Sport and Its Female Fans by Toffoletti Kim;Mewett Peter;

Author:Toffoletti, Kim;Mewett, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

6 “Oh Yes, He Is Hot”

Female Football Fans and the Sexual Objectifi cation of Sportsmen’s Bodies

Kim Toffoletti and Peter Mewett

INTRODUCTION

The past decade has witnessed a growing focus on the study of women sports fans within the social sciences and related disciplines (Cere 2003; Crawford and Gosling 2004; James and Ridinger 2002; Jones 2008; Mewett and Toffoletti 2011; Pope 2011). Emerging from and responding to the historical marginalization of women in sport and the bias towards the male fan in literature on sports spectatorship, critical research on women spectators serves the valuable function of illuminating “women’s everyday experiences of being a sports fan” (Gosling 2007: 250). This chapter considers one aspect of women’s participation as followers of male sports, namely, the extent to which female fans partake in the sexual objectifica- tion of sportsmen. We aim to assess how looking at male athletes in sexually desiring ways impacts on the individual and collective construction of women’s gender and sports fan identities.

Despite the inroads being made into documenting and theorizing the various dimensions of female sports fan experience, and the considerable literature on the operations of the male gaze in sport, what appears to be lacking from existing research on sports spectatorship is a nuanced examination of how women look at the athletic male body in sexually desiring ways. We accomplish this by analyzing how female fans of the Australian Football League (AFL) discuss male footballers’ bodies as part of the experience of watching live sport. We speculate on the implications for women fans who sexually objectify sportsmen and consider the extent to which visual pleasure contributes to the maintenance and/or disruption of normative constructions of gender and sexuality in the Australian sporting context. While women who look voyeuristically at male athletes disturb the notion of the ‘authentic’ sport spectator who is understood to be male (Gosling 2007; Woodhouse and Williams 1999), we argue that the sexual objectification of sportsmen does not diminish traditional masculine authority in football, on or off the field. Moreover, women’s role as active lookers does not translate into improved fan status but can jeopardize the legitimacy of women’s sports fandom.

This chapter advances existing sport scholarship on the sexual objec- tification of sporting bodies (Wedgwood 2008), which, apart from a few studies of the visual consumption of male athletes (Mason 1992; Miller 1998; Morse 1983; Trujillo 1995), has largely focused on the institutional gaze as a mechanism regulating women’s bodies in sports media contexts (Bernstein 2002; Brandt and Carstens 2005; Buysse and Sheridan Embser- Herbert 2004; Duncan 1990; Duncan and Messner 1998; Kane and Greendorfer 1994; Lenskyj 1998; Messner, Duncan and Cooky 2003). In contrast to literature concerning sexualized images of athletes, our research attends to the experiences of women who participate as at-ground spectators of live football matches. Accordingly, we explore dimensions of specular pleasure experienced by female fans, the meanings they derive from looking at the male sporting body, and the gendered implications of ‘looking’ on the construction of the female sports fan. In order to

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