“Family-Friendly” without the Double Entendre: A Spatial Analysis of Normative Game Spaces and Lesbian Fans

Abstract

In this article, I demonstrate the importance of employing a feminist geographic framework in order to both read WNBA game spaces and to understand lesbian fan participation within these spaces. I argue that attending to the production of WNBA game spaces makes visible the ways that normative cultural politics become manifest, and brings to the fore the ways that dominant relations are naturalized and rarely questioned. Further, attention to the production of these leisure spaces compels an examination of the relationship between spatialized normativity and claims to, and performances of, lesbian identity. By understanding social space as a productive force, it is possible to conduct a critical reading of the materiality of WNBA game spaces and the implications for the reproduction of naturalized (hetero)normativity. In addition, it illustrates that lesbian fan experiences and interpretations of normative WNBA game spaces must be examined in a framework that takes seriously the factors that inhibit critical engagement with (hetero)normativity, as well as the central role that lesbian fans play in the co-production of these spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• WNBA
• normativity
• spatial analysis

Notes

1. The WNBA does not gather statistics on sexual orientation, but the popular press has reported on a number of occasions that lesbians make up a sizable portion of the WNBA audience. The MN Lynx marketing professional whom I interviewed acknowledged that lesbians make up a large portion of the team's fan base. She also suggested that it may be possible to infer sexual orientation from the descriptive categories (like “WNBA-ers,” “Urban Women,” and “Kidcentrics”) developed out of fan segmentation research completed by the league prior to 2005. Any inference of percentages from these categories would be tenuous at best.

2. I used the term “non-heterosexual” in my call for participants so as to attract a range of self-identified LBTQ participants. The vast majority of respondents identified as “lesbian” (including the one transgender individual who took part), and those who identified as bisexual spoke explicitly to participating in the game space with female partners. In the dissertation (Muller, 2008) I discuss the politics of sociospatial identity formation to contend with the limitations of the “lesbian” category and to trouble essentialist notions of the category.

3. I draw on David Harvey's (1989) use of urban entrepreneurialism rather than neoliberalism, which is more commonly invoked in scholarship about the cultural politics of stadium building and professional sport in U.S. cities (e.g., Silk, 2004). Although neoliberalism points to multi-scalar changes that affect urban political economies, it is an amorphous term whose effects often become detached from specific place-based contexts. The entrepreneurial city “model” can be traced to the devolutionary trends of neoliberalism, but it offers a framework that is sensitive to the place-specific effects of changes in urban political economies.

4. For almost the duration of the Lynx franchise, until the last month of the 2005 season, Katie Smith had been the star of the show. In the video display in 2005, she is depicted unlike any other player; whereas all other athletes appear as if they are ready to start playing the game, Smith is noticeably “dolled up.” Although she is in uniform, she is represented wearing jewelry, which is absent when she is on the court, and wearing her hair styled in a more overtly feminine way, which stands in contrast to the way she wears her hair while on the court. This form of reframing athletes as “appropriately” feminine and presumably heterosexual demonstrates the function of media within the game spaces to reinforce the normative cultural politics at work in the arena.

5. This helps to explain some of the uproar around the WNBA brawl that took place during the 2008 season. The fight threatens, among other things, the league's self-image of “good girl” athletes who are wholly dissimilar from their NBA counterparts.