Lesbian visibility and the politics of covering in women’s basketball game spaces

Abstract

In this article, I use research on the lesbian fans of US women’s professional basketball (WNBA) to outline how a set of exclusive cultural politics (re)produces a curious form of self‐regulation amongst target consumers. I link leisure geographies and geographies of sexuality through an analysis of lesbian visibility to examine the ways that identity performance is shaped by the implicit cultural politics at work in WNBA arenas. I use Kenji Yoshino’s adoption of Erving Goffman’s term ‘covering’ to discuss the ways that normative ideologies are reinforced by management‐driven practices and by the self‐circumscribing practices of some lesbian fans. I show that covering is noteworthy as both an effect of marginalisation and as a mandate that encourages lesbian fans to reproduce the dominant discourse at work in WNBA arenas. I argue that act of covering illustrates the material effects of normative power relations and the ways that these effects are understood to be a natural outcome of an apolitical economic logic instead of the result of the decidedly political process of spatial production. I contend that attempts to cover give lesbian fans a false sense of power to regulate the reception of their bodies and their enactments of normativity.

Keywords:

• visibility
• covering
• lesbian fans
• gender performance
• WNBA

Acknowledgements

This text was improved by the thoughtful, constructive insights of three anonymous reviewers, Eileen Muller Myrdahl and the editors of this special issue.

Notes

1. Data on the legitimacy of US professional women’s team sports are limited, but it is possible to extrapolate from a number of sources, including pay equity for professional athletes and coaches; comparison of resources available to men’s and women’s professional leagues; statistics on television coverage and ratings for women’s team sports; and statistics on the numbers of tickets sold for women’s team sports. In almost all cases (with the possible exception of professional soccer), there is a tremendous disparity between comparable men’s and women’s team sports. See, for instance, Messner and Cooky (2010), Women’s Sports Foundation (2008) and Shelburne (2008).

2. The research was funded by the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies and the University of Minnesota Ralph Hall Brown Dissertation Fellowship.

3. Race emerged as a minor theme in individual and focus group interviews, which I interpret to mean that the majority of my respondents found the dominant whiteness of WNBA game spaces (McDonald, 2000, 2002) and their position within the racialised production of game spaces to be unremarkable. As such, most appeared to accept and participate in the reproduction of whiteness, especially in the sense of producing spaces of normative respectability (Frankenberg, 1993; cf. Darnell, 2007).

4. The ‘Kiss Cam’ is a common practice at US professional sport events. A camera‐person scans the audience, zooms in on a (heterosexual) couple, often overlaying the image with a cartoon‐like heart, and remains focused on the couple until they kiss. Wise (2009) describes the practice: [the team or arena management] ‘send[s] their video cameramen and camerawomen to find unsuspecting couples in the stands during timeouts and capture[s] their [faces] for all of Verizon Center’s crowd to see … [then] wait[s] for the couple’s reaction, which usually involves a polite, if awkward, peck on the lips’ (para. 2).

5. In post‐season 2009, there were seven independent owners of WNBA franchises who have no ties with an NBA affiliate.

6. With the exception of women’s professional soccer: the WUSA existed for three seasons (2001–2003) and re‐emerged as the WPS in 2009.

7. The size of this audience, although reported by popular press as a large, league‐wide phenomenon (see, e.g., Kort, 2005; Wise, 2009), is not quantified by WNBA statistics.

8. I pointedly do not include bisexual and transgender people in this discussion of acceptance because they are not often included in public discourse.

9. These readings were certainly racialised: anecdotal evidence, including preliminary research field notes and media coverage of the team, suggests that the game spaces of the New York Liberty games are racially diverse, and every WNBA team is racially diverse. Although Mohr never explicitly mentions race in the article, his reading can be analysed with an eye to the ways that race is inflected through associations of gender and sexuality (see King, 2009; McPherson, 2000).

10. It should be noted that, at the time of this writing in 2010, one NBA team, the Phoenix Suns, has voiced and enacted opposition to the recent passage of the Arizona law that criminalises undocumented persons and legalises racial profiling. The team adopted a new uniform (with the team name written in Spanish) for a nationally televised game in an overt protest of the law. This is an interesting counterpoint to Elizabeth’s argument for WNBA action to create a lesbian‐friendly league.