In this article, we argue that the “turn to affect” can provide a generative framework for working through key sticking points for women in sport. Through an analysis of the rule changes and subsequent social media comments in the lead-up to the inaugural Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) competition, we demonstrate the power of emotions for intensifying and resisting discussion about women’s participation in male-dominated sport, as they accumulate through fan encounters on social media. Through a focus on the expression of emotions such as disappointment and contempt, we interrogate the collective workings of digital affects for constituting gendered knowledge production and subjectivity in sport contexts. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of feminist thinking for sport research and practice.
Despite the recent rise of female Australian rules football in the public eye, little research has explored the nuances of players’ experiences of gendered embodiment, performance, identity, desire and engagement in the sport. The aim of this article is to explore how spaces have the capacity to create, normalise and regulate gender, bodies, identity and desire through an analysis of a women’s Australian rules football team, a space that is neither dominated by heteronormativity and neither queer nor lesbian subcultures. Through analysis of photographs and photo-elicitation interviews, this paper seeks to explore how bodies, gender, desire and embodiment are experienced, perceived and contested by and through the lens of players, within this sportscape. The implications of this research are an insight into the fluid and complex dynamics of a particular sportscape and the capacity of such spaces to redefine belonging and normativity outside of dominant hetero-gendered discourses.
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