Speaker
Description
Tackle football is often seen as a masculine space where boys and men can exhibit their physical superiority over one another. The variety of roles in football places value on a diverse range of body sizes, including larger bodies (Liechty, Sveinson, Willfong & Evans, 2015). But gendered myths position women and girls as inherently smaller and frailer than men and boys (Dowling, 2000; McCaughey, 1997). So, what does that mean for girls trying to enter these masculine spaces? In this paper, I discuss the experiences that some girls have had playing on boys’ tackle football teams in Canada, the United States, and Poland between 1993-2020. The paper is based on interviews I conducted with 12 women. My presentation builds on scholarship pertaining to women’s football, co-ed sport, youth sport, and feminist understandings of embodied patriarchy and gendered body discourses. I use football as a lens to analyse how girls are taught to see their bodies’ capabilities. I argue that girls’ experiences on boys’ football teams can be empowering by helping them unlearn physical inferiority discourses and teaching them to appreciate their bodies’ capabilities beyond its size and appearance.
