‘Ladies present!’: an auto/ethnographic study of women amateur golfers at an English provincial golf club

Abstract

Despite high general participation rates in golf in England and a raft of initiatives to encourage more women and younger players into golf, fewer than one in five amateur golfers in England is female and there is a real dearth of young women entering the sport. Sexist policies and practices have been posited as possible barriers to women’s and girls’ grass-roots participation in golf, but to date little qualitative research has been undertaken on the lived experiences of recreational women players themselves. To address this considerable gap, an 18-month ethnographic and autoethnographic research project was undertaken within a case study club in the English East Midlands. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with thirteen amateur women-players, ethnographic observations, detailed autoethnographic field notes and video auto-reflections, this article explores some of the key themes that emerged from the research, utilising primarily Foucauldian-feminist theoretical perspectives to frame the qualitative findings. The two key themes selected for analysis here are: (1) women’s lived experience of corporeal surveillance in golfing contexts; and: (2) discursive othering and objectification of women in golf.

Keywords:

• Women’s golf
• ethnography
• autoethnography
• Foucault
• surveillance

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the women players who so generously gave of their time in being interviewed for the project, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the original draft of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The original concept of the ‘panopticon’ is that of a central, all-seeing surveillance tower in the centre of a prison, which is built so that windows into the prisoners’ cells enable the guard in the panopticon to see into all prison cells whilst the guard remains invisible to the prisoners.

2. names to be inserted post-reviewing.