Clubhouses and locker rooms: sexuality, gender and the growing participation of women and gender diverse people in Australian football

ABSTRACT

The launch of the Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) combined with the introduction of grassroots women’s Australian football across the country have challenged the landscape of Australian sport and sport media in recent years. Many young women and gender diverse people have had the opportunity to participate in contact sports such as Australian football for the first time. With this, has come exposure to off-field spaces and cultures that they have previously been excluded from, such as post-sport pub culture and locker rooms. Through qualitative interviews with grassroots players in the Hunter Region, this paper explores how spaces can encourage and provide the opportunity for women to challenge binary expectations through comradery and acceptance of masculine bodily displays in conjunction with the normalization of non-heterosexuality. We conceptualize the ‘sport-sexuality-assemblage’ as a way of accounting for the relations of desire for women and gender diverse people in a range of sport spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• sexuality
• affect
• youth cultures
• gender
• AFLW

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Steven Threadgold for initial guidance and supervision of study design and data collection, as well as the participants for their time and enthusiasm for the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kade Booth

K. Booth is a Research Assistant with the University of Newcastle. Their research interests are: gender, sexuality and sport spaces.

Adele Pavlidis

A. Pavlidis is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University. Her research interests are: sport, leisure studies, social media, feminist theory, and affect.