‘Postfeminist Sports Cultures: Exploring (In)Active Women’s Experiences’

The recent rise in participation and media coverage of women’s sport and female athletes, coupled with ubiquitous neoliberal discourses of women’s empowerment and autonomy, mean that whilst analysis of women’s ‘difference’ or ‘Otherness’ within a sports system designed by and for men is still warranted, perhaps more pertinent at this time is analysis that explores gendered power relations. For whilst the sporting (and media) context celebrates female athlete visibility and their ‘do it yourself’ attitudes, we need to problematise the postfeminist notion that women in sport are a homogenous group with similar needs and experiences or risk further entrenching stubborn inequalities pertaining to gender, sexuality, race, class and disability. To do this requires research on women’s sport, and sport media, that delves into the diversity of women’s experiences, their bodily practices, and relationships to/with various sport, leisure, and physical activity contexts.

Informed by feminist physical cultural studies, my research critiques the postfeminist production of sporting femininities to open new spaces for feminist intervention and activism in sport. As part of the Sport, Physical Activity and Health Equality Research Centre at the University of Bath, I have been publishing in this area since 2011. I am a co-editor (with Drs Kim Toffoletti, Aarti Ratna and Professor Holly Thorpe) of the book New Sporting Femininities: Embodied Politics in Postfeminist Times and a Palgrave book series editor for New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures, which has published 8 manuscripts to-date. On the basis of this research, I would like to express my interest in being part of the Learning from the Lionesses: Transformative media and marketing for inclusive sport symposium.

Within my presentation, I will demonstrate the utility of a postfeminist sensibility (Gill, 2007, 2016) for understanding the representational nexus of sport by applying it to the sport of football. This critical sensibility is imperative as it ensures that whilst we can celebrate what some consider the ‘unstoppable rise’ of women’s sport, we are also attentive to gendered relations of power that mean inequities and injustices go unchallenged for women and girls in sport institutions, media representations and everyday practices. However, not only does a postfeminist sensibility shed light on the way that postfeminist discourses of female success ‘other’ those whose experiences are shaped by ‘broader struggles for social justice’ (Heywood & Drake 1997, p. 165). It also involves analysis of the challenges and contradictions for those that can invest (materially and symbolically) in active subjectivities (Francombe 2014, 2015). With a focus on the intersections of gender, class and race, my presentation will explore footballing femininities and inequities within 'the beautiful game', from grassroots through to the Lionesses.