhelming majority of publications in socio-logical research have focused exclusively on male supporters (see Pfister et al., 2013). It is against this backdrop of a male-dominated aspect of society – illustrated by the way in which existing studies on sports fans have focused almost exclusively on men – that this book tackles head-on the lack of research on female sports fans. But this is not a book about women’s exclusion from sport; rather I seek to examine the narratives around the pleasure and enjoyment women gain through their consumption of sport as well as continued gender inequalities in this traditionally ‘male preserve’ (Dunning, 1994). The book addresses the extent to which, and how, sports fandom figures in the leisure lives of female fans and explores the diversity of women’s experiences as sports fans, showing how women’s journeys into fandom and into the domain of sport are extremely varied.

Over two decades ago, Duke (1991) outlined a research agenda for the sociology of football and called for more studies into women’s experiences as well as comparative research between fans of different sports, yet these topics have remained largely marginalized in academic work to date. Most studies have focused exclusively on male football fans, thus neglecting other sports and many of these studies have focused upon male hooligan cultures and/or issues of fan rivalry (see, for example, Armstrong, 1998; Dunning et al., 1990; Rookwood and Pearson, 2012; Spaaij, 2008; Stott and Pearson, 2007). This is despite the minority of fans actually involved in fan violence in the UK; for example, government statistics for the 2014–2015 season showed that there were 4.9 football-related arrests per 100,000 attendees at football in England and Wales (Home Office, 2015), which can be used as one measure to indicate the low levels of fan violence.

This book therefore centralizes female sports fans and considers women’s experiences of sports spectatorship in the contemporary period. There is a lack of comparative sociological work that examines sports fans (male or female), but I draw upon empirical research on female fans of two sports (men’s professional football and rugby union) in the UK city of Leicester. In 2016, Leicester was named the UK’s ‘greatest sporting city’ (ESPN, 2016), so this ‘sports city’ was in many ways an ideal site for the research (see ‘Undertaking the Research’). My focus on female fans of football and rugby union in one locale offers a highly innovative approach to the study of sports fandom. Sociological analysis is located at the heart of this book but the research is interdisciplinary and the focus on women’s experiences as fans will also be of interest to those working in the fields of sports studies and physical education, gender studies, leisure studies, popular culture and regional studies.

This opening chapter begins by outlining existing studies on sports fandom in order to provide the rationale for the focus of this book. It overviews the aims of the book and the theoretical position I adopted, outlines how I undertook the research and provides a summary of the structure of the book.

Existing Studies and Rationale for the Book

Female fans have been largely marginalized in academic research and perhaps this can in part be attributed to a gendered dichotomy in research on fandom in the Academy (Pope, 2014). For example, Jenkins (1992: 15) has discussed the assumed differences between the sexes as follows: ‘If the comic fan and the psychotic fan are usually portrayed as masculine, although frequently as de-gendered, asexual, or impotent, the eroticized fan is almost always female.’

Thus, whereas the typical feminine image of fandom is of ‘sobbing and screaming and fainting, and assumes that an uncontrollable erotic energy is sparked by the chance to see or touch a male idol’, the masculine image of fandom is of ‘drunken destructiveness, a rampage of uncontrollable masculine passion that is unleashed in response to a sports victory or defeat’ (Jensen, 1992: 15). Larsen and Zubernis (2012: 8) bemoan how ‘fan shame persists across gender lines, with media portrayals of fans still tending towards depictions of bizarrely overinvested people who engage in strange, borderline illegal practices’, and they suggest that it is women who typically receive the most ridicule. In short, academic research on fandom has arguably tended to reflect these gendered divisions, meaning that gender-driven research and gender-informed commentary is based largely upon the male in sport fandom and the female in media fandom (Jones and Lawrence, 2000). Thus, while there is an extensive body of work on female fans, women have traditionally been researched as fans or audiences of soap operas (see, for example, Ang, 1991; Spence, 2005), new reality TV (see, for example, Skeggs and Woods, 2008), music (see, for example, Ehrenreich et al., 1992; Toth, 2008) and movies or movie stars (see, for example, Taylor, 1989; Barbas, 2001; Bell and Williams, 2009) rather than as sports fans.

A large body of research has examined women’s experiences of playing sport – including women’s participation in football and rugby union (see, for example, Carle and Nauright, 1999; Caudwell, 2004, 2012; Dunn, 2016; Gill, 2007; Skille, 2008; Jean Williams, 2003, 2007). But in contrast, the experiences of female sports fans have been largely marginalized in academic research to date. Over a decade ago, Free and Hughson (2003: 152) in an analysis of ethnographies of male football supporters in the UK, commented on the ‘startling’ absence of women and expressed the hope that ‘women’s voices will be heard in future studies’.

Mewett and Toffoletti (2012) describe how work on female fans has been slowly accumulating in recent years. Their excellent account of female fans of the Australian Football League (AFL) is one of the few empirically based research studies that has examined the experiences of female fans, and to date this research has focused on areas including: how women initially become fans of AFL clubs; female fans’ views on players’ sexual mis-conduct; and how women look at the male athletic body in sexually desirable ways (Mewett and Toffoletti, 2008, 2011; Toffoletti and Mewett, 2012). While a few other research studies can be located that examine female fans worldwide, much of the recent emerging research in this area has focused upon how women have been depicted as ‘inferior’ or ‘inauthentic’ sports fans and the ways in which they have negotiated a space for themselves in the male-dominated sports stadium (see, for example, Cere, 2003; Chiweshe, 2014; Crolley and Long, 2001; Dixon, 2015; Esmonde et al., 2015; Jones, 2008; Lenneis and Pfister, 2015; Pfister et al., 2013). The small but growing body of work on female sports fans has been a useful comparator to my own research findings and has been referred to throughout this book.

However, notwithstanding the small body of work on female sports fans, research on female fandom has largely remained an under-researched area (Mewett and Toffoletti, 2012). In men’s professional football, the lack of research on female fans seems especially surprising given the amount of material and research that is available on male supporters that has typically centred upon the importance of sport for constructing Connell’s (1995) ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This lack of research on female fans can perhaps in part be attributed to the tendency for scholars to focus upon ‘exceptional’ forms of fandom – those topics which are deemed ‘exciting, topical and politically interesting’ (Dixon, 2013: 335). For example, as I have already noted, much of the academic research on sports fans – especially football fans in England – has typically focused upon male hooligan cultures and/or issues of fan rivalry (see, for example, Armstrong, 1998; Dunning et al., 1990; Rookwood and Pearson, 2012; Spaaij, 2008; Stott and Pearson, 2007). Other football fan research has examined ‘lads’ sporting identities (for example, King, 2002) and male-dominated organized supporter movements (see, for example, Taylor, 1992; Nash, 2000, 2001) in a search for evidence of ‘authentic’ forms of male fandom. In rugby union (and other sports), it is difficult to locate academic studies that examine supporters of either sex, but statistics show that women are now a substantial component of the sports crowd and make up around one-quarter of football fans at Premiership matches and one-fifth of rugby union fans (Premier League, 2016; Premiership Rugby Head of Marketing, 2016).

In order to examine the experiences of female fans, I argue that there is a need for research on sports fandom to fully incorporate women’s experiences rather than either: ignoring women and focusing solely on male fans and issues (as has been the case in the extensive body of work focused upon issues of fan rivalry and hooliganism); labelling women as ‘inauthentic’ supporters; and/or ‘adding’ female fans to research which is primarily focused upon male fans. For example, King (2002) does attempt to incorporate female fans into his research which is primarily on ‘the lads’ at Manchester United. But unlike ‘the lads’, females are labelled by him as ‘new consumer’ fans – fans who will seemingly have a ‘naturally’ weaker identification with the club in contrast to ‘traditional’ male supporters or ‘the lads’. Thus, although female fans have been ‘added’ to this research, this does not consider the possibility that female fans may support clubs for similar or the same reasons as male fans. In a similar vein, Crabbe et al. (2006), in their model of different styles of football fandom, focus exclusively on males and only discuss gender issues in relation to how football can generate tension in relationships. When asking, ‘Can the girls go out to play?’, Crabbe et al. (2006) only discuss those women who do not follow football and so may be able to escape domestic burdens when their partner involves their children in the sport. But this does not consider those women who use sport as an ‘escape’ from domesticity and does not consider the possibility that females may be sports fans too.

In this book, my findings show that there are a variety of motives and attachments for women fans and so women sports fans are heterogeneous. These findings challenge gender polarities in research, whereby female fans are typically depicted as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘new consumer’ fans who are subordinate to male ‘authentic’ and traditional fans (see Chapter 5). Thus, I argue research on sports fandom would benefit from a greater sensitivity to heterogeneity in both men’s and women’s experiences and by considering the diversity of men’s and women’s supporter styles. Therefore, when seeking to incorporate women’s experiences as fans, researchers must also be careful not to simply replicate narrow definitions of what it means to be an ‘authentic’ sports fan that have been constructed in the literature to date. For example, Dunn (2014: 12) has recently offered an account of female football fans in the UK and her selection criteria for those interviewed in the study was that respondents ‘attended games regularly; and/or held shares in her club, and/or; was an active participant in an organised fans’ group; and/or had been a supporter since childhood or for more than 30 years’. Although she critiques male academics for depicting male football fans as ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ and female fans as ‘non-traditional’ and ‘inauthentic’, these sampling techniques support a very narrow definition of what it is to be an ‘authentic’ fan (i.e. a supporter who must attend matches regularly, be a long-term fan and may be a member of a supporters’ trust or hold shares in the club) and thus exclude other ‘types’ of female fans who do not exhibit these characteristics (for example, occasional attendees, women who do not currently attend live matches regularly, those who recently became sports fans).

As shown in this book, there is not one ‘blanket’ position for female fans and it is important to consider the complexities of women’s experiences and viewpoints. This book seeks to examine the diversity of women’s experiences as sports fans. Cunningham Osborne and Sarver Coombs (2016: 66) in research on female National Football League (NFL) fans in the US, recently suggested that women ‘don’t want to be that kind of fan’ who is persistently studying a football team or experiencing extreme emotional reactions and so they claim women are not as involved in their fandom as men. But as discussed in Chapter 8, the findings in this book show that sport plays an important role in the lives and identities of many female fans and, for some women fans, the club is a central life interest. Thus, just as it is essential to consider the experiences of those female fans for whom sport and their club is not a central life interest, it is also vital for research to examine the experiences of those female fans who mirror traditionally ‘authentic’ forms of male fandom, challenging the notion that female fans are typically ‘inauthentic’ or ‘inferior’ to male fans in their support. I will now overview the theoretical approach that was adopted and will outline the research aims.

Theoretical Approach and Research Aims

This research draws broadly upon a feminist framework. Earlier feminist studies on women and leisure played a crucial role in first putting women’s experiences of leisure on the research agenda, but most of the germinal texts on women and leisure which have been published since the 1980s make little or no mention of sport...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women’s Changing Leisure Lives
• 3 Changes in Professional Sport and the Feminization of Sports Fandom
• 4 Continuity and Change in the Lives of Female Sports Fans
• 5 Women, Sport and a Sense of Place
• 6 Rivalry and Class Distinction between Female Football and Rugby Union Fans
• 7 The Meaning and Importance of Sport for Female Fans
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix: Research Participants
• Index