Two balls is too many: stadium performance and queerness among Portland’s Rose City Riveters supporters club

Abstract

Portland, Oregon’s Rose City Riveters is the largest independent organized supporters group for a women’s soccer team in the world. They support Portland Thorns with an organized, expressive and organic performance of songs, musical instruments and displays that envelopes the entire stadium. Utilizing ethnographic subject-centred methods, this empirical study argues that the group’s performance reflects two different performance lineages, organically organized transnational soccer fandom on one hand and disidentifying queer public performance on the other. This paper explores how different elements of these lineages overlap in the Riveters’ performance to disrupt, negotiate and resist the dominant ideologies of hyper-masculinity and heteronormative femininity that shape professional soccer in the United States.

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Susan Birrell, Dr. Deborah Whaley, Dianne Williams and Cathryn Lucas, for their assistance on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Tifo is an Italian word for fan support. In the US American context, the word refers to enormous fabric displays that fans rig to the stadium infrastructure. Fans create, display and produce tifo in many national contexts.

2. The word capo is Italian. In Portland the capos stand at the front of the section and lead the chants. The practice originated in Italian organized supporter groups, but is part of soccer fandom in many national contexts.

3. For consistency, the employment of the term soccer is used for association football, although Portland Thorns Football Club is the name of team that Rose City Riveters supports.

4. Rose City Riveters members estimate that 60–70% of the group identify as women. Participant observation reflected similar numbers.

5. The 107ist takes its name from the section of Providence Park where the Timbers Army initially organized and continues to stand. Section 107 is also one of the sections where Rose City Riveters conduct their performance.

6. ‘What’s in a name? that which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet’ (Craig 1914).