Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

The stories told about sports fans tend to focus on the experiences of privileged male fans, with other groups either neglected or added as footnotes. My work builds on this issue by focusing specifically on the position/s of female fans of elite male sports, and thus explores the experiences of women in a fan culture in which men predominately occupy multiple spaces within in it. How female fans enveloped in this patriarchal system then perform and negotiate their gender and fandom, not only in relationship with these privileged men, but also in relation to the other women who enter these spaces is significantly complicated. Sporting arenas can be somewhat panoptic and force expected behaviours. How these behaviours are enforced by fans themselves, becomes problematic for those who exist outside of the traditional stereotype of the white, male sports fan. How female fans then police their behaviour and, although sometimes subconsciously, adopt it to the expected behaviour of the dominant participants, provides interesting insight to the predisposed perceptions of gendered stereotypes in sport. This is a common but unexplored process for women and other minorities who enter traditionally white, male spaces such as sporting arenas.