Women Sport Fans: Identification, Participation, Representation

Women worldwide are making their presence felt as sport fans in rapidly increasing numbers. This book makes a distinctive and innovative contribution to the study of sport fandom by exploring the growing visibility and interest in women who follow sport. It presents the latest data on women’s sport spectatorship in different regions of the world, posing new theoretical paradigms to study the globalised nature of female sport fandom.

This book goes beyond conventional approaches to analysing the practices of women sport fans. By using a critical feminist perspective to investigate cultural conditions and social contexts (including globalisation, digital networked technologies, consumerism, neoliberalism and postfeminism), it brings into view a diversity of women’s voices and experiences as sport fans. It sheds new light on the power dynamics of gender, ethnicity and sexuality influencing women’s participation in sport spectatorship and interrogates the ways female sport fandom is made visible through transnational media networks.

Women Sport Fans: Identification, Participation, Representation is fascinating reading for all those interested in sport and gender, the sociology of sport, or women’s studies.

Kim Toffoletti is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Deakin University, Australia. She specialises in the study of women’s sporting experiences and representations, using transnational feminist and critical postfeminist perspectives. She is the co-editor of Sport and Its Female Fans (Routledge, 2012)