Cinderella at the (foot)ball: wives and girlfriends in Australian rules football

ABSTRACT

The football WAG is fast becoming an iconic figure in Australian culture and a crucial part of Australian football branding. The commodification of the ‘WAG’ benefits the Australian Football League (AFL) as a business and bolsters the masculinity of players because the ‘WAG’ fits within the narrow narratives about gender that are reproduced within football culture. Despite the increasing visibility of ‘WAGs’, academic scholarship has been slow to address their presence and influence, representing a significant gap in research on Australian sporting culture. This paper investigates how the AFL ‘WAG’ is represented in Australian news media and utilises the popular Brownlow Medal Award ceremony as a case study for thematic analysis. The research concludes that the ‘WAG’ is represented as a ‘trophy wife’ and that this representation functions to reinforce the dominant masculinity of her male partner. These findings are nested within academic research on sport and sexual assault and are framed by feminist theory.

KEYWORDS:

• News media
• Australian sport
• Australian football culture
• sport
• hegemonic masculinity
• WAGs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Stipend [0];Karen Halley Trust [0];Flinders University Research Scholarship [0].

Notes on contributors

Shawna Marks

Shawna Marks is a PhD candidate at Flinders University. Her doctoral research focuses on the social construction of masculinity and heterosexuality in Australian football and the intersection of sport, masculinity and sexual violence. Shawna writes and researches on feminism, masculinity, heterosexuality, violence against women, sport and other popular cultures, and issues within higher education.