“It Was a Combination of Feeling Super Badass and…Super Inept”: Exploring Girls’

Experiences Playing on Boys’ Tackle Football Teams

By

Kasanndra Murphy

A thesis Submitted to the Department of Kinesiology and Health Studies

in conformity with the requirements for

the degree of Master of Arts

Queen’s University

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

May 2021

Copyright @ Kasanndra Murphy, 2021 Abstract

This study explores girls’ experiences playing tackle football on boys’ teams to understand how girls experience a highly masculine sport space. Tackle football is largely a space reserved for men and boys. Girls’ opportunities to play football are limited and often involve playing on teams intended for and dominated by boys. The purpose of this research was to begin to understand girls’ experiences in tackle football to highlight girls’ ongoing oppression in patriarchal societies and to consider whether football can be empowering for girls.

The idea for this research originated from my own experiences playing tackle football on boys’ teams for four years. I present my experiences alongside data I collected in interviews with

12 women from Canada, the United States, and Poland who have played on boys’ tackle football teams. These interviews, paired with my personal experiences, allowed me to identify aspects of toxic youth football cultures and, maybe surprisingly, the opportunity football presents for embodied feminist empowerment for girls.

I identify some girls’ experiences as taking place in toxic football cultures based on their experiences with microaggressions and violence. These cultures work to retain boys’ and men’s control over football spaces by plaguing girls’ abilities to play football and hindering girls’ enjoyment of the sport. Discouraging girls’ football involvement is a powerful tool of oppression, because football could, in better circumstances, be empowering for girls. Playing football against boys allows some girls to confront embodied forms of patriarchy and challenge discourses about girls’ physical inferiority. This research highlights girls’ continued oppression in patriarchal societies and the embodied nature of patriarchal norms. It also shows how girls’ physicality could be used as a tool to challenge oppressive gender structures.

ii Acknowledgements

Thank you to my supervisor, Dr Mary Louise Adams, for teaching me what it means to be a good colleague, how to always ask the next question, and for your constant support throughout this research journey. I appreciate your commitment to education and encouraging all of your students to follow their passions. Thank you for all of your support and teachings throughout this process.

Thank you to the fellow members of my “studio” that constantly provided me input and advice throughout this process. Specifically, thank you to Jen, Mustafa, Eun, Amy, Orlaith, and

Sogol for putting up with me the past few months and helping me get this finished. Our meetings were the main thing that kept me motivated during this pandemic. I really enjoyed seeing all of your faces in the little boxes even though we could not see each other in person.

Thank you to my family for encouraging me to follow my passions even when I was ready to give up. Specifically, I want to thank my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents for your constant support and encouragement in everything that I do. Thank you to my nephew Isaiah for the copious distractions that always make me smile. Your fascination with my laptop always reminds me to take breaks and focus on enjoying the process.

Thank to my friends Jessica, Willow, and Grace for helping me overcome the many stressors I experienced throughout this project.

This project would not have been possible without the women’s football community.

Specifically, I want to thank the participants of this study. Thank you for being open with me and sharing your experiences. The outpouring of support I received from the football community is something that I never dreamed was possible when I started thinking about this research.

iii Throughout my years of playing tackle football, I never really felt a part of the football community. The participants in this study instantly made me feel otherwise.

iv Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgements ...... iii

List of Tables ...... vi

List of Figures ...... vii

List of Abbreviations ...... viii

Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 2 Literature Review ...... 15

Chapter 3 Methods ...... 37

Chapter 4 Results and Analysis Part 1 ...... 55

Chapter 5 Results and Analysis Part 2 ...... 84

Chapter 6 Conclusion ...... 108

References ...... 124

Appendix A Thesis Advisory Committee / Thesis Proposal Amendment Form...... 144

Appendix B Interview Guide ...... 145

Appendix C Research Ethics Approval ...... 147

Appendix D Letter of Information and Consent Form ...... 148

v List of Tables

Table 1 Characteristics of the study participants…………………………….39

vi List of Figures

Figure 1 Recruitment Poster……………………………………………….41

Figure 2 Ill-fitting Equipment…………………………………………….103

vii List of Abbreviations

CCWFL Central Canada Women’s Football League

DB Defensive Back

DL Defensive Lineman

K Kicker

LB Linebacker

MWFL Maritimes Women’s Football League

NFL National Football League

NWFL National Women’s Football League

OL Offensive Lineman

QB Quarterback

R Receiver

RB Running Back

S Safety

TE Tight End

WAFL Women’s American Football League

WPFL Women’s Professional Football League

WR Wide Receiver

WWCFL Western Women’s Canadian Football League

viii Chapter 1

Introduction

Why This Project?

Growing up I was very athletic and loved all sports. I was introduced to football when I was 11. My uncle asked me to join a new youth tackle football team. I was excited to have the opportunity to play a new sport, so I said “yes.” It turned out that in my small town of 8000 people, so many kids wanted to play tackle football that there were enough players for two teams of 30 players in my age category. I knew that the team would have boys playing on it. I knew some of the boys that I would be playing football with from my school. But when I entered the gym for the first practice, holding my mom’s hand, and I saw my 60 teammates, I was shocked.

As a girl who had signed up for tackle football without having much knowledge of the sport, I was not expecting to be the only girl in a sea of 60 boys. Despite this initial shock, I forced myself to play and to finish the season. Football was physically gruelling and full of awkward gender experiences. After my first season, I vowed never to put myself through that again. But, two years later, I started missing football. I missed the degree of athleticism, the encouragement of coaches, the support of my teammates, and I missed feeling special as the only girl in my town who played. So, I went back and played another season in the community league I had played for previously. I then went on to play two more years of junior level football in high school.

In total, I played four seasons of football and they were all-encompassing. The recreational league I started playing in went from January to June with practices and games two or three times a week. The high school season went from late August to November with practices

5 days a week for 2 hours. High school team tryouts started before high school itself started. My first day of high school was the day I found out I made the cut for the football team, and that was

1 followed by my first team practice. But football meant more than just time with the team. Being a football player had become my main identity during early adolescence, when questions of identity loom large. When I wasn’t playing football, I was thinking about football. When I wasn’t in uniform, I was wearing team merchandise. From ages 11- 16, I was the girl who played football. So, when I decided to stop playing football, I felt lost. For years after I stopped playing football, I was embarrassed; I felt like I had let myself down because I “gave up.”

When I started to study sociology in my first year of university, I started to think retrospectively about my football experiences. Using a sociological lens allowed me to see that my football experiences were not as unique as I thought they were. Many of the experiences I had linked to larger feminist narratives about women’s inequality, expectations of femininity, and gendered policing. Feminism let me see my experiences differently. When I was playing, I thought being a girl playing football made me special and different. Is it actually a positive thing to be different? Being different by playing football opened me up to a lot of social policing and criticism. While playing football, I had internalized these negative experiences and believed that they were my fault. Sociology showed me the structures that were likely behind my experiences.

With this new perspective, I became curious about how social structures impact girls’ football experiences and what this knowledge could tell us about girls’ position in sport and society? That is what I set out to discover through this project.

In this project, I use tackle football as a lens to analyse how women and girls negotiate patriarchal social structures. Tackle football is a part of the sporting world where girls are still largely excluded because of their gender. According to Nancy Theberge (1985), sport amplifies the gender inequality and gendered separation that exists throughout social life. This perspective on sport has allowed me to understand my football involvement in a unique way and has made

2 me question whether others share those experiences. After speaking with the 12 participants in this study and reflecting on my own football experiences, I argue that girls' experiences on football teams with boys are often hindered by oppressive patriarchal structures. But, while it might sound contradictory, I also argue that girls' participation on boys’ football teams can be a tool to challenge and unlearn constraining narratives of femininity.

Situating the Involvement of Girls in Football

When referring to football in this paper I am referring to North American football or tackle football. Tackle football is a high contact field sport. There are traditionally 11-12 players a side. Players typically wear padded pants, large plastic shoulder pads, and bulky helmets with partial face guards for protection. Players are encouraged to make contact with opposing players to prevent the movement of the ball in accordance with a set of rules enforced by a referee. The goal of the game is to fight for yardage on the field by trying to advance a ball. Possession of the ball dictates the team with the possibility to score. Teams execute designed plays through short bursts of action in an attempt to reach the opposing team’s endzone to score.

The history of North American football has deep roots in post-secondary education in the

United States. The first recorded collegiate football game took place on November 6, 1869, between Princeton and Rutgers (Fields, 2008). In the 1880s, the first formal version of tackle football started when Yale, Princeton, and Harvard universities standardized a set of rules for the game (Fields, 2008). Since its inception, football has been seen almost exclusively as a sport for men and boys.

Given that tackle football is a so-called masculine sport, few people encourage women or girls to participate, including Football Canada. Football is often seen as a form of male initiation

3 that puts men “apart from and above women” (Malcom, 2006, 498). Despite the need for football to set men and women apart, girls who want to play tackle football often end up playing with boys because most girls football programs are non-contact flag football and very few girls’ only tackle programs exist (Football Canada, 2016). For example, Football Canada’s 2016

Competition Review recognized that they offer extremely limited programming for girls ages 9-

17. To address this inequality, Football Canada (2016) sought to create committees and collect feedback to understand how to better support girls’ football development in Canada. Yet I have not found any information regarding the outcomes of these initiatives. The lack of investment in girls’ football by Football Canada is one example of the limited access women and girls have had to football in Canada.

Despite the lack of opportunities for girls, women have a long history of playing football in Canada that is largely unrecorded. The earliest documentation of organized women’s football in Canada that I have found is the involvement of a Toronto team in the Women’s Professional

American Football League (WPFL) in 1969 (Rozendaal, 2016). The Toronto Canadian Belles played two games in Toronto Ontario, one in Kingston Ontario, five games in Cleveland, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before changing their name to the Toronto Trojans in 1970. They only played in the WPFL for a single season before the league collapsed (Rozendaal, 2016). An all-Canadian women’s football league did not form until 2004 when the New Brunswick

Women’s Football League (now the Maritime Women’s Football League) was founded (Football

Canada, n.d.). The Maritimes Women’s Football League (MWFL) started with two recreational women’s teams and over the past 15 years has grown to four teams (Football Canada, n.d.).

Given that the MWFL is recreational, Canada did not have a professional league until 2011 when the Western Women’s Canadian Football League (WWCFL) formed (Football Canada, n.d.).

4 The WWCFL now has eight teams from across the Prairie Provinces (Football Canada, n.d.).

With opportunities available in both Eastern and Western Canada, women in Central Canada attempted to form the Central Canada Women’s Football League (CCWFL) in 2014 to offer opportunities for players in Central Canada (Staffieri, 2015). But the league did not form because of a lack of interest during player recruitment (Staffieri, 2015).

Women in the United States have had similar challenges maintaining football involvement. But football’s roots in American culture have aided in the popularity of the sport among women in the United States. One of the earliest records of women’s tackle football is of women playing for halftime entertainment shows during men’s football games in the 1920s

(Linden, 2015). In 1926, a women’s tackle football team called the Yellowjackets played during halftime shows for the Frankford Philadelphia NFL team, with the women playing against two elderly men (Leone, n.d.). The game was more of a form of entertainment than a legitimate football match (Leone, n.d.). Women’s teams playing other full-contact teams in all women leagues did not emerge fully until the Women’s Professional Football League (WPFL) started

(and ended) in the 1960s (Linden, 2015). Despite a 40-year gap, the WPFL was, like the

Yellowjackets, seen simply as “circus-type entertainment” rather than as true athletic competition (Linden, 2015). It wasn’t until 1974 that women’s football advocates in the United

States came together to form their own league called the “National Women’s Football League”

(NWFL) (Linden, 2015). But the league folded in the 1980s because of a lack of media coverage and a small fan base (Linden, 2015). It took more than 20 years for the next nationwide league to form in the United States with the Women’s American Football League (WAFL) forming in

2001 (Linden, 2015).

5 Stories of women and girls playing football are appearing in the media more and more.

For example, Sam Gordon is a young football phenom who started playing on boys’ teams and has become a symbol for girls’ football, even appearing on the Super Bowl 50 commercial alongside NFL greats. Sam and her dad started their own girls’ league in Ohio and recently brought forth a lawsuit against 3 school districts fighting for girl's football teams (Eppolitio,

2020). In the past 5 years alone there have been a lot of "female football firsts": Toni Harris (first skill-position player to commit to a D1 college), Jen Welter (first NFL coach), Sarah Thomas

(first NFL referee), and more. While these trailblazing women may serve as role-models, girls are still struggling to gain acceptance within the sport.

My Research Project

To me, playing football with boys was like nothing I had experienced before. Football is tied to my first memories of feeling othered and constrained due to my gender. In a way, I was lucky, because I never faced any direct exclusion, bullying, or harassment while playing football.

But I did experience many micro-aggressions: sitting by myself on the bus to games, not having willing partners when we were learning to tackle, being the last picked for drills, and other subtle reminders that I was in a space not designed for me. I do recognize that to say that the first time I felt othered was not until I was 11 is a privilege. The marginalization I encountered opened my eyes to the subtle forms of oppression others may experience.

My football experiences are very contradictory. While football was difficult in many ways, playing football was also one of the best experiences of my childhood and was the main times in my life that I felt powerful. Physically, I felt the strongest I ever have. I was training daily to the point of exhaustion. I was making big hits, running, lifting weights, and using my

6 physicality to defend against players who were larger and stronger than me. I think the biggest form of strength I experienced playing football was mental. When I was in my teenage years and being bombarded with norms of femininity and being told that I was a part of the weaker gender;

I was immediately going out on the field to counter those narratives. I felt that I had overcome those beliefs and proven to myself and others that those narratives were incorrect.

Analysing my own experiences of playing on boys’ tackle football teams led me to conduct this research study. While playing football, I felt a sense of pride and strength in my ability to succeed playing a contact sport against boys, although I also faced constant subtle reminders that I was transgressing social norms. The social perspective of my experiences only became clear to me while attending university. During my undergraduate degree in Sociology, I learned about C. Wright Mills’ (1959) concept of the “sociological imagination.” I used this concept frequently to help me understand my life and experiences. Inevitably, I ended up reflecting on football, and I turned to scholarship to try and make sense of my experiences as a player. I found very little scholarly discussion of women and girls’ experiences in football. This lack of scholarship drove me to pursue sport sociology to try and find those answers.

My research for this project involved 12 semi-structured interviews with women who have played on boys’ tackle football teams in Canada, the United States, and, in one case,

Poland. In this project, I sought to understand how my experiences connect to those of other women in similar situations. Specifically, while I was playing football, I faced a lot of trials because of social constructs surrounding femininity. These experiences made me interested in how other girls negotiated norms of femininity and discourses about female inferiority in the context of football. I had found that challenging such narratives felt empowering, and I wanted to see if other girls felt similarly and to consider if football could be used as a tool to empower

7 other girls. To help me analyze the data I gathered in interviews, I rely on an array of feminist theory regarding gender, inequality and empowerment.

Theoretical Lens

In this research I draw on a variety of theories to understand the gendered experiences of girls who played on boys’ football teams. I mainly draw from post-structural feminist theories.

By post-structuralist feminism, I am referring to a process of troubling binary gender categories, theorizing how individuals become gendered subjects and questioning the perceived inevitability of gender-based actions (Davies & Gannon, 2005). A post-structural feminist perspective allows me to question taken for granted “truths” and problematize norms to challenge unequal gendered social structures.

To identify unequal social structures in this project I largely use the terms, “patriarchal societies” and “patriarchal social structures.” The idea of “patriarchy” has largely been a base for feminist analysis. In this project, I use the idea of patriarchy similar to Sylvia Walby (1990) who sees it as “a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women” (20). Walby’s key point is that patriarchy is a system created through multiple social institutions and is not based on biological truths of inferiority. In my work, I include the terms “societies” and “social structures” in order to identify the socially constructed nature of patriarchy. I reference patriarchal social structures to identify that the problems girls are facing are caused by unequal social structures that privilege men and boys.

My approach to identifying patriarchal social structures lies in post-structural feminism.

Specifically, my approach to this project is connected to Chris Weedon’s theories of gender.

Chris Weedon (1987) is a post-structural feminist who argues that the way we conceive of

8 anything in the world is influenced by discourse. Briefly, discourses are historical and social forms of meaning and knowledge, based on unequal power structures, that materialize and form objects that they speak about (Foucault, 1972). Discourses are conceived of as “truth” (Weedon,

1987). But those truths are actually only based on how we are reading the world at a given time

(Weedon, 1987). The things that we perceive as true are actually only temporarily true based on current dominant discourses (Weedon, 1987). Weedon argues that discourses are powerful because they exist in two ways that intermingle (Weedon, 1987). First, they exist within consciousness as they work to form our perceptions of the world (Weedon, 1987). Second, they exist within systems that have been put into practice and, therefore, have become materialized

(Weedon, 1987). Gender is one of those systems.

According to Weedon (1987), ways of being have become gendered to create power imbalances that position men in roles of power and women in roles of resistance. Gender is a part of discourse and subjectivity. To Weedon (1987), subjectivity is about people taking on roles in various subject positions within the larger social discourse. Individuals see gendered categories and ways of being and try to “insert” themselves within those categories that are formed through current discourse. These categories are influential in how individuals are taught to perceive of themselves and others. Although, subject positions are largely unstable because they are rooted in discourses. Subject positions change when new discourses become available, power relations change, or when subject positions grow to have more options available within them (Weedon,

1987). That is why altering the way we view gender is important. If we can surpass the gender binary or create more forms of empowered femininity, women will be able to take up subject positions that let them challenge gender structures.

9 In recognition of the post-structural feminist lens that this project employs, I feel that to be able to discuss the body in relation to gender, it is first important to clarify the differences between sex and gender. Sex is a term linked to the biological construction of people’s bodies and how those biological makeups have become categorized. In contrast, gender is learned behaviour that is socially imposed based on the cultural expectations ascribed to each sex.

Gender is reflected by notions of masculinity and femininity. Gender and sex both have many categories but are often essentialized into binary categories. The dominant sex categories are male and female and the dominant gender categories are man and woman. Typically, sex is understood as being deterministic of gender, meaning that female babies are often socialized as girls and women. Gayle Rubin (1975) explains the connection between sex and gender through the idea of the "sex/gender system," which highlights the different ways in which children are socialized into their genders as a direct co-relation to their sex.

Gender is socialized based on the way that we understand gender and gendered behaviour. Judith Butler (1990) is a leading gender theorist who argues that gender is a performance in which gender identities originate from repeated acts of similarly categorized gendered actions rather than a single seamless identity. The categorization of activities is based on a spectrum of gender where masculinity is one extreme and femininity is another. When people perform actions that are categorized on the opposing end of the spectrum, it does not signify them as a member of a different gender category. Rather, gender non-conforming acts highlight that gender is spatially and temporally located and is socially constructed (Butler,

1990). Actions that cross gender norms also reinforce the idea of gender as a spectrum because there are multiple types of masculine and feminine presentations within each gender category. As

Jack Halberstam (1998) explains in Female Masculinities, women can present as hyper-

10 masculine while maintaining their identity as a woman. For example, “tomboys” are a sub- category of women and girls that recognize masculine forms of presentation. Halberstam (1998) explains the category of “tomboys” as a recognition of girls’ performance of “boyishness” and “a disruptive form of unconventional masculinity” (51). Highlighting, that despite gender being a performance, gendered categories are broad and girls that perform masculinity can still maintain their identity as girls.

Despite the breadth in forms of gender performance, it is important to recognize that not all performances of masculinity or femininity are equally valued in society. In order to preserve culturally valued forms of gender performances, deviant gender performances are policed and devalued. An example of this can be seen in Mary Louise Adams (2011) book, Artistic

Impressions, which analyses men’s history in figure skating to understand the link between perceptions of effeminacy and sport. According to Adams, effeminacy is often discouraged in boys and men and perceived as negative because it is in opposition to other culturally valued forms of masculinity. The devaluation of effeminacy constrains boys’ and men’s actions by steering them away from activities, like figure skating, that are perceived as feminine. Despite the breadth of masculine performances including effeminacy, misogyny and a “social imperative of gender conformity” act to police men and boys into the bounds of “normal masculinity”

(Adams, 2011, 20).

Now that I have discussed the impacts of gender, I want to acknowledge the problems of using binary gendered understandings of people within my work. But, as Joan Wallach Scott

(1996) describes, like many feminist researchers I am stuck in an "inevitable feminist paradox" in which feminist researchers must engage in binary gender divisions to highlight the unequal situation of women, while also pushing to abolish the binary gender system to overcome

11 restrictive notions of gender. In this research, I acknowledge gender categories and engage with dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity. I discuss gendered bodies, gender norms in sport, and dominant forms of gender presentation. I engage with these categories and assumptions in hopes of problematizing these binary gender norms by highlighting the inequalities women and girls experience in patriarchal societies. Despite my reliance of gender binary in my research, I do hope to work towards, as Judith Lorber (2000) wrote, “using gender to undo gender” (79).

In order to avoid seeing gender as mere performance and a discursive construct, I use theories of embodied femininity throughout this project. I engage with the work of Iris Marion

Young (1980) and Martha McCaughey (1997) to highlight the embodied nature of patriarchy and to challenge existing structures that restrict girls' experiences of their bodies. These theories will be explained in more detail in my analysis chapters. Here, I will simply present the main arguments of these two key theorists.

I use Iris Marion Young’s (1980) work to understand how girls’ bodies are socially constrained. Comparing the ways that men move and use their bodies to the ways that women comport themselves, Young (1980) argues that the oppression of women is embodied. Women are taught to limit their movements, take up less space, and control their bodies in ways that men are not (Young, 1980). I use Young’s ideas to understand how girls experience embodied forms of oppression and how that oppression constrains them in football.

I use Martha McCaughey’s (1997) work on physical feminism to conceptualize the embodied aspects of football and how they connect to girls’ potential empowerment.

McCaughey originally developed the concept of physical feminism by analysing women’s self- defence classes. McCaughey argues that women’s bodies are important agents of change to help

12 women unlearn patriarchal notions of body comportment that position women as physically inferior to men. Despite the power of women’s bodies to unlearn patriarchy at an embodied level, women’s bodies are not always viewed as key to agency in feminist discourses (1997).

Drawing on McCaughey’s theory, I conceptualize girls’ bodies as agents for change by highlighting the benefits of tackle football in countering embodied forms of patriarchy.

Research Questions

The main question I aim to answer in this research is: What have been the experiences of girls who have played on youth boys’ tackle football teams?

I created two sub-questions to help me narrow down what specific aspects of girls’ experiences I seek to understand in this study:

1. What is a typical trajectory of girls in football and how is that shaped by gender?

2. What are the embodied aspects of girls’ experiences playing tackle football with boys?

Objectives

This research is carried out in pursuit of three main goals:

1) To increase understandings of gender inequality and sexism in football to challenge

unequal gender structures

2) To highlight the processes that exclude girls from culturally significant and potentially

empowering experiences like, in this case, football.

3) To identify areas requiring intervention in current boys’ systems to make coed spaces in

football that are inclusive to girls.

13 Chapter Outlines

In this thesis, I make two arguments. First, I argue that girls’ experiences on boys’ football teams are hindered by oppressive patriarchal social structures that create toxic football cultures. Second, I argue that the embodied aspects of girls’ football participation can be helpful to challenge and unlearn constraining narratives of femininity. I present my research in 5 chapters. In Chapter 2, I present a review of gender and sport literature within which I situate my research. I look at literature on feminist perspectives of women’s and girls’ bodies, sport, women’s football, youth sport, and co-ed sports. In Chapter 3, I describe the research methods of this project, explain the data collection and analysis process and provide a summary of the participants. In Chapter 4 and 5 I present my analysis of the data. In chapter 4, I tackle the first sub-question by explaining the trajectory followed by many girls who play football on boys’ teams. I take a feminist approach to understanding the patriarchal structures that girls must confront in their involvement in tackle football and discuss girls’ experiences in toxic male football cultures characterized by exclusions, microaggressions, and, in some cases, violence. In

Chapter 5, I turn my focus on the second sub-question and look at the embodied experiences of girls in tackle football. I use theories by Iris Marion Young and Martha McCaughey to challenge discourses of girls’ physical inferiority and discuss both the freeing and constraining nature of football on girls’ bodily comportment. In Chapter 6, I conclude my thesis by summarizing my findings, providing recommendations to improve the sport of football for girls and providing suggestions for future academic studies and direct interventions.

14 Chapter 2

Literature Review

In this chapter, I will be situating my research within feminist literature on sports. To begin, I present work by scholars who seek to explain the perception that women and girls are physically inferior to men and boys. These discourses impact the way that gender is understood in sports and are especially important in tackle football. In light of gendered sporting discourses and analysis of it by a variety of scholars, I argue that football is a masculine-typed sport with intrinsic links to masculine cultures. The masculine nature of football provides a variety of challenges for women that I outline by drawing on literature about women’s football. While women's football literature is an important starting point for contextualizing my research, it is missing two key elements specific to girls’ football experiences, discussions of co-ed and youth sporting structures. To contextualize the youth sports aspect of girls’ experiences, I look at youth sports literature that focuses on boys’ football and the gendering of youth sport culture more generally. I finish this chapter with a discussion of literature on co-ed sports, including studies that talk about both the difficulties girls face in co-ed sports and the potential that co-ed sports has for girls to contest oppressive gender norms.

Before I begin, I wanted to situate the work that I will be presenting. In this literature review I aim to develop a better understanding of gendered perceptions of women’s and girls’ bodies and to create a base from which to understand the experiences of girls playing on boys’ football teams. It is important to note that the information that I present is grounded by twentieth- and twenty-first century Western cultures, particularly those in North America. I want to be clear that, while they fail to acknowledge it, most of these authors speak predominantly of white, cis, middle/upper-class cultures. By presenting these literatures I am not fully presenting

15 an intersectional view of girls’ experiences. I try to address some intersectional perspectives in my analysis chapters, but a detriment of this project overall is my limited intersectional focus. I also want to note that the connotations of masculinity and femininity that emerge in this literature, and that I discuss here, are spatially and temporally situated and are based on social perceptions rather than biological or natural truths. Due to time and space constraints, it is not always possible in this chapter to discuss gender or ideas about gender in their full complexity. I am, however, conscious of how gendered categories are constructed in relation to dominant beliefs in specific social locations and are not inclusive.

An Introduction to Gendered Sport

In this section, I will be providing some context to gender divisions in sport. I begin by providing a quick historical summary of how views about women’s and girls’ bodies have been shaped and constrained by patriarchal social structures. I also explain the structures that have created gender divisions in sport and how those structures actively constrain women’s and girls’ physicality. Finally, I introduce the notion of gender-typed sport that has served to maintain sex- segregation in sport.

Women have made immense progress in gaining increased equality in many sectors of society. But men and women are still far from being treated equally. Sport is a great example of the persistent inequality between genders, because it is one of the few institutions that still clearly separates men and women (Dowling, 2000). Many scholars argue that sport’s focus on physicality leads to strong gender divides that are socially embedded and viewed as natural

(Burstyn, 1999; Caudwell, 2003; Dowling; 2000; Messner, 2000; Theberge, 1993; Lorber, 1993).

When social norms are seen to be natural or based on biological truths, they are difficult to

16 challenge. The potential to change these unequal structures often only becomes clear when we look at their origins and see that they are socially constructed.

Ann Hall (2016) provides a good overview of the history of gender division in sport in her book The Girl and the Game, which focuses on Canadian sport. Hall provides a strong link between the perception of masculine women and sport. In the 1890’s, women were not supposed to play most sports in public if the activities made them look ungraceful. Women largely did not play team sports because team sports were largely considered to be “mannish” in the early 1900s

(Hall, 2016). This link between gender and sport created an unequal development of women’s sport across Canada. For example, in the 1930s women’s softball became common in the Prairies while most women were still unable to access team sports in the rest of Canada until the late

1950s. Women’s inability to access sport forced women to start placing formal complaints about sex discrimination to provincial human rights commissions and legal battles in the early 1970s.

These legal battles led to Sport Canada’s 1981 benchmark policy about gender in sport and created a base for the women’s and girls’ continued legal struggle for access to sport spaces

(Hall, 2016).

Susan Cahn (1994) also offers a history of women’s sport in her book Coming on Strong, which focuses on the United States. Cahn’s account is especially important because she explains a connection between feminist movements and women’s sport access. Cahn (1994) outlines a strong link between the rise of organized sport and the rise of feminism in the 1920s. The 1920s are often referred to as "the golden age of sport," because there was an increase in professionalization of sport, sporting celebrities grew in importance, and sporting structures grew their bureaucracies (Cahn, 1994). The 1920s is also known as the "Flapper" era, a time when women began to enter the social realm more by engaging in leisure activities, participating in

17 sexual and consumer cultures (Cahn, 1994). During this time, some women began to display physical skills traditionally assumed to be masculine, like speed, strength, and power. These traits are things that women have always possessed. But Cahn (1994) argues that it was only when women gained more access to public space that these characteristics could be increasingly displayed.

Despite the advancements in the 1920s, women's displays of physicality have been constrained and appear sporadically over the past century. According to Patricia Vertinsky

(1990) medical discourses intended to limit women largely originated from upper class men who had access to high social status within the medical field. An example of this limitation can be seen in discourses surrounding menstruation in Britain in the late nineteenth-century. When medical professionals labelled menstruation as a medical illness and encouraged women to limit the use of their mental and physical energy, women became positioned as “victims of their entire reproductive experience” (Vertinsky, 1990, 39). The beliefs behind these nineteenth-century medical discourses are that bodies possess a limited amount of energy that they can use over the course of a lifetime, which must be balanced between mental and physical pursuits. But menstruation and childbirth use a lot of energy. Therefore, women need to restrict their energy use to avoid running out or even billing their excess use to future generations. Patricia Vertinsky

(1990) recognizes that women were not necessarily forced to restrict their activity. But dominant discourses that are perceived as medical truths are largely influential to convince women and girls that their bodies are something that needs to be monitored and restricted. These medical beliefs have changed, but there are lingering effects on how women and girls are socialized to use and conceive of their bodies.

18 Differing views of men’s and women’s bodies have justified the gender inequality that is still visible in sex-segregated sports. I use the term “sex-segregated sport” to discuss the practice of dividing players into leagues based on biological sex characteristics. Several scholars argue that sports are often sex-segregated as a way to protect the idea of women as inherently inferior

(Kane, 1995; Cahn, 1994; Coakley, 2004). Dowling (2000) argues that by separating athletes by sex, women are prevented from directly challenging men, which allows men to continue to believe that they are physically superior to women without having to provide proof.

Sports have not always been sex-segregated. In her book, Artistic Impressions, Mary

Louise Adams (2011) explains that bobsled, skeleton, skeet shooting, and synchronized swimming all began as activities where men and women competed together. Co-ed activities transformed into sex-segregated sport when sports organizations decided to codify rules that made sex-segregation seem natural (Williams, 2003). In the case of bobsled, when the sport gained elite status it suddenly was deemed too dangerous for women to compete (Cronin, 2001).

This new concern for women’s safety also coincided with women’s success. Katherine Dewey won the United States Bobsleigh Championship when it was co-ed in the 1930s and US women were barred from the sport in 1938 (Adams, 2011). Women could not even compete in Olympic bobsleigh until the 1990s where they now participate in sex-segregated categories. Sex- segregation in sport seems to be based on physical differences. But the history of sex-segregation highlights a practice based on the desire to maintain patriarchal social structures through strict policies of separation.

Gender typing of sports works more covertly than sex-segregated sport. Sex-segregated sport specifically creates sporting spaces for men and women and overtly enforces those sex- divisions. In contrast, gender typing in sports works covertly by creating understanding of sports

19 as a sport for girls or a sport for boys. Mary Louise Adams (2011) argues that “sport typing” is less prevalent now but the binary view of sports as gendered is still visible in some sports.

Understanding gender typing in sport is important because they have real effects on participants.

Adams (2011) uses the example of figure skating and notes that men in figure skating often face complications associated with participating in a sport typed for girls and girls in figure skating can often have their achievements diminished. Ideas that led to sports becoming gender typed are based in femininity and masculinity norms. Sports that highlight flexibility, fine motor skills, and endurance are seen as feminine (Theberge, 2000). In contrast, sports that value physicality, face- to face competitions, force, and power are considered masculine (Koivula, 2001; Ross &

Shinew, 2008). Brenda Riemer and Michelle Visio (2003) tested these stereotypes by asking 365 school children in the United States whether they thought a boy or girl would play each sport.

Riemer and Visio (2003) found that football was perceived as a sport for boys and participants felt that individuals should be able to play any sport they want but sports are still perceived to be tied to a specific gender.

To understand more about which sports are currently viewed as masculine or feminine I look to Mélissa Plaza, Julie Boiché, Lionel Brunel, and François Ruchaud’s (2017) study. In this study, participants looked at gender-neutral silhouettes of athletes in various sports and then stated the gender that they believed matched the silhouettes. Plaza and colleagues (2017) argue that sports are gendered because participants saw girls in silhouette athletes participating in sports that were socially marked as feminine and boys in silhouette athletes participating in sports that were socially marked as masculine. Sports such as dance, twirling baton, riding, and gymnastics had the highest connection to girls (Plaza et al., 2017). In contrast, sports such as bodybuilding, motorcycle racing, rugby, kickboxing, and ice hockey had the highest connections

20 to boys (Plaza et al., 2017). This study is important because it highlights how engrained gender- norms are in sport. Additionally, it illustrates that these participants view some sports to be mostly only available to either girls or boys.

When girls play sports marked for boys, girls help reimagine gendered sport perceptions and femininity norms. Collette Dowling (2000) and Michael Messner (2002) argue that when women and girls play masculine-typed sport their participation becomes a part of the cultural imagery and challenges traditional views of gender by highlighting women’s athleticism in opposition to assumptions of weakness and passivity. Fiona Gill (2007) adds that when women start to engage in sport, they actively resist many feminine aspects of disciplining bodies and construct new forms of femininity. Gill (2007) uses the example of women playing rugby to argue that femininity norms teach women that their bodies are “passive, fragile, and disembodied” (416). But, playing contact sports teaches women to restrict feminine norms and to display masculine forms of embodiment such as being aggressive, physical, and to occupy space.

The new ways that women learn to engage with their bodies can help change the way that women and girls view their bodies in relation to gender by highlighting the ability to resist the confines of femininity and show alternative forms of feminine presentation. Creating new forms of femininity by deviating from gender marked sporting norms can be an incredibly powerful tool for women and girls to overcome embodied forms of masculine domination that underpins gendered sporting structures.

Football and Masculinity

Tackle football is a heavily gendered sport that is linked to masculine culture. In this section I begin by explaining the perception of football as masculine. Next, I explain how some scholars understand football as a tool to teach masculinity to boys and how the masculinity

21 football teaches can be problematic. Finally, I explain how football has remained a masculine space by policing and restricting women and girl’s involvement.

Football is largely viewed as a masculine-type sport. Many scholars argue that football is the sport most associated exclusively with men and boys (Schmalz & Kerstetter, 2006; Koivula,

2001). For example, Dorothy Schmalz and Deborah Kerstetter (2006) asked 444 school aged children in Pennsylvania which sports they think boys can play and which sports girls can play.

Of the 30 sports on their list, football had the most decisive gender divide with 70.4% of participants stating that they think only boys can play football (Schmalz & Kerstetter, 2006).

This intense belief that football is a masculine sport is unsurprising. Messner (1996) explains that football is not only a masculine sport, but it is integrally linked to masculine culture, it is a tool for male initiation, and potentially the “last bastion” of male hegemony (Messner, 1996; 2001).

Agreeing with Messner, many scholars describe football as a tool of masculinization and a form of male initiation (McDonagh & Pappano, 2008; Malcolm, 2006; Packard, 2009).

Football’s tight connection to masculine culture is rooted in the history of the sport.

Theodore Roosevelt was a large supporter of tackle football. Roosevelt saw the sport as a tool to help men maintain the “virility” that came with the kind of “strenuous life” that was less common after World War II as more and more men engaged in white-collar labor in the United

States (Cahn, 1994, p.11). Football offered a space for men to retain their physicality. In contrast,

Cahn (1994) suggests that the rise of football may have been influenced by women’s advocacy movements. Following World War II, women’s advocacy groups started growing and putting pressure on patriarchal structures (Cahn, 1994). Football became a space for men to highlight their perceived physical superiority over women. Either way, football become popular as a space for men to maintain their physical superiority over women in patriarchal societies. This history

22 of the sport has largely shaped football’s current position as a sport mostly for men and boys. By seeing football as a space to preserve masculinity, women’s and girls’ football involvement becomes problematic and intrusive.

One of the problems of football’s presence as a place to preserve masculinity is that it largely teaches hypermasculinity. Hypermasculinity refers to exaggerated masculine behaviour that emphasise strength, aggression and sexuality (Mosher & Sirkin, 1984). Research suggests that football coaches and players can often foster concerning forms of masculinity. Contact sport and football cultures have been found to lead to bullying, fighting, and violence (Kreager, 2007;

Forbes, Adams-Curtis, Pakalka, & White, 2006). These actions are also commonly directed at women (Messner, 2002; Muir & Seitz, 2004; Robidoux, 2001; Crosset, 2000). Football has a reputation as a sport that fosters violence.

There are several theories about why football may lead to the violent behaviours that are characteristic of hypermasculinity. Derek Kreager (2007) uses a United States National

Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health from 1994-2001 to analyse how high school sport connects to male violence. Kreager (2007) finds a high correlation between contact sports and adolescent violence and notes that football players and wrestlers show the highest likelihood of being involved in serious fights. Kreager (2007) argues that the hypermasculine behaviours seen in football players are connected to the value that football cultures place on physical aggression as something that can increase players' prestige and lead to success on the field. In football spaces, aggression is a positive thing that is seen as an important marker of masculinity (Kreager,

2007). This connection between masculinity and aggression is problematic because players often reproduce aggressive behaviours outside of sport spaces in pursuit of prestige (Kreager, 2007).

Football’s connection to aggression can also help explain the privileged social location that

23 players occupy because they are executing hypermasculinity, which is often a valued form of gender presentation.

A second theory that can explain the link between football and hypermasculinity is

Michael Messner’s (2002) categorization of football as a “center sport.” Football, basketball and hockey are center sports. They tend to hold higher forms of social value, are closely tied to institutions, receive more funding and support than other sports, and are used as sites for male socialization (Messner, 2002). Center sports are often also gender typed as masculine (Anderson,

2008). Football, and other center sports, teach orthodox masculinity that can be antiwoman, misogynous, and homophobic (Messner, 2002). The social value placed on center sports that foster problematic forms of masculinity are evident of the social value placed on these forms of masculinity. By praising athletes in center sports and using center sports as an important form of male socialization, it recreates hypermasculine gender performances that continue to harm women and girls.

Football’s categorization as a center sport and its link to masculine culture leads to resistance toward the girls and women who threaten football spaces. When girls play football, they challenge the sport’s status as a socially valued space exclusively for men and boys. Men often police and place heavy restrictions on girls and women who seek to enter football spaces.

For example, Bobbi Knapp (2011) argues that women and girls often need "gatekeepers" to help them get into football spaces. In this context, the term "gatekeeper" refers to a person who is in an insider position with a team, typically a player or a coach, and who can vouch for a woman who is looking to participate on a men’s team (Knapp, 2011). When women and girls are granted space in the sport, they are often policed heavily by only being granted access to perform specific roles. Randall Curren and J.C. Blokhuis (2018) argue that football creates a “two-tiered

24 gender system with men on top.” This two-tiered gender system allows women and girls entrance to football spaces in non-player roles such as team moms/caretakers, officials, and coaches, as we can now see in the NFL (Curren & Blokhuis 2018; Messner & Bozada-Deas,

2009). Even when women and girls do enter as athletes, football structures have informal methods to contain their effects on the game (Adams & Leavitt, 2018). For example, Lois

Byrson (2003) argues that women and girls enter masculine sporting spaces on unequal terms with men and boys. Women and girls entering sporting spaces often have their achievements ignored and they face layered barriers to prove themselves (Byrson, 2003). Women and girls are likely discouraged from entering sports spaces because of the added barriers they face. Women and girls still commonly face barriers when trying to enter football spaces. The barriers that women and girls have to face in sports, like football, often aid in maintaining football spaces’ masculine status by keeping girls out.

Women and girls who manage to enter football spaces often are policed and face a variety of social stigmas. For example, professional women football players are often punished for interfering in masculine space by being discounted as having limited football skills and not being physical (Packard, 2009). Women who play football are often labelled as gay as a way for spectators to make sense of the women’s masculine football performance (Packard, 2009). Many women and girls who participate in so-called masculine sports are gay. Nevertheless, the assumption that women who play masculine sports must be gay is a tool to maintain dominant notions of femininity by positioning those that perform contrary to these beliefs as outsiders

(Broad, 2001; Kane, 1995; Koivula, 2001).

25 Sex-segregated Women’s Football Literature

In order to understand the structures of women and girls’ football I will start by presenting the existing literature specific to women’s football. Most women’s football scholarship focuses on professional football players’ gender experiences in relation to their identity as football players. The women’s football literature I analyse shows how scholars understand women’s football experiences and the common narrative of women’s football as empowering. There is not a lot of scholarly work on women and girls in football. The work that I have chosen to present here has a sociological focus and presents a narrative about women’s empowerment through engagement in the masculine space of football.

An important article about women’s football that I draw on for my study is Josh

Packard’s (2009) “Running Off-Tackle Through the Last Bastion: Women, Resistance, and

Professional Football.” Packard (2009) views women’s football participation as a form of resistance to the social institution of gender. By conducting 200 hours of observations and 20 interviews with women from the National Women’s Football Association (NWFA) Dragons’ team, Packard (2009) identifies three factors that he argues must be in place for resistance to patriarchal social structures to occur through women’s football participation: players must consciously resist norms, football for women must be considered “deviant”, and resistance must be done as a group. Packard’s analysis of women’s football as gender deviant is heavily referenced in other literature on women’s football and is useful for helping us understand how girls’ football experiences may be empowering, while they are also marked as deviant and stigmatized. Packard highlights the importance of recognizing gendered social structures when studying women’s football. Although, I wonder if Packard would have gotten similar results with a different team. The idea that a team must collaboratively resist gender norms seems

26 contradictory. If the norms are deviant, deviant groups may not always exist. But individuals may be able to alter team cultures to help create new team norms that act to resist gender norms.

Bobbi Knapp has written a lot about women’s tackle football. One of Knapp’s (2011) articles that I found interesting is “Becoming a Football Player: Identity Formation on a

Women’s Tackle Football Team.” In this paper, Knapp (2011) uses a feminist interactionist framework to analyse 10 semi-structured interviews, her own experiences playing football, and two years of observations with a professional women’s football team from the midwestern

United States. Knapp (2011) finds that women who play football develop their identities in relation to a chain of influences: new players’ identities are based on the identities of veteran players and veteran players’ identities are influenced by the identities of their male coaches.

Male coaches largely form their identities in men and boys’ football settings. The connection between women’s football identities and male coaches highlights that women’s football is recreating masculine sport structures (Knapp, 2011). Knapp focuses on the similarities between women’s and men’s football identities, but what differences exist between men’s and women’s football identities? Knapp’s study is based on a single team. I wonder if her results would be different if she studied a team with more women on the coaching staff?

In a 2014 article, "Smash Mouth Football: Identity Development and Maintenance on a

Women's Tackle Football Team," Knapp looks at how teams work together to stage the routine of playing football. The purpose of this article is to understand how women form their identities as football players. Knapp’s research is important because the players perceive women’s football identities as a new way of being given the lack of representation of women in football. Knapp

(2014) identifies major themes that she found to be consistent among the members of the team: playing "the right way," recognizing the uniqueness of their position as women who play

27 football, and demanding respect. She suggests that these themes demonstrate women’s and girls’ positions as outsiders within football spaces. Women’s feelings of being unique was an outcome of football that the participants in my study enjoyed the most. But the fact that women still need to demand respect in football shows their continued positioned as outsiders who are trying to fight their way in.

While both Knapp and Packard talk about identity and the potential for women to feel empowered within football, neither of them talk about the embodied aspects of women’s football experiences. An article that has heavily influenced the way that I understand players’ embodied football experiences is Toni Liechty, Fleesha Wilfong, Katherine Sveinson, and Kate Evans’s

(2015) article, “It Doesn’t Matter How Big or Small you Are… There’s a Position for You':

Body Image Among Female Tackle Football Players." Liechty and colleagues (2015) analyze interviews with 15 women who play football in Western Canada to understand the impact football has had on the women’s experiences of their bodies. Liechty and colleagues (2015) found that women in football tend to have a positive body image and appreciate their bodies in terms of function rather beauty. However, football creates challenges for players' body image as they try to negotiate feminine appearance norms off the field alongside body requirements for success on the field (Liechty et al., 2015). Liechty and colleagues’ (2015) unique focus on body inclusivity in football and how that can lead to women's empowerment has reminded me to conceptualize the body as central to girls' sporting experiences. Their work has pushed my thinking about girls' football experiences beyond an analysis of girls’ socially constructed gender presentation and towards a discussion of the ways that gender norms work in conjunction with girls’ physicality to both constrain and empower girls who play the sport.

28 The notion of empowerment is common in women’s football literature. In Packard's

(2009) and Knapp's (2011) work, they talk about players' ability to inspire women and girls through their football participation. Despite a history of women's football dating back to the

1920s (Leone), Packard (2009) and Knapp (2011) both find that women who play football see themselves as "pioneers" and "trailblazers" in the sport. Similarly, Liechty and colleagues (2016) argue that by participating in football, women become role models and create new possibilities for others to join the sport. These claims about the potential of football speak to how women who play football view themselves as symbols of empowerment. Whether or not these women have actually empowered others is not clear, because the researchers who make these claims have only spoken to football players.

While some scholars focus on the potential of football to empowerment women, Cheryl

Cooky and Mary MacDonald (2005) emphasize the importance of critically analysing the idea that women’s sport is a site of empowerment. Empowerment narratives can ignore histories and practical realities that constrict women and girls’ sporting opportunities (Cooky & MacDonald,

2005). Narratives like the ones referenced in Nike’s “just do it” slogan put the onus on individual women and girls achieve athletic excellence. They disregard the way that patriarchal structures operate to limit women and girls’ physical capabilities and access to sport spaces (Cole & Hribar,

1995; Cooky & MacDonald, 2005; Helstein, 2003; Lucas, 2000). Cooky and MacDonald’s

(2005) critical perspective is missing from narratives of empowerment in women’s tackle football. From my own experiences, it is a lot to expect from people who are playing football for fun to be empowering role models for others. As Cooky and MacDonald (2005) argue, empowerment narratives present the structural gender inequalities seen in sport as things that individual athletes can overcome rather than issues that require large scale social change.

29 Co-ed Sport

Girls playing co-ed sport face additional challenges when compared to girls in sex- segregated sport. To understand some of these challenges, I look to co-ed sport literature.

Specifically, I focus on youth sport and on the experiences of girls. I begin by explaining gender segregation in sport. Then, I explain the importance of co-ed sport as a place for girls to challenge patriarchal social structures. Finally, I present specific pieces of scholarly work that have had an impact on how I view co-ed sport.

Co-ed sport can be a powerful tool to challenge gender segregation in sport. Jane

Sunderland (2004) argues that there is a common fear among men that women will outperform them. When sport is kept separate, it is easy for men to spin a perception of their superiority

(Sunderland, 2004). But when women are given the opportunity to directly challenge men in physical pursuits like sport, women can challenge the perceived dominance of men (Sunderland,

2004).

By giving women and girls the ability to directly challenge men in physical pursuits, co- ed sport can be incredibly empowering for women and girls. Mary Jo Kane (1995) argues that to gain further gender equality, we should have co-ed sports as a way to show similarities in ability between sexes to help deconstruct binary perceptions of men’s and women’s athletic performances. Several scholars agree with Kane, arguing that it is important to allow men and women to share sports spaces to highlight similarities in physicality and skill (Henry &

Comeaux, 1999; Wachs, 2002). These beliefs have been tested in a study by Eric Anderson

(2008) who found that when men and women compete in integrated sports contexts, men often gain more admiration and respect for women and women's athletic abilities.

30 Despite the potential for change offered by co-ed sport, Jacqueline McDowell and

Spencer Schaffner (2011) argue that women’s participation in sports with men is likely not going to create large scale change. McDowell and Schaffner (2011) review The Gender Bowl, which is a reality television event that featured a women’s tackle football team playing full-contact football against a random group of men who used to play football in high school. McDowell and

Schaffner (2011) note that the men displayed "conservative gender relation discourses” by actively trying to preserve football as a masculine space. In contrast, the women displayed discourses of egalitarian gender relations as they tried to gain acceptance into the football space by adopting aspects of masculinity (McDowell and Schaffner, 2011). McDowell and Schaffner

(2011) conclude by arguing that these competing discourses suggest that women are not able to make social change simply through their participation in sport with men. Rather, men and boys need to change their own gender ideologies for meaningful social change to occur (McDowell and Schaffner, 2011). The Gender Bowl is an exaggerated example of co-ed sport because the teams were largely unequal, and the game was designed exclusively for entertainment.

McDowell and Schaffner’s findings are important, because if men and boys were truly willing to include women and girls in sport as equals, then my research would not be necessary; patriarchal structures would not persist. Studying the experiences of women and girls is important for gaining a better understanding of the inequality in society. But it is also important to remember where the inequality originates.

Men’s and boys’ feeling about co-ed sport can have a big impact on girls’ experiences.

Shane Aaron Miller (2010) analysed his daughter’s experiences while wrestling against boys to discuss the fluidity of gender and the codification of masculinity and femininity in sporting spaces. Miller (2010) found that boys’ losses to girls are especially impactful because of “the

31 strong vested interests that are placed on gender norms, and the confusion and disappointment that result when those norms are violated” (p.171). When girls win against boys in masculine sporting spaces, boys’ masculine identities can come into question because of engrained norms of boys’ and men’s physical superiority (Miller, 2010). The questioning of the inferiority discourses that girls’ wins can create is an important feminist aim for dismantling patriarchal structures. Such losses come at a real cost to individual boys. There are incredibly large gains available for women and girls in co-ed sporting spaces by challenging sporting structures. But it is important to recognize that those challenges can be problematic for men and boys who are currently benefitting from the patriarchal structures.

Youth Sport

The participants in my study are sharing their experiences in the context of youth sport.

Girls face unique challenges in sport as compared to adult women. I designed this section to provide some insight into the unique aspects of sport designed for youth. Specifically, I explain the current trends in girls’ sport participation, the role of parents in shaping children’s sports experiences, and their ideas about gender appropriate sport. Finally, I look at how youth sport structures are gendered and how that affects athletes’ social status.

Youth sports participation rates are declining and are unequally distributed based on gender. The Tucker Center is a research group at the University of Minnesota that studies women and girls in sport. In their 2018 report, the Tucker Center found that less youth are participating in sport and that this trend has been occurring for the past 10 years. The rate in which youth sports participation are declining is also impacted by gender. Adolescent girls are almost three times more likely to stop playing sports than adolescent boys (Staurowsky et al., 2015; Stuart &

32 Whaley, 2005; Tucker Center 2018). The rate of girls’ attrition from masculine-typed sports during adolescence is even higher (Guillet, et al., 2006). Although, social support can help keep girls interested in sport and encourage them to continue in masculine-typed sports (Abadi & Gill,

2020).

One of the forms of social support that can make a big impact on keeping girls in sports are parents. Parents play a large role in how children learn to perceive of sport as gendered. Maureen

Weiss and C.T. Hayashi (1995) show that having parents who are supportive and involved in their child's sport participation led to an increase in the child's involvement in sport. Honorata

Jakubowska and Dominika Byczkowska-Owczarek (2018) conducted a study that found that families with higher social capital are more approving of their children playing “gender inappropriate sports,” because they were less impacted by the social costs associated with their decision. Given that parents are often required to pay for, sign up, transport, and otherwise support children in sports, parents have a lot of control over the activities their children participate in. Parents socialize boys and girls into sport differently according to gendered sports norms (Miller & Levy, 1996). A multitude of factors affect how children are socialized into sport by their parents. For example, parents who participate in sports often aid their daughters to be more involved in sports and report less of a gender role conflict as a result of their sport participation than parents who do not participate in sports (Miller & Levy, 1996). There are countless other factors that can affect how parents socialize children into sports, but these examples highlight that parents have a large impact on whether girls can compete in gender non- conforming sport and how girls negotiate their presence in those sports when they do participate.

One of the many reasons that some people view girls’ sport as "second rate" can be analysed in the differing approaches to youth sport based on gender. Jay Coakley (2006) argues

33 that there are two distinct approaches to sport: the "participation-model" and the "performance model." The performance model of sport demonstrates a desire to win, dedication, intensity, and

"an aggressive pursuit of athletic superiority" (Cooky, 2009, p.276). In contrast, the participation model focuses on play, social connections, and mutual enjoyment of sport with competitors

(Coakley, 2006). Often, boys’ sports teams appear to follow the performance model of sport and girls’ sports teams use the participation model (Coakley, 2006). Cheryl Cooky (2009) argues that these varying approaches to sport often lead coaches to recreate sporting structures designed to keep girls out. Cooky (2009) argues that the participation model of sport that girls are commonly socialized into often leads parents and coaches to believe that girls are uninterested in sport and competition. This perception often recreates structures that justify women’s and girls’ exclusion from high-level sport (Cooky, 2009).

The structures that exclude girls from high-level sport also affect how girls’ sport is perceived and the social status awarded to athletes. Sohaila Shakib and Michele Dunbar (2002) argue that gender is often a larger factor in the social status attributed to youth athletes than athletic success. Shakib and Dunbar (2002) asked high school students their views on their school's sports teams and found that students viewed their boys' basketball team as having more social value than the girls’ team; despite the girls' team having a much better win record than the boys' team. Carly Adams and Stacey Leavitt (2018) found similar narratives positioning girls' hockey as "second rate" and argue that these gendered perceptions of sport highlight how sport can reproduce masculine domination and that individual efforts are often ineffective at changing patriarchal social structures. When girls’ sport participation is being positioned as “second rate” it re-creates systems of inequality for women and girls in sport by providing less resources, creating a less competitive sporting cultures, and pushing girls out of sport space.

34 Michael Messner provides a strong view of gender in youth sport structures in his 2002 book Taking the Field. Messner analyses what he noticed watching his son’s first season playing on a boys’ soccer team. Boys and girls displayed a lot of similarities in soccer skill, attention to the game, and physical capabilities. Despite these similarities, parents were quick to discuss their beliefs of the need for sex-segregation. Messner (2002) theorizes that sex-segregation in youth sport may create spaces where gender seems to disappear because gender differences diminish.

But, when sex-segregated settings cross, or when girls enter boys’ sport settings, it leads to

“highly charged gendered interactions” (Messner, 2002, 11). These interactions are important to understand for my work because girls are infringing on boys’ spaces. Although, Messner’s theorization that sex-segregated sport may allow gender to “disappear” is problematic because gender performances hold different social values and because the oppression girls experience based on their gender can continue in sex-segregated settings.

The continued oppression of girls in sex-segregated spaces is evident in Bethan Evans

(2006) study of girls in same-sex physical education aged 13-16 in Liverpool in 2001. Evans

(2006) found that the “male gaze” impacted girls while playing in co-ed spaces and in girls only spaces. The idea of a “male gaze” is rooted in Foucault’s (1977) ideas that being looked at and doing the looking is about a relationship of dominance with the person doing the looking holding power. The person holding the power is often men because women are often expected to “look right” for a masculine gaze (Rose, 1993, 145). Evans found the male gaze had a large impact in how the girls participated in co-ed physical education because girls felt pressure to present to boys as “passively beautiful” and to show their athletic competence (Evans, 2006, 547). Evans

(2006) also found that the male gaze still impacted girls in single-sex physical education, which shows that the male gaze has been internalized. Young girls are already learning to place

35 restrictions on their bodies based on internalized gender beliefs that continue to impact them in sex-segregated spaces. Understanding how girls experience youth sport is imperative to understanding unequal gendered sport systems. The entire system for women and girls in sport is disadvantaged when girls are being discouraged from fully engaging their bodies and participating in sport at a young age.

Conclusion

The literature that I have presented in this chapter has covered an array of topics that all focus on feminist perspectives of sport, gender, and embodiment. Throughout this literature review, I introduced scholars’ arguments about patriarchal social structures and how they operate to control women and girls’ bodies, opportunities, and sport participation. To provide context to my research, I drew particularly from work discussing gendered sport, masculinity in football, women’s football, co-ed sport and youth sport. The literature that I have presented suggests that society is largely patriarchal, and these unequal structures are especially relevant in sex- segregated sporting spaces and masculine-typed sports, like football. Sporting spaces can be challenging for women and girls, but they also provide opportunities to challenge patriarchal structures through co-ed sport and empowerment. The scholarship that I present in this chapter will be revisited in chapter 4 and 5 when I analyse my research findings. In the next chapter, I will present the methods that I used to conduct my study.

36 Chapter 3

Methods

This project is designed to establish a more comprehensive understanding of what it is like for a girl to play on a boys’ tackle football team. In order to do this, I conducted this study using 12 semi-structured interviews with women who had played on youth boys’ football teams when they were younger. The 12 participants’ experiences spanned three different countries: six women played in the United States, five in Canada, and one in Poland. I collected my data in

May of 2020 during the peak of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. As a result, all of my interviews were conducted remotely using Facetime and Zoom on my iPhone.

My video camera, laptop, and a backup laptop were used as recording devices. The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours.

During the interviews I used an interview guide that I created based on previous studies of women’s tackle football as well as my own personal experiences playing on a boys’ tackle football team (Appendix B). I chose this semi-structured interview approach because these types of interviews are considered a strong research tool that can increase rapport between a researcher and their respondents (Ritchie, et al., 2014). Additionally, interviews are a strong tool to elicit personal accounts and motivations, private subjects, and social norms (Ritchie et al., 2014).

Ethics

I received ethics approval for this project from the Queen’s University General Research

Ethics Board (GREB) (Appendix C). I submitted my formal ethics application in the first week of February 2020. I waited a month for my first set of revisions and another month for my second set of revisions. I completed a third set of revisions to eliminate the option of in-person

37 interviews as a result of new restrictions from the General Research Ethics Board in response to

COVID-19. Finally, I received my ethics approval in late April 2020. My ethics process was heavily delayed as a result of COVID-19. I thank the reviewers for their help in ensuring this project could still be carried out safely for myself and all of the participants despite the circumstances.

Participants

In this study, I look at the experiences of girls who have played on organized boys’ tackle football teams. I created several criteria to consider when selecting the participants for this study:

1. Identified as a girl at the time of participation

2. Involved in an organized tackle football league. (By organized league, I am

referring to league play that has regularly scheduled games, practices, and pre-

determined teams and coaches)

3. Played on a team where a majority of players identified as boys.

4. Participated during youth or adolescence (age 4-17)

5. Were over the age of 18 at the time of this study

I was able to recruit 12 participants: 6 from the United States, 5 from Canada, and 1 woman from Poland. Of the 12 participants in this study, 9 of them had been the only girl on their teams when they played. Eight of the women continued to play football on women’s teams as adults. All of the participants identified as coming from middle class families. Of the 12 participants, 7 identified as white, 4 did not disclose their racial identity, and one woman identified as Indigenous and white-passing.

38 Table 1: Characteristics of Study Participants

Where When How Long Approximate Positions Only Girl? Age Elly N. US 1993-1997 4 years 8-11 LB, RB Y Alex E. US 2000 1 year 10 LB Y Toni Poland 2019-2020 2 years 16-18 RB Y Logan E. Canada 2005-2008 3 years 11-16 RB, WR Y Anna S. US 2014-2015 2 years 16-18 OL Y Lauren S. US 2007-2008 >1 year 17 K Y Abby E. Canada 2011-2016 5 years 13-18 DB, S, R N Morgan E. US 2004 >1 year 14-15 undeclared unknown Sam E. Canada 2003-2007 4 years 12-16 DL, DB, Y OL Izzy E. US 2000-2005 5 years 9-14 DL, OL, TE Y Brooke C. Canada 2010-2012 2 years 14-16 QB, R N Vicky C. Canada 2012-2016 4 years 14-18 DL, OL N *Reference list of Abbreviations for Positions

Recruitment

To recruit participants, I originally intended to rely on convenience sampling by contacting women with whom I had previous connections and who had played on a boys' football team. I posted my recruitment poster on my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, and I directly contacted people I know who met the participation criteria. After several weeks, I only had two participants. Starting to get concerned for my study, I began posting on women’s tackle football Facebook pages. I posted on several pages and began to get a lot of engagement from one of them. I quickly reached the 15-participant limit I had set for my study. But I was unable to organize interviews with four of these women. Therefore, I used snowball sampling to find my 12th participant.

In addition to convenience sampling and social media recruitment, I also used snowball sampling techniques by asking several participants if they were willing to share my study with others who met the criteria. Snowball sampling, as explained by Patrick Biernacki and Dan

39 Waldorf (1981), involves a chain of referrals in which insiders help to locate study participants.

Snowball sampling is often used in sociological research, because it is a good way to find hard to reach participants, especially when talking about sensitive issues, and it provides a sample of individuals with naturally occurring commonalities (Biernacki & Waldorf, 1981). To perform snowball sampling, I asked many of the participants to share my research poster with their football communities and friends. Many of the participants were willing to help with recruitment, but I was only able to recruit one participant through this method. The participants’ willingness to help with snowball sampling exceeded my capacity for participants in this study. Near the end of my interviews, I had to tell participants who offered to share the study to refrain from doing so given my 15-participant limit.

In the end, I conducted 12 interviews, which greatly surpassed my expectations for this study. The ideal number of interviews for a qualitative study is often debated and heavily dependent on the nature of the study (Baker & Edwards, 2012). In my study, I focus on each participant’s experiences, but weave the women’s experiences together to create a more cohesive narrative. Therefore, I feel that 12 interviews are perfect for my study to reach the depth that I desired for each interview and the time limitations related to master’s level research.

Social Media as a Recruitment Tool

I advertised this study on social media by posting my recruitment poster (Figure 1) on

Facebook and Twitter along with a short explanation about myself and the study.

40 Figure 1

Recruitment Poster

I began by posting on my personal accounts where many of my “friends” and

“followers” “shared” and “retweeted” the post to increase its reach. Social media, and Facebook

41 in particular, have often been praised by researchers for their ability to be used as recruitment tools because they are cost-effective, relatively anonymous, widespread, and accessible

(Thornton et al., 2016; Amon et al., 2014; Carter-Harris et al., 2016). Some scholars have found that Facebook pages are a great recruitment tool to connect with hard-to-reach populations

(Kayrouz, et al., 2016; Lijadi & Van Schalkwy, 2015). On Twitter, you can track how many people have seen your post and, in my case, I had surpassed 2000 views within a week. Despite the vast number of people viewing my posts, this method only allowed me to recruit two participants.

After several weeks of recruiting, I started looking for alternative methods. At the outset of this study, one of my biggest concerns had been recruitment, because I knew that I was trying to study a “hard to reach population”. I use “hard to reach population” to describe a study population where a random sample would be difficult to achieve due to cost and an inability to create a sampling frame (Goodman, 2011). When it comes to football, girls who have to play with boys as teammates are often subject to discourses that position their participation as abnormal. This can make it hard for girls who play on boys’ football teams to form a strong sense of community with one another. Also, there are not a lot of girls who have had this experience. I wondered how I would recruit participants for my study given that members of the community of women who had once played football with boys are generally geographically distant from each other. I decided to start posting on women’s football Facebook pages. I was unable to find any Facebook groups specifically for girls who play or previously played boys’ tackle football. But I did find several Facebook groups that specialize in discussions surrounding women’s football. These pages attract hundreds to thousands of women and offer women a platform for learning about opportunities to play competitive women's tackle football, sharing

42 videos of drills and games, and advertising women's football events, apparel, and training sessions. Despite the pages being focused on women’s football rather than youth football, I was able to recruit 10 participants through this method. This recruitment process demonstrated the importance of figuring out where participants are most likely to be, as opposed to relying on personal connections or very general mass distribution.

One of the main concerns with using social media as a recruitment tool is the possibility of selection bias. Lori Wozney, Karen Turner, Benjamin Rose-Davis, and Patrick J McGrath

(2019) argue that some groups can be overrepresented in your study as a result of Facebook recruiting based on which population is most likely to be using Facebook. I found this to be true with my study. Despite a call for participants over the age of 18, but with no upper age limit, all of the participants in this project are adults, and their stories occurred within a span of 23 years between 1997-2020. Selection bias may also be reflected in the fact that 9 out of 12 participants have played or continue to play some form of women’s tackle football. And yet I personally do not know any girls who first played with boys and then continued to play with women as they grew older. Girls who went on to play women’s football may be overrepresented in this study because I used a women’s football Facebook page as a recruitment tool. This could potentially be problematic given that the women who continue to play as adults may be showing a love for the game and a likelihood of having had more positive early football experiences than those who did not continue to play.

I found public engagement to be important when using social media as a recruitment tool.

When people began showing interest in one of my posts, I immediately began responding, commenting, and reacting to their posts. I wanted to show my appreciation and approachable nature to encourage their continued interest in this project. When someone indicated their interest

43 in participating in the project by commenting directly on the post, I “liked” their comment, replied to them publicly by saying "Thank you so much! I sent you a message," and sending them a private message to further gauge their interest and potentially set up an interview. By doing this, I could show other potential participants that I was actively monitoring the post and was a real person who is genuinely interested in speaking with them. Several people who were not eligible to participate in the study posted their support for my project. I enjoyed being able to interact with them on a public forum to show that I was not only focused on getting my data but on being social and growing knowledge of girls and women in football. This helped to build a rapport between the women’s football community and myself.

Interviews

For this project, I conducted 12 semi-structured, in-depth interviews. According to Jane

Ritchie and colleagues (2014), interviews are a core method to gather in-depth personal accounts about complex social processes and norms with participants who are geographically dispersed. I found interviews to be a good fit for this project given the focus on personal experiences and gender norms. Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin (2012) also note that interviews allow researchers to understand the experiences of others better by allowing them to see the world using the participants’ perspectives. This was especially important to me given that this study was designed to go beyond my own experiences to better understand the experiences and perspectives of other women and build a better understanding of girls' football experiences more generally.

This project is heavily rooted in feminist principles. Hence, I use a feminist approach towards interviewing. Feminist research practices put the experiences of women at the forefront

44 by using research paradigms designed for women rather than traditional so-called generic paradigms, that have primarily been designed by and for men (Harding, 1987; Roberts, 1981;

Haraway, 1988). Feminist research paradigms promote a non-hierarchical relationship between the researcher and participant built on the basis of both parties openly sharing experiences

(Oakley, 1981). Feminist research practices are concerned with reciprocity, trust building, and flexibility in research design to allow for a more individualized approach to research.

In this study I held the position of an "insider-researcher" meaning that I occupy a position similar to that of the participants, because I the study concerns a group of which I am a member (Merton, 1972; Asselin, 2003). Sonya Corbin Dwyer and Jennifer Buckle (2009) suggest that being an insider-researcher often fosters a stronger connection between the researcher and participants which creates an environment more open for sharing. I think that being an insider-researcher allowed me to form a quick bond with the participants. Being able to share my own stories with the participants helped to demonstrate that I recognized the complexities of their experiences, and this likely allowed for deeper sharing in our conversations.

One of the limitations of being an insider was a fear of over-sharing. Going into my interviews, I was concerned that I might end up talking too much and not allowing adequate space to hear the participants’ experiences. Therefore, I began my interviews focused on being inviting but I also tried to limit my time speaking to focus on my interview guide. But, early on in the interview process, I found that making the interview seem less formal and more like a normal conversation was important in building trust and creating more openness. Therefore, I decided to refocus my interview strategy towards ‘responsive interviewing.’ Responsive interviewing involves building trust between the researcher and participants by having a more equal conversation with quite a lot of reciprocity (Rubin & Rubin, 2012). In this form of

45 interviewing, the interviewer and interviewee both guide the questioning (Rubin & Rubin, 2012).

In the conversations I had with participants, we followed the interview guide, but I also shared my experiences and took long detours from the guide in response to participants’ specific interests. Therefore, the interviews themselves were not all the same and reflected the participants and their personalities, their willingness to share, and the tone of the stories they were telling. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb (1932) describe interviews as a “conversation with a purpose” (132). Seeing the interviews in this way allowed me to maintain a focus on gathering the information necessary to address my research questions and to focus primarily on gathering stories from the participants. But this approach also allowed me to share some stories with the participants to create a friendlier conversation and encourage a stronger researcher/ participant connection throughout the interview process.

Responsive interviewing helped me express the feminist principles underpinning this research project. Feminist research approaches often focus on shared interactions to maintain a non-hierarchical structure between researchers and participants (Ritchie et al., 2014). Feminist approaches also value shared knowledge formation rather than knowledge extraction, and responsive interviewing also helped in this regard. It helped me to create a more collaborative project, which is a key feature of feminist interviewing (Ritchie et al., 2014).

I began this project with a focus on creating a collaborative process where the participants would largely steer the focus of the research. The participants proved to be incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about girls’ and women’s football and gender equality, and I think that that becomes clear throughout this thesis. Allowing the participants’ voices to shape this project is precisely what feminism is about; people coming together with shared experiences for the common good of improving gendered experiences.

46 Interviewing During Covid-19

All of my data collection took place in May of 2020, which was when people in Ontario were still living with a stay-at-home order because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Researching during a pandemic was difficult. At that time, I had left school and was working a lot of extra hours at what was supposed to be a part-time job (because the pandemic left my employer very short-staffed) and living with my parents. I was lucky, because I was able to go to work and maintain some normalcy in my life. However, trying to conduct and transcribe 12 interviews, each one lasting an hour or more, while working close to full-time, with limited (rural) internet access was a challenge, to say the least.

Despite the added difficulties I experienced with my research during Covid-19, the changed circumstances provided me with an opportunity to reflect on my own social position. As a single, childless, able-bodied, woman from a lower-middle-class family, I had had access to a number of things that many people did not have access to during Covid-19. I was able to physically leave both my home and work; I had a quiet place to conduct my research when I returned home; I had a relatively low level of household responsibility; and I maintained good health. I also recognize that while many people have not had have access to these things during

Covid-19, they are also things that many people did not have access to in their day-to-day lives before Covid-19.

I had originally planned to conduct interviews in person whenever possible. Due to

Covid-19, the Queen’s General Research Ethics Board required researchers to work remotely whenever possible. Therefore, I was forced to conduct all of my interviews using electronic video communications. I was originally very worried about remote interviewing because in- person interviews are often seen to build a stronger rapport between researchers and participants

47 (Ritchie et al., 2014). However, I found video calls to be a good substitute, because I was still able to share non-verbal methods of communication with the participants thanks to the video format. Furthermore, I found remote interviews helped build rapport, because I was able to meet the participants’ families and see their dogs, and I was shown pictures that otherwise would not have been accessible. I think I was able to build a stronger rapport online than I would have been had I met participants at some neutral location. We were able to welcome each other into our homes while simultaneously maintaining the comfort of being separate. Only one of the participants requested that we not use video during the call, and I found that that had a slight impact on my ability to connect with her and to show engagement, because neither of us were able to share facial expressions. This issue is regularly cited as a common concern with telephone interviews (Ritchie et al., 2014; Novick, 2008; Irvine et al., 2013).

Conducting interviews during Covid-19 may also have aided this project insofar as it allowed me to recruit participants who may have otherwise been unavailable. Many of the women I interviewed were professional women’s football players with families, jobs, and were typically very busy people. As an example of the time commitment required for women’s football one of the participants, Elly, recalls her experiences:

For an away game, you dedicated 2 to 2 ½ days... For a home game, sometimes we’d

get together on a Sunday morning and kind of go over things... Most of the years that

I played the team provided travel. But me living an hour and 15 away, I’d have to drive

there. I’d still have to hold a job and insurance and then you have to think of, well if I tear

my ACL, which is such a common women’s athlete injury, that’s going to affect my

job and my home life. Whereas professional men’s athletes, they’re given the

opportunity to rehab and you know, different things. I don’t know… It’s too bad.

48 Women football players are often very busy given travel, team commitments, paid employment, and other life and family roles. But, because of Covid-19, their football training was put on hold and several of them were not working at the time. Therefore, I was able to recruit participants who otherwise might not have had the time to participate.

Incorporating My Experiences

My initial plans with regards to adding my voice to this project have grown and changed immensely throughout the data collection stage. I started this project by conducting and recording an interview where I asked myself the questions on my interview guide. I did this for several reasons:

1) to test the questions and see if they were useful in gauging the experiences of the

participants,

2) to have my experiences recorded before conducting the interviews so that I had a sense

of what I remembered or thought before I heard from the other participants

3) to provide the option of including myself in the study, akin to the other participants.

I think that this was a helpful exercise. It allowed me to reflect on my experiences and have discussion points to add to the interviews in order to enable a stronger connection between myself and the participants in this study. This exercise allowed me to alter some of my questions for clarity before conducting interviews. It also served as a reflexive activity that allowed me to consider my own experiences. Ultimately, I did not include any data from this exercise in the thesis. Although, as you will see, I do share many stories of my experiences alongside those of the participants.

49 My experiences are woven into the transcripts. I found that having the experience of playing on a boys’ tackle football team was essential to my being able to connect to the participants during the interviews. Being able to share stories and chat about how our experiences were similar or different helped create a space that encouraged sharing. In retrospect, I think that that space helped us to go deeper into the experiences that the participants graciously provided. Furthermore, sharing my own experiences in interviews forced me to reflect on and record some of my own experiences beyond my original self-interview. Being able to talk about playing on a boys’ football team with 12 different people, for a total of nearly 16 hours, allowed me to remember a lot of different things that I had forgotten. Lastly, I believe that sharing my experiences with the readers of this project is important, because this project is highly subjective in that I place myself directly within my work and my analysis. I make no apologies for the lack of objectivity, instead I wish to show the reader a bit of where my analysis is coming from, and to acknowledge and claim the value of what some may refer to as “my bias.”

Following several of the interviews, I recorded my thoughts and feelings about the interview and the interview process. Originally, my idea had been to keep a journal following each interview. But that did not end up happening, given the rushed nature in which I had to schedule some of the interviews around my paid work and other commitments. However, I did have an hour-long commute to and from the location (with reliable wireless) where I conducted some of my interviews. This hour commute gave me time for quiet reflection and frequently I used my phone to record my thoughts, ideas, and feelings about the interviews of the day. I used these recordings to decompress, identify common themes, build new questions and ideas to focus on with future participants. They also helped me to make connections between my experiences

50 and those of the participants. This was a helpful process in that it was not overly time consuming, and it allowed me to expand the unstructured aspects of my interviews while engaging in self-reflection on the interview process and my own experiences.

Throughout this entire process, I have been debating how I would like to include my voice and experiences in this project. This research is intrinsically tied to my own experiences, as the concept, research questions, and interview guide were largely created based on my history playing football. Therefore, I was initially uncertain as to how many examples and stories of my own should be included in this thesis, as I wanted to ensure that the participants’ voices remain at the forefront. As you will see in future chapters, I have included my voice as a part of the analysis, sharing stories and making comparisons and connections between my stories and those of the participants in the study.

Analysis

My analysis began in the transcription stage. I found being able to transcribe and listen to my interviews invaluable. Judith Lapadat (2000) echoes this statement by saying that transcription is integral to the research process because it is more than simply writing down words because there is no limit to what can be recorded. Transcription is about making choices of what and how to turn an interview into text (Lapadat, 2000). Therefore, by doing the myself, I had full control over how to represent the recordings. Furthermore, as a person who values auditory learning, I found listening to the recordings while transcribing them to be incredibly helpful in familiarizing myself with my data. Often, I would listen to interviews instead of music while driving to try to keep myself thinking about this project whenever possible.

51 One thing that I learned while transcribing is that it is very time consuming. In my proposal, I said I would transcribe each interview as it was completed, before conducting the next interview. The members of my committee laughed saying that that would be unlikely. They were correct. I found that my interview process occurred very quickly as I gathered 10 of my interviews within 2 weeks, whilst also working nearly full time. I ended up conducting up to four interviews a day, and was, therefore, unable to transcribe anything in between. Despite this, I found that being able to take notes about key topics that came up in previous interviews and to think about how to incorporate those topics in future interviews was a valuable technique. I did not make any direct changes to my interview guide. I did, however, build on ideas from past interviews with new participants, and I tried to fit each interview to the specifics of that participant’s experiences and what they wished to focus on and share.

Once the transcriptions were complete, I used inductive coding to do a thematic analysis.

I chose inductive coding because I wanted the data that I had collected to shape my findings and the codes I generated. I believe that inductive coding was a good choice, because it is often used in exploratory studies to foster deep readings of texts, thereby allowing for strong theoretical descriptions of phenomena (Gioia et al., 2012). I also chose to perform a thematic analysis.

Thematic analysis is commonly done by looking for patterns through open coding and creating categories that highlight relevant themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006). I chose to use thematic analysis because it is often heralded for its ability to enable researchers to easily conduct rich, detailed and complex accounts of data by examining participants’ varying perspectives (Braun &

Clarke, 2006; King, 2004).

My coding process began by printing off all 223 pages of transcripts and using a pencil to make note of potential categories, key information, or themes as I read over the transcripts. After

52 the initial reading, I conducted a second reading where I found 26 codes. I focused on organizing my data based on common themes that created each code. Often, those themes aligned with the questions on my interview guide. For example, any data that could help answer the question

“Did you ever see your size as a problem when you played football?” was coded under “size.”

From there, I began colour coding the transcripts using highlighters and coloured pens to denote each of my twenty-six codes. Some of the initial codes were negative teammates, positive support, bruises, and size. Then, I added several sub-codes and put each quote within its corresponding category in a Word document on my computer. Using the example of the code for

“positive support”, sub-codes indicate where the support came from: teammates, parents, coaches, mentors, friends, and community. If a quote fit multiple codes, it was placed in every section where it was applicable. This process yielded 80 pages of raw data. From there, I progressively narrowed each code down in a separate document in order to make it easier for me to find specific examples while writing.

The focus of my analysis was to find reoccurring categories of experiences between multiple participants. I also made sure to identify individual experiences that did not fit within other categories but seemed important. Jane Ritchie, Jane Lewis, Carol McNaughton Nicholls, and Rachel Ormston (2014) note that in qualitative research, experiences, thoughts or comments only need to appear once in the data to be worthy of being included in the analysis. I found this incredibly important as individual experiences that seemed to be without a category ended up fitting within a larger web-type understanding of the women’s experiences.

53 What I Wish I’d Known

I was very worried about finding participants throughout the entire preparation stages of my project. When I began asking people to participate, I felt like I was burdening them. I did, however, discover that I simply needed to keep looking until I found the right group of people.

Once I found the participants, they were usually very enthusiastic about being able to participate in this study, and many thanked me for doing this research, because they really saw a need for it.

Once the Covid-19 pandemic started in Canada I began to rethink my entire project. I had always worried that my research might be somewhat trivial. But I thought it was important, based on my experiences playing football, because girls are being left out, socially policed, and bullied out of what should be an empowering experience. When Covid-19 hit, I began to question how I could justify doing this research project during a global crisis. But talking to the participants changed that. They valued this project and encouraged me to persevere. Allowing the participants to share their positive football experiences and seeing the joy in their faces discussing their football triumphs reminded me of why I love the sport and why girls should have access to it. The participants' willingness to share their negative experiences showed me that they are just as passionate as I am about making changes to the game and to society.

54 Chapter 4 Results and Analysis Part 1 Toxic Football Cultures and their Effect on Girls’ Participation in the Sport

It’s just the question of how much are girls actually allowed to play? … It’s also just something that wasn’t really heard of, a girl playing tackle football. So, it was kind of like, “So you say you’re allowed, but are you really allowed? Or, like, how welcoming are the boys going to be?” (Brooke)

Introduction When I was growing up, my parents taught me that girls could do anything that boys can.

Like the majority of the participants in this study, I identified as a tomboy when I was a child. I enjoyed doing gender marked activities that were usually categorized for “boys”: most sports, building, playing with cars, etc. My parents allowed me to explore my passions. I did not question girls’ or women’s place in society until I began to play tackle football. The first day that

I walked into that sea of boys at practice, I started to question why no other girls had signed up.

After that practice, I spoke with the mother of one of my teammates; her reaction explained it all.

She tried to convince me that playing as a girl was unsafe and that I shouldn’t want to play football, specifically against boys. In that moment I began to realize that gender makes a difference in how one is perceived and is taught to perceive one’s self.

This chapter discusses my first research sub-question: What is a typical trajectory for girls in football and how is that shaped by gender? The participants in this study each played from one to five years of football on boys’ teams. With tackle football programs typically available for youth 5-18, none of the girls in my study played even half of the 13 years of football potentially available to them. I argue that girls’ football involvement is plagued by patriarchal social structures that form toxic football cultures to maintain football as a space exclusively for men and boys. Looking back at the quote from Brooke that I used to open this chapter, girls can play football, but football is still widely seen as a masculine activity. Football’s

55 categorization as a masculine sport negatively affects girls’ ability to conceive of football as an option for them, and it can hinder their experiences if they do decide to play.

This next section looks at factors that limit girls’ participation in football. I identify two common trajectories of girls’ football involvement:

i) being forbidden to play

ii) playing, but then leaving a toxic football culture.

These varying trajectories are largely based on the cultures that girls play football in and how girls’ identities are understood within those cultures. I finish this chapter with an analysis of how girls viewed race within their football experiences. This analysis is used to highlight the importance of positionality within cultures and the importance of using an intersectional approach to understand girls’ football experiences.

Being Forbidden to Play

Girls often face barriers to football long before they ever get near the field. Half of the participants in this study were told directly, at some point, that they could not be on the team on which they eventually played. As I mentioned earlier, football is a space that was initially designed to turn boys into men. So, women and girls who take an interest in playing football are often seen as a threat to masculine identity (Snyder & Spreitzer, 1989). One way that men and boys try to maintain football as a masculine space is by excluding women and girls. From my interviews, I discovered that girls tend to be excluded or deterred from playing football by three key actors who uphold patriarchal gender structures: parents, registration volunteers, and coaches.

56 Parents determine the activities that their children can participate in. The majority of participants said that their parents were incredibly supportive of their desire to play football.

However, several participants faced an initial struggle to get their parents' approval. Sam explains:

I wanted to play football because I watched my brother play for so many years. I was

going to register a year earlier but my parents were against it…They thought it was

dangerous and didn't want me to get hurt. So, my brother always played, and they told me

I wasn’t allowed to (laugh). It’s so funny because since then they’ve become such

advocates for female sports.

Sam and her brother were treated differently. Sam’s experience of differential treatment is in line with gendered perceptions of risk that produce girls’ bodies as less fit for risk than boys’ bodies

(Brown & Penney, 2014; Laurendeau, 2008). Sam’s parents identified the risks related to football, assessing them as acceptable for their son but too hazardous for their daughter. The fact that they grew more supportive after Sam started playing football highlights the socially constructed nature of these views of gendered bodies. Sam playing football showed her parents that boys and girls have similar body capabilities and led them to become advocates for women in sport. This experience suggests that we can confront and change gendered perceptions of risk by allowing girls to play with boys.

Parents are not the only actors working to maintain gender structures, excluding girls from football. Gender policing also occurs during the registration process. In my experience, football is not always clearly labelled by gender. By this, I mean that despite football being a sport that is largely only played by men and boys, it is rarely stated in advertisements or registration requirements that teams are for boys exclusively. The reason football teams do not

57 need to be called boys’ football teams is because of gender marking. According to Michael

Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Kerry Jensen (1993), sports for women and girls are often marked by gender, such as: “Women’s Football Alliance." In contrast, the football league in which men play can be called the "National Football League." Men’s football is the norm; so, women’s football needs a qualifier because it is abnormal (Messner et al., 1993).

Football not having codified gender markers may mean that girls can play. But girls are still restricted from playing football by informal perceptions of football as masculine. One way that this informal restriction occurs is through the registration process. While trying to register for football, both Izzy and Alex were discouraged from football and directed towards cheerleading by the people working at the registration desk. Izzy ended up cheerleading for half a season before playing football the next year. She explains:

My parents went to sign me up and the people there were bullying my mom saying, "Oh,

do you really want to sign her up for football?" They bullied her into signing me up for

cheerleading. My mom said, “Well, just do this and be around football and see if you

want to do it…just be in the area.” The entire time I just watched the football game. I

went half the season and I stopped [cheerleading].

The registration volunteers enforced gender roles by reinforcing discourses of football as a sport exclusively for boys. Nothing had identified the team as exclusively for boys. However, the registration workers policed the gender divide by trying to steer girls into sports that are deemed more gender appropriate. Cheerleading is often viewed as a sport for women and girls. Matthew

Ezzell (2009) explains the contradiction of cheerleading. Cheerleading is based on masculine- typed sporting traits of power, stamina, and strength. Although, cheerleaders often dress hyper- feminine by wearing makeup, skirts, and hair bows in performances. These feminine traits often

58 counter act the athleticism of cheerleaders (Ezzell, 2009). Despite the athleticism of cheer, there are clearly significant differences between football and cheerleading. The people at the football registration desk were clearly not intending to direct Izzy to a sport that was similar to football, but open to girls. By suggesting that Izzy sign up for cheerleading they were reinforcing gender roles and maintaining football as a space for boys.

Alex had a similar experience to Izzy; she was also encouraged to join cheerleading instead of football. Alex explains, “Mom took me to register and they said, “follow her for your cheerleading uniform.” Mom was like, “She’s here to play football.” It was a struggle. I was the only girl on the team and in the county.” Alex grew up in what she describes as "small-town

USA to the max," a place where she felt everyone was strongly gender-conforming, and her actions were often seen as a challenge to the local way of life. Alex liked football, baseball, and

BMX, and "girls didn't do stuff like that in this county." Alex explains that she feels ideas about

“feminine-appropriate” sport were stronger in the county where she grew up than in other places she has experienced. Cultural notions of what counts as acceptable behaviour largely worked to prevent Alex’ participation. According to Mary Louise Adams (2011), “feminine-appropriate” and “male-appropriate” categories of sports are often taken for granted as universal but are heavily situated in cultural and historical contexts. The people working at the football registration desks tried to prevent her and other girls from participating in a gender deviant activity. The registration process can be the first line of defense against those who try to deviate from gender norms.

Finally, coaches are significant actors who can impact girls’ ability to play and their acceptance on boys’ football teams. Some participants talked about being forbidden to play by coaches. As Logan explains, fighting a coach’s ruling is often not worth the struggle: “I was

59 upset I couldn't play varsity. It would have been awesome to play all 4 years with the boys. It wasn't worth the fight because there’s a girls' league here. A lot of girls don’t get that opportunity.” Girls’ teams are often not a great alternative to playing with boys. Many of the participants noted that the girls' teams they have been associated with often have shorter seasons than boys’ teams, fewer players allowed on the field, and modified tackling rules, and they focus on introducing girls to the sport rather than offering established competition. The modifications commonly made for girls’ football are characteristic of many girls’ sports. Nancy Theberge

(1997) argues that as girls and women were admitted to sports, the sports themselves would often be modified to reflect myths about women’s fragility, and those modifications have operated, historically, to perpetuate sporting structures where men are seen as dominant. In the case of football, the modifications to the girls’ game do not just make the game less fun, they also reinforce girls’ inferior social position.

In conclusion, being allowed to play football means a variety of different things. Girls are legally allowed to play football on boys’ teams. But gender norms continue to restrain girls’ opportunities in football. Parents, registration volunteers, and coaches are three examples of people who restrict girls’ access to football. Girls are still being pushed out of football by people reinforcing patriarchal social structures that maintain football as a masculine space free from women and girls.

Leaving a Toxic Football Culture

A second common experience for girls who play football with boys is that at some point they end up leaving a toxic football culture. When girls gain entrance into the sport, it does not mean that they are being accepted. Of the six players who did not face direct exclusion from participating on a boys’ team, two were never allowed to play during games and eventually left

60 because of a toxic football culture. In this section, I analyse girls’ experiences of infringing on masculine space. To do this, I start by explaining football culture. Then I present four key aspects of girls’ experiences in the toxic cultures that can emerge in football: microaggressions, bullying, targeting, and sexual assault.

Football Culture

In my study, I found that all of the participants’ experiences varied heavily. Some girls had incredibly supportive teammates and coaches who made their team feel like a family. Other girls felt subtly excluded from team activities but knew that their presence was accepted. Finally, some girls felt othered, as though their presence was a point of controversy, and as if their teammates attempted to push them out of the sport by any means necessary. When I refer to

“toxic football cultures” I am mainly referring to the third set of experiences and the exclusionary cultures that produce such negative experiences. My use of the word “toxic” is in reference to toxic masculinity. "Toxic masculinity" is a term coined by Shepherd Bliss in the

1980s to discuss authoritarian masculinity (Harrington, 2020). Since then, the term has been adapted by feminists to denote a type of masculinity that fosters violence, misogyny, and homophobia (Harrington, 2020).

Football has long been accused of fostering toxic forms of masculinity. Kreagar (2007) found that youth football players are often taught that aggression leads to success, and football players’ aggression can be rewarded by elevated social status. This positive interpretation of aggression leads to violence against people whom players perceive as outsiders (Kreagar, 2007).

Many scholars argue that aggressive boys often have elevated social status, because they are perceived as popular or dominant in their social groups (Prinstein & Cillessen, 2003; Rodkin et

61 al., 2006; Woods, 2009). The relationship between aggression and elevated social status is likely linked to hegemonic masculinity (Ferguson, 2000; Renold, 2007). Hegemonic masculinity is a term developed by R.W Connell (1983) to explain the type of masculinity that seeks to retain a dominant position of men over women and other men who do not align with traits based on toughness, antifemininity, and elevated status (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Thompson &

Pleck, 1986). Hegemonic masculinity executed in football has also led several scholars to find correlations between youth football and sexist attitudes that led to violence against women

(Beaver et al., 2016; Forbes et al., 2006; Kreager, 2007).

In this section, I highlight some of the participants’ experiences that stem from toxic traits of masculinity. In discussing the women’s experiences, I aim to bring attention to the toxic climate in football with the hopes of demonstrating that football spaces remain a site of exclusion for girls that needs to be contested. By identifying elements of toxic football cultures, namely microaggressions and violence, I aim to highlight areas for change to make football a safer place for girls.

Microaggressions

The term “microaggressions” was developed by Chester M. Pierce in the 1970s to highlight subtle forms of racism. It has since grown to include other forms of marginalization against people based on sexuality, gender, and other identities (Sue, 2010). Emily Kaskan and

Ivy Ho (2016) highlight that women in sport are frequently subjected to microaggressions based on assumptions of inferiority, sexual objectification, and restrictive gender roles. In my research,

I found that girls commonly face microaggressions that led to feeling unwelcome on football teams. Here I offer three examples: team-mates who are unwilling to partner with girls; girls

62 being made to use separate locker rooms; and teammates and others making assumptions about girls’ sexuality.

Microaggressions – Lacking a Willing Partner

Something as simple as having a partner to work with for drills can go a long way to help someone feel included on a team. Being the last person to find a partner feels awful. I vividly remember standing and waiting for someone to approach me to offer to be my partner.

Ultimately, I would be paired up with someone from a group of friends that had an odd number, and that ‘extra’ boy would be forced to work with me. I could sense his unwillingness to practice with me and his uncomfortable approach to the drills, knowing that he had to make contact with a girl. Having this experience at every practice negatively impacted my training. I never felt comfortable tackling or being tackled, because I was unable to practice with a willing partner.

Every time I ended up with a reluctant partner, it was a reminder that I was different and unwelcome.

Most of the women I interviewed had similar experiences. The most common drills that girls have trouble finding partners for are tackling drills. Tackling drills create a concern in co-ed sport participation, because male players fear female players’ supposed fragility (Dowling,

2000). By this, I mean that men and boys are taught that women and girls are fragile and unable to take a hit (Dowling, 2000). Boys often feel that they cannot be as aggressive against girls as they would be with boys (Coakley, 2004). Logan explains her experiences trying to find a willing partner to initiate contact:

None of the guys wanted to hit me. I was like, “come on guys, somebody’s gotta do it.”

And one of the bigger guys on the team comes up and he’s like, “I’ll do it.” I was a little

63 nervous and I had every right to be nervous. He didn’t hold back. Which is awesome and

really set the tone, so nobody treated me like a girl. I flew a like 5 yards. And when I

landed, I jumped back up and I was like, “That was awesome! Let’s do it again!”

In Logan’s case, having one teammate who was willing to fully commit to a tackling drill with her was enough to “set the tone” for the remainder of her teammates going forward. By being able to take a large hit and “jump back up” she showed her teammates that she was not as fragile as they had assumed. In contrast, Izzy explains how she overcame her struggle of finding a willing partner to hit her by initiating contact: “Some of [my teammates] didn’t want to hit me.

But I’d just hit them REALLY hard. And say, ‘if you're not going to hit me, I'm not going to not hit you.’ Then they started hitting me back. (Laugh.)”

Boys frequently feel that engaging in physical contact against girls puts them in a “lose- lose” situation. If the boy wins, he is blamed for beating someone presumed to be an unequal match and inherently inferior. However, if the boy loses, he highlights what Shane Aaron Miller

(2010) refers to as an unsolvable ontological question created by binary gender categories. Miller

(2010) explains that if girls compete against boys and win there are two potential outcomes. One is that the girl is seen to be passing as a boy, which puts into question boys' physical superiority

(Miller, 2010). Or, the more common option, boys are cast out of their gender category and are seen as "failing to be real boys" (Miller, 2010, p. 167). One example of this second outcome is an altercation Alex had when she partnered with the coach’s son. The boy had been commenting on how girls can’t play football and was actively trying to exclude Alex from the team: “I competed against him in a drill and I knocked him down and made him cry. His dad picked him up by his facemask and said, “that’s a girl, and you’re crying!” Just like the normal comments you get.”

64 In this experience, Alex was able to directly confront an oppressor and make a point about her ability to participate at a high level. Alternatively, this example also shows the response of her coach trying to discipline his son, given his inability to physically overcome a girl. In Miller's

(2010) research, he finds that boys who lose against girls often exhibit emotional pain highlighting "the strong vested interests that are placed on gender norms, and the confusion and disappointment that result when those norms are violated” (p.171). Given Alex’s coach's reaction, it is unclear if her teammate’s tears are from pain, concern for his dad's response, or uncertainty about his masculinity. But it is clear that he was put in a precarious position as a result of masculinity norms.

A second reason that girls may have issues gaining partners is concern about touch.

Football relies on heavy contact. Alex Channon and George Jennings (2013) found that mixed- sex martial arts participants are often concerned about improper intimate touch and that concern can hinder their training. In my research, I found that concerns about intimate touch were held by parents, coaches, and teammates rather than the girls themselves. For example, when Toni began considering playing football, her coach “just worried about the contact. Not just hitting, it’s just I could feel uncomfortable when just someone touched me.” This quote alludes to the assumption that girls are hyper-sensitive about being touched. It was a concern that Toni did not share.

Toni’s comment shows that it is not just hitting that is the issue, it any touch that might be perceived as intimate. In a time when the #Metoo movement is in full-swing, touch is a common concern for coaches. Coaches have been forced to adopt a "no touch" policy to protect players and themselves against allegations that have largely coincided with the creation of a culture of fear (Piper et al., 2013). Toni's experience with her coach is rooted in larger social issues.

Concerns about touch can limit girls’ but not boys’ participation.

65 Microaggressions – Locker Room Exclusion

A second factor that can make girls feel unwelcome on a team is a lack of team bonding in the locker room. Of the 12 people I interviewed 5 regularly changed in the boys’ locker room,

2 did not have a locker room at all and came to the field dressed, and 6 were forced to change in a locker room without their teammates. Logan is counted twice as she changed with the boys when she was younger but was forced into her own room as she entered high school. I was always forced to dress alone either in the girls’ changeroom with girls dressing for other sports, or in the girls’ bathroom if the girls’ changeroom was being used for basketball games. Changing alone felt isolating. But I saw gendered locker rooms as the norm until I started speaking with some of the participants during the interviews.

Many scholars have questioned the binary sex separation of locker rooms and restrooms

(Herman, 2013; Doan, 2010; Cavanagh, 2010). Ali Greey (2019) draws on Judith Butler (1990) to argue that spaces like locker rooms and restrooms are intensified spaces within a heterosexual matrix that operate to reinforce heterosexuality and binary conceptions of sex and gender as normal. The "heterosexual matrix" is how culture operates to naturalize binary conceptions of sex, gender, body norms, and norms of heterosexuality (Butler, 1990). Locker rooms act as a space that sorts people based on their sex gender to reinforce gendered social norms that can be incredibly problematic for those who do not meet those norms including trans, gender non- conforming, and non-binary people. But, when those binary categories are met, they are infrequently transgressed. So, in this section, I explore girls' experiences in boys' locker rooms to understand the importance of their presence in those spaces and to highlight the need for increased inclusion of all team members in locker rooms by questioning preconceived notions of normalcy.

66 For most of the participants I spoke with, the locker room experience that they had dictated their perception of normal. For example, participants who that shared a locker room with boys often had never considered that they could have been excluded in a room by themselves.

And participants who changed separately could barely conceive of changing in a room with boys. Logan experienced both arrangements:

I was always in the locker room with guys until grade 9. Then they put me in the

auxiliary where they keep all the balls… I understood putting girls into a different locker

room because you are developing different parts and things…It’s a big dynamic change

after always being with the guys… It’s not fun to be by yourself. You just want to be one

of the guys until you’re in a different room and you realise that you’re not.

Girls often have worse accommodations than boys when playing co-ed sports. Girls often have to change separately based on concerns about sex differences that escalate during puberty.

One of the best rebuttals that I heard to the argument about girls and boys having

“different parts” came from Sam. Sam always changed with her teammates. The way that Sam and her teammates used their locker room seemed to solve many issues that people have with co- ed changerooms:

My coaches never wanted me to feel different and that locker room is a big part of it. I

still had a locker, but I would get changed in the bathroom (inside the changeroom) and

come out to put on my shoulder pads and everything… no one would ever get completely

naked and if they were going to, they would go into the bathroom too. It was such a cool

experience. I feel like you don’t build relationships if you’re not in the locker room and a

part of things. A lot of my best times playing football were in the locker room.

67 Barry Miller (2016) reiterates Sam’s views on locker room conduct by highlighting recent shifts in men’s locker room culture that include increased modesty and distancing between individuals.

Even if small shifts in changing habits were required to create a more welcoming space for the entire team, Sam feels that those changes were worth it to improve the team’s bonds.

I found that the girls who did change in locker rooms with the boys on their team often had a stronger team bond and a more positive overall football experience. As Toni explains: “We are a team so we should change together. I’m just thinking psychologically it is bad when someone is separated from their team. Especially because the changing room is comfortable, and we talk. It’s good to just be together.” Toni mentioned that on her team, she played with boys from different cities who came together to play. Unlike players on a high school team, the only time that Toni and her teammates got to spend together was at football practices and games. But while you are on the field you are supposed to be disciplined and not socializing. So, for them the locker room played a large role in team bonding as it created a space where teammates could become comfortable with each other.

One of the most common concerns about girls being in boys’ locker rooms is the culture of boys’ team changerooms. “Locker room talk” is characterized by discussions positioning women as objects, encouraging sexism, discussing sexual conquests, and promoting rape culture

(Curry, 1991). Timothy Jon Curry (1991) found that “locker room talk” often arises when sporting cultures have a strong peer group dynamic that encourages antisocial behaviour and targets fellow teammates. The players then overconform and engage in “locker room talk” as a way to affirm their masculinity to prevent further victimization (Curry, 1991). The term “locker room talk” does not necessarily mean that these conversations arise only in locker room spaces, but the term is also not coincidental.

68 Are locker rooms a safe space for girls to share with boys? Vicky told me about her experiences with "locker room talk." Vicky said that she had a boy on her team who over- sexualized women and who made “inappropriate comments” and then thought it was all fine if he just apologized for them. Vicky said that his comments would make her and the other girls in their co-ed locker room uncomfortable. But she used this issue as a teaching tool to confront the male players and address how problematic their actions were. Vicky felt she had to take on the role of educating her teammates to foster a safe space for herself and the other girls. Sam believes that she played a similar role simply by existing in the hyper-masculine space, breaking up the opportunity for toxic masculine discussions to fester as she explains, “I think a lot of the guys that I played with have a little more respect for women, just like, having that experience.”

Girls’ presence in the football locker room with boys may help break up the largely unmonitored space where toxic football culture grows. But Sam and Vicky point out that this is an extra burden of labour for girls.

Microaggressions -Sexuality

Finally, one of the main microaggressions the participants experienced while playing football were comments that made assumptions about their sexuality. The assumption that girls who engage in masculine-typed activities are gay is a tool that has been used to police young girls away from participation in so-called gender inappropriate sports. Josh Packard (2009) notes that critics often ‘accuse’ women in football of being gay to justify why the players are able to succeed in a masculine type sport. As Lauren explains, “In high school, I was called “gay” non- stop. I’ve been called gay since freshman. Just playing sports, not fitting in the mold… Then football, it just came out really big…It’s weird to think that was the insult.” Football is an

69 activity that is marked as hyper-masculine and so women who play must be gay; even more so than in the other “masculine” sports Lauren previously experienced such as soccer or softball.

Unfortunately, of the 12 participants that I spoke with, 8 of them claimed to have faced direct “accusations” of being gay, because they played football. I use the term "accusations," because such comments were often made maliciously as a tool for gender policing. Logan explains:

When I first started playing with boys, my brother always teased me that I was gay cause

I played with the guys. I’ve been called a he/she. That was the main thing I was bullied

about when I was a kid, because I played mainly male sports. So, that was kind of hard.

Bullies reinforce heteronormativity when they use being gay as a slur to police girls into gender conformity (Cahn, 1994). Girls playing masculine sport are often targets of this type of bullying

Izzy began playing football when she was 9 and she explains how this assumed “common knowledge” affected her:

My uncle was probably the worst. I can remember him saying, “oh, she’s going to like

girls.” Or something like that. I just remembered thinking, “I don’t like anybody.”

(Laugh.) You know, I don’t. But, when I was in high school, I remember a couple of the

girls saying, “oh, you’re not a lesbian?” I’m like, “no.” It was just so weird. Let me

decide for myself. Don’t put assumptions on me.

Girls playing masculine sports often face questions about their sexuality. Girls who have their sexuality questioned learn the importance of heteronormativity at a young age. These discourses are harmful to gay people because they recreate systems of oppression. The discourses are also harmful to girls because they teach them that being gay is bad before they have been able to

70 explore their sexuality and they steer girls away from masculine activities to recreate patriarchal gender binaries.

When players reach adolescence and begin to explore their sexuality, the issues associated gender norms and sexuality grow. Sam explains her struggle during adolescence:

I was very worried about what people thought about me at that time. Especially being a

young lady. I think in high school, the worst name I could have been called was a

dyke…I was so worried about being labelled masculine…Anytime we would go to

football events, I would make sure I was dressed really feminine. I would wear makeup

and do my hair…I was always scared of being perceived as masculine. But nowadays,

I'm like, "yeah, I played football. What about it?" I really don't care. Right? I was so

scared in high school though.

Nancy Malcolm (2003) argues that girls in athletics are likely to display heightened concerns about their femininity between the ages of 12-16. Some women and girls try to counter assumptions about their gender and sexual identities through what Janet Felshin (1974) called the

“feminine apologetic,” the use of clothing and makeup to overplay femininity and counteract the expectations of a masculine performance that originates in sport participation (Liechty et al.,

2016; Theberge, 2000; Richard et al., 2017). Sam used the feminine apologetic to avoid a label of homosexuality. Her concern about this label shows that Sam was taught that homosexuality is negative and something to try to avoid.

Lauren explained her fear of being called gay:

If you're from a small town in the south and you've never met someone who's gay, you

don't know what this is. You go to a Southern Baptiste church and find out it's terrible.

71 Like, then, when it comes time, it's a bad thing. So, until you expose yourself to the

world, you're stuck in that mindset.

Being gay can be incredibly hard for teenagers. Lauren explains:

[Labelling others as gay and positioning it as negative at a young age] that’s SUPER

dangerous. I don’t think I knew anyone who was openly gay in my hometown. It was just

so negative. Now people from high school would never admit that they called someone

gay. But that was the insult, “you’re gay, you’re queer.” It kept a lot of people from being

as aggressive, tough, or strong as they wanted to be. Nobody wanted to be called gay… I

remember coming home one day [after] everyone calling me gay, and I just wished I was

so I could say, “so what?” But I just wasn’t. It was infuriating, cause I felt like I was

perpetuating the stereotype of denying it. Like, I’m not gay, but why is that an insult?

Both Lauren and Sam noted that things became easier as they grew up and ultimately learned to see homosexuality more positively.

One of the participants argued that the connection between girls playing football and homosexuality was something that actually benefitted her as she came out:

Yeah [people assumed my sexuality]. And I think that really helped with coming out,

because everyone was like, “oh well she must just want to talk to all of the guys.” But

then word got around pretty fast that I had a girlfriend, and it was like, “oh that works

out. That’s perfect.” (Laugh) …I was pretty masculine off the field. So, once I started

dressing that way and stuff my friends were like, “Oh yes, makes sense.” And then

everyone just kind of assumed it. (Abby)

In this example, it is clear that heterosexuality was the default, and Abby’s peers used it as a way to justify and devalue her football participation. But, when Abby came out, her football

72 participation was not questioned as much because it took away an element of sexuality that people had previously assumed motivated her to play football. Gay stereotypes about masculine ways of dressing and girls playing football helped Abby to feel comfortable coming out, because those assumptions just seemed to make sense for her, as they do for many gay women.

Violence- Bullying

Girls also experience violence in football. The three forms of violence that I will be discussing are bullying, targeting, and sexual assault.

Several of the participants were bullied by their teammates. The fact that boys would bully girls on their teams reflects research findings that show bullying increases when it becomes a group norm, and it is directed towards a person perceived to be a nongroup member (Duffy &

Nesdale, 2009; Gini, 2008; Ojala & Nesdale, 2004). Girls may also be especially at risk in football because bullying increases when peers are striving for higher status in gender segregated environments (Faris & Felmlee, 2011). In the following section, I will focus on Lauren’s experiences to highlight the severity of bullying that toxic football cultures can foster.

Lauren began playing football in her last year of high school and did not finish the season due to the immense bullying she received. She explains, “it [playing football] was the worst decision I made. It was horrible. The bullying was intense. It got to the point where it was so bad, my dad bought me a Taser to bring with me, just in case someone took it the wrong way.”

Apparently, it is common for young people to carry weapons to school after being bullied (Glew et al., 2008; Goldstein et al., 2008; Brockenbrough et al., 2002), a fact that makes schools even more dangerous (Goldstein et al., 2008).

73 The decision by Lauren and her parents for her to carry a Taser was a short-term solution to ensure her physical safety. But there were also a lot of long-term implications associated with

Lauren’s victimization: “I’d feel sick waking up for team morning workouts. It was my nerves.

We’d start, and my stomach would get in knots… Starting the day being anxious about being on the field with them and taking another shit day.”

Lauren’s health suffered because of the anxiety that came from her teammates’ bullying.

Bullying makes it hard for victims to create positive relationships, may harm their psycho-social functioning, and their ability to become confident adults (Harris & Hathorn, 2006; Espelage &

Holt, 2001; Kim & Leventhal, 2008). The bullying Lauren experienced was not coincidental. It happened because the boys targeting her were performing hegemonic masculinity, trying to secure their social status and emphasize their superiority over Lauren and all other girls.

This toxic form of masculinity is also why Lauren did not receive support from her coaches. Children are told to report bullying to adults. But the toxic culture Lauren faced was fostered by the coaches. Lauren explained that she was originally convinced to play football by one of the coaches. Yet even that coach refused to intervene to help stop the bullying. Lauren explains:

I didn’t have a single coach on my side. I thought the coach [who convinced me to play]

and I became super close, he kept like on the side away from everybody and he was just

like, “you should go hit somebody.” But he never stood up for me in the moment. That

kind of bummed me out. But looking back, he was like 26 or 27… He was a kid himself.

He didn’t realize what he had done by inviting me on the team.

Highschool football players bully their teammates and outsiders if the “moral atmosphere” of the team promotes bullying and if the “most influential male in a player’s life would approve” of

74 their actions (Steinfeldt et al., 2012, 340). With football coaches often taking on roles as mentors and parental figures, they play an important role in the socialization of their players. When they reinforce, contribute to, or become bystanders of bullying, they are endorsing those actions and aiding in creating a toxic football culture.

One of the players who bullied Lauren was her friend’s boyfriend. Lauren’s friend spoke to her boyfriend pleading with him to stop bullying her, but Lauren recalls hearing him say, “I can’t stick up for Lauren. Everybody picks on Lauren. I can’t be that one person.” David Dupper and Nancy Meyer-Adams (2002) argue that interventions to prevent bullying need to occur at multiple levels by creating a culture of acceptance. This task is challenging in athletic cultures that propagate exclusion and encourage a lack of action by players and coaches (Diamond et al.,

2016). No one in a position of relative power, like the young coach, or with a personal connection to Lauren, like her friend’s boyfriend, left their position as a bystander, because of the fear of repercussions that might come from breaking away from group norms.

Violence- Targeting

One way that bullying can be seen in contact sports is through targeting. By "targeting" I am referring to directed physical attacks made with the intent to hurt or injure. Targeting is a vicious practice that occurs in many contact sports and is a particular concern for girls playing with boys. Jay Coakley (2004) argues that boys often do not become less physical when they play with girls (who are assumed to be weaker), they become more physical in an attempt to punish the girls for infringing on male space. Anna told me that her teammates hated that she was playing, “I got told, ‘why don’t you quit? You want to play with boys, you got your wish.’

One teammate intentionally rammed his helmet into my nose and it bled… A guy pushed me into

75 the showers [where they were] on.” Anna’s bloody nose was not an accidental injury. Anna faced a lot of bullying from her team throughout her two years playing football. Incidents like this were not addressed by her coaches who helped foster a toxic football culture.

Targeting can be incredibly dangerous. Football is already a dangerous sport, because people are encouraged to create full speed collisions while wearing heavy equipment. A lot of injuries happen organically. But, when people enter the game with an intent to injure, that potential harm increases. One example of a clear form of targeting is when a player makes intentional contact after a play. This happened to Izzy:

After the play ended, a kid came and rammed his helmet into my back and broke my

rib…they ended up kicking the kid off the team. They didn't let him play the rest of the

season. My coach thinks the dad told the kid to do it. I guess that was a bit of targeting. It

was definitely because I was a girl. And it was WAY after the play. We were walking

back to the huddle. That was pretty bad.

It was not a random individual act but rather a form of learned violence used to punish a girl for intervening in a masculine space.

Violence- Sexual Assault

Finally, several of the participants experienced unwanted sexual advances and sexual violence while playing on boys’ tackle football teams. Women and girls are often sexualized as a way to undermine their athletic prowess (Theberge, 2000; Packard, 2009; Knapp, 2014). Abigail

Powell and Katherine Sang (2015) found that men in male-dominated spaces often sexualize women as a way of positioning them as inferior. This problem is often exacerbated in team sports settings where boys and men are often found to view women as conquerable sexual

76 objects (Anderson, 2008; Messner, 1992; Burstyn, 1999). Some researchers argue that male contact sport athletes are disproportionately likely to perpetrate sexual violence (Anderson, 2008;

Crossett, 2000). Given such findings, it makes sense to ask if boys’ football teams are safe spaces for girls?

Several of the participants experienced sexual assault or threats of sexual assault in their football participation. Here I focus on Sam’s experiences. Sam recalls being 14 and playing on the offensive line when the opposing defensive lineman "basically like pushed my pads up and copped a feel." She explains it as "horrible, horrible, horrible. It was just a really awkward experience. I was really uncomfortable.” Sam was hesitant to report her experiences because of her position as a girl playing football with boys. Sam explained that she “felt weird” addressing the issue because, “As a girl, you don’t want to cause drama, because that’s the stereotype. Girls are drama. They cause issues. Often when something was wrong, I wouldn’t address it, cause I didn’t want to create those waves.” Sam also explained that football made it difficult for her to accept the unwanted touching as violence rather than sport. According to Sam,

I was trying to dismiss it and thought maybe I was just being dramatic. Maybe it was just

tackle football, and I was looking into it too much. It's interesting how, as women, we're

easy to dismiss that, and it's really easy to be like, “No, I'm overreacting.” Or, “No, it

didn't happen.” And that was 14 years ago. I still second guess myself. But, obviously, it

happened.

The fact that this sexual violence occurred during a football game made it difficult for Sam to interpret the experience as sexual violence. When players are making direct contact with each other from play to play and aiming for each other’s chests to make contact, one can see where

77 the second-guessing may have occurred and how others may have dismissed Sam's claim. But sexual violence is not an accident. Sexual violence is intentional and direct.

Despite her hesitancy, Sam immediately told her teammates who “were livid. Like I mean, livid. Like, no one needed to say anything, they didn’t need to talk to the ref. My teammates were like, ‘we’re taking care of this.’” Her parents also stepped in when they were informed about the issue after the game. Her parents spoke with the league and the club presidents became involved to help rectify the situation. Sam had support to address her mistreatment.

Sam’s experiences highlight the social implications of sexual violence. Feminists commonly argue that sexual violence is not a crime of passion but rather a crime of violence

(Cahill, 2001; Burgess-Jackson, 2000). Sexual violence is always more than an individual act. It is a means for men to use their bodies to assert their positions of superiority over women

(Brownmiller, 1975). Such individual acts fit into larger patriarchal structures that position women and girls as inferior to men and boys. Sexual violence against girls in football is a means of asserting male superiority when it is challenged by female players.

Intersecting Identities: Race and Girls’ Football Experiences

One aspect of players’ experiences that I have yet to discuss is the impact of players’ racial identities on their football participation. I chose to place this section at the end of this chapter because of the importance of the topic. By placing this section at the end, I am able to build on previous topics in this section to show how the participants’ experiences in football related to race. This section is important because I recognize that discussions exclusively about gender do not create an intersectional analysis of players’ experiences and can act to silence the

78 experiences of girls who have not been represented in this study. Roberta Hamilton (1993) writes that gender categories are blurred by intersectional categories such as class, race, and sexual orientation. To provide an intersectional analysis, I use this section to highlight the importance of race and how the participants believe their racial identity, and those of their teammates, impacted their football experiences. Problematically, the analysis I present only focuses on white and

Black players and is not inclusive of other racialized experiences.

Canadian professional football history highlights the struggle that racialized people have endured to enter football spaces. This history is explained by John Valentine and Simon Darnell

(2012) who compare the Canadian senior game (and later the Canadian Football League) and the

NFL. Valentine and Darnell start in 1928 by highlighting Russ Gideon, the first racialized player to play in the Canadian senior game, who played from 1928-1933. At this time, there was an unofficial ban preventing racialized people from joining the NFL. Valentine and Darnell (2012) argue that this ban was largely caused by whiteness. During the Great Depression it was understood that jobs should be reserved for white people and football reiterated this rule through unwritten racist policies. Football teams began to reconsider their racist hiring policies in 1946 with the appearance of Jackie Robinson playing baseball in Montreal. After seeing Robinson’s success, the Montreal Alouettes signed 2 Black players, teams across Canada started attracting

Black players from the United States, and all the professional football teams in Canada were integrated 5 years later in 1951. The NFL desegregated 10 years later. Despite gaining space to play professional football, racialized players still were largely unable to win awards (Kelly,

1999) and often faced racial hostility from their teammates (Bell-Webster, 2009).

Despite the struggles racialized people endured to enter football spaces; football is a sport often heralded for its racial diversity. “The 2019 Racial and Gender Report Card” for the

79 National Football League (NFL) highlights that People of Colour make up 70.1% of NFL players, 33.6% of NFL assistant coaches, and 12.5% of NFL head coaches. NFL teams are often racially diverse in professional football. Although, this racial inclusivity often is problematized because of "racial stacking," a practice in which Black players are assigned to positions with more risk and, allegedly, less skill (Schneider & Eitzen, 1986; Coakley, 1990; Pitts & Yost,

2013).

Research on youth sports shows that in the United States, Black boys are disproportionately playing football, compared to their white counterparts, despite the inherent risk associated with the sport (Sabo & Veliz, 2014). Don Sabo and Phil Veliz (2014) used data from the Monitoring the Future project to look at 47,000 eighth and tenth grade students in the

United States in 2006 and 2012. They found that 24% (grade 8) and 15% (grade 12) of white boys played tackle football. Whereas 34% (grade 8) and 21% (grade 12) of Black boys played tackle football (Sabo & Veliz, 2014). Alana Semuels (2019) refers to this phenomenon as the

“white flight from football.”

Despite the racial diversity often seen in studies of boys’ football, 7 of 12 participants in this study identified as white, 4 did not disclose their racial identity, and one woman identified as

Indigenous and white-passing. I did not specifically ask participants about their race. Rather, I asked if they believe race had an impact on their football experiences. Nine of the participants did not think that race had an impact. Sam and Lauren both spoke about the role that whiteness played in their experiences.

In recognition of the privileges that come with whiteness, Sam identified positive aspects of her experiences that she felt were linked with her whiteness, “As a white person, I feel like I am very privileged to have the experiences and everything that I was able to do. Which someone

80 of another race might not have those privileges or those experiences.” Sam notes that whiteness is something that is often taken for granted as not racially marked. Her comment is reflected in the comments of the other participants who did not see race as part of their experience.

In contrast to Sam, Lauren did not necessarily address whiteness while sharing her experiences. But she did make some insightful observations about her experiences as a white girl playing football. Lauren played football on a high school team in the Southern United States where she saw a distinct racial divide. For the most part, Lauren’s football experiences were largely negative as a result of the toxic football culture created by her teammates and coaches.

She was perpetually bullied, told she was not welcome on the team, and not given playing time.

But she also noticed a common trend among her oppressors. As she explains: “This sounds strange, but there’s a racial aspect to it. All the Black guys didn’t really care I was playing... All the white guys were insecure about me playing…I remember the preppy white guys tearing me down. Pretty hard.” Lauren notes that the people who were perpetuating the toxic football culture that she experienced were her white teammates.

This racial difference might also be explained by definitions of hegemonic masculinity, a category that is often reserved for white, straight, able-bodied, middle/upper class, cis, men to assert their dominant position over everyone else (Wesley, 2015). Racialized boys do not start out in the same privileged position as white boys in a racist society (Wesley, 2015). Black boys do not have access to hegemonic masculinity and likely do not feel the same need to dominate.

Researchers suggest that Black and racialized boys are often more supportive of gender equity in sport (Kauffman & Wolff, 2010; Brown et al., 2011). With this perspective, it becomes clearer that Lauren’s experiences in a toxic football culture were likely caused by hegemonic masculinity and whiteness.

81 Lauren noticed a change in this behaviour when a Black girl joining the team. “The girl who came behind me was a Black woman. And she ended up being a starter and had no problems. She had a group around her with different dynamics and was more protected

(Lauren).” Lauren’s assumption was that the girl was able to join the subculture of other Black players. In this case racial solidarity might have been more important than gender solidarity. And that meant that the girl who played after Lauren was not forced to experience the same level of toxicity that Lauren had been subjected to. Additionally, her identity as a Black woman may have also provided her with protection against the toxic white masculinity displayed by her white teammates. Jaime Schultz (2005) uses media portrayals of Serena Williams to argue that Black women are often stereotyped differently than white women to be seen as more physical, less fragile, more aggressive, and more masculine. These perceptions of Black female athletes may aid women when entering masculine-types sporting spaces because stereotypes of Black female athletes closer align to the norms of football and collision sports than the stereotypes associated with white female athletes.

Overall, this section raises a lot more questions than it is able to answer. I think that more work and research need to be done to better understand the intersectional experiences of girls who play football on boys’ teams. I believe that there are some interesting ideas in this section regarding the impact of race on girls’ football experiences. I was surprised to find a lack of research specific to race and youth football generally. More research needs to be done that directly speaks to racialized girls about their football experiences. In this analysis, I problematically rely exclusively on the experiences of white participants. If I had the opportunity, I would have done a targeted recruitment of racialized players to better include their experiences. I also would have likely to ask more targeted questions about the role of whiteness

82 in girls’ experiences. But I think that a next step would be to begin to examine the experiences of racialized youth in football in conjunction with a variety of intersecting identities in which gender is only one.

Conclusion

Girls playing boys' tackle football often need to directly confront gender norms. Toxic football cultures constrain girls’ football involvement and push out many girls who dare to breach gender boundaries. The patriarchal structures that underpin society are especially evident in overt and covert forms of exclusion and bullying that girls experience when trying to play football. As I mentioned, football is not separate from the larger culture in which it exists.

Football cultures are highly connected to the cultural views on sex and gender. Football cultures and subcultures are sometimes inclusive. But they can also be toxic. It is up to the participants – coaches, players, officials, parents – to decide to perpetuate toxic cultural norms or make larger social changes with their actions.

In this chapter I focused on how social norms and culture shape girls’ football experiences. I have provided an overview of what football cultures look like and how they can be toxic and work in problematic ways against girls. In the next chapter I focus specifically on girls’ physical experiences of football. I focus on the impact of patriarchal social structures on girls’ understandings of their bodies. In contrast to the negative tone in this chapter, I try to present some of the visceral experiences that give girls a passion for the sport. Finally, I suggest how football can empower girls to challenge patriarchal social structures, including those in the sport itself.

83 Chapter 5 Results and Analysis Part 2 Making the Catch in Heavy Coverage: Football as a Tool for Overcoming Constraining Perceptions of Girls’ Bodies The boys didn’t believe that I was that fast. I always got the usual, “girls can’t play.” But it was funny cause all the cheerleaders were on the sideline throwing the football back and forth, cheering for me. They thought it was awesome. (Alex)

In high school, my football team played in a recreational tournament every year. In grade

10, after our final game, I was walking in the parking lot with my dad when a large man said,

“hey, good game eh.” My dad looked at me inquisitively and said, “who is that man?” I smugly replied, "that was the person I spent the whole game blocking. He didn't get past me once!" My dad's eyes nearly popped out of his head as he stood there speechless. I leaned in towards my dad and whispered, "he's big so he can't get that low. It's all technique Dad." To me, part of the thrill of football was being able to physically confront and overcome my opponents. Being able to overpower boys was especially empowering. Women and girls are often taught that boys and men are physically superior, but my football experiences allowed me to directly challenge those narratives.

In this chapter, I answer the research question: What are the embodied aspects of girls’ experiences playing tackle football with boys? Overall, football provides a space where girls can confront socially constructed narratives of their bodies’ fragility, combat sporting structures designed to exclude their bodies, and learn embodied forms of empowerment. In this chapter I aim to highlight some of the feelings – physical and emotional – that girls experience in football to demonstrate why girls love the sport. I begin by explaining girls’ experiences with tackling, which they categorize as scary, challenging, empowering, and euphoric. I then aim to uncover some of the ways girls’ bodies are policed off the football field and what effects this policing has

84 on girls who participate. I explain how socially constructed narratives about girls’ bodies as small, weak and inferior and about football as an activity for large bodies work to keep girls out of the sport. Then, I discuss how socially constructed gender norms are embodied to actively limit girls’ physicality. Finally, I return to the notion of empowerment to explain how girls’ football participation could be an important symbol for feminist movements.

Physical Feminism and Tackling

I have been discussing the idea of football as a space for empowerment throughout my work. Looking at the previous chapter, it is might be surprising that toxic football cultures could also be empowering for some girls. I believe that the physical empowerment some girls find in football is related to embodied aspects of the sport. A scholar who focuses on women’s embodiment through physicality is Martha McCaughey (1997), who uses the concept of

"physical feminism.” McCaughey (1997) introduced this term in her work on women's self- defence classes as a way to conceptualize how the body can work as an active agent in feminism.

According to McCaughey (1997), “we have been so busy analyzing women’s victimization by men’s aggression that we have almost reified men’s power to coerce women physically, failing to highlight women’s potential for fighting back” (12). Embodied feminist practices, like women's self-defence, are important because masculine domination is an embodied process

(McCaughey, 1997). Yet, many forms of feminism ignore the body or view it as non-agentic and outside efforts to challenge patriarchal structures (McCaughey, 1997). Some feminists have a tendency to view women’s bodies as things that are acted upon and need to be protected. In contrast, physical feminism sees women’s bodies as potential tools to help challenge patriarchy.

85 Physical feminism is about understanding how discourses of inferiority operate to create self-imposed limitations on women's physical activity (Dowling, 2000; McCaughey, 1997). By

“discourses of inferiority”, I am referring to the persisting and dominant cultural belief that men are physically superior to women. This belief has effects on everything in society, but in sport it validates an unequal gender system that positions male athletes far above female athletes (Cahn,

1994; Coakley, 2004). Contrary to popular opinion, McCaughey (1997) argues that the biological differences within male and female bodies are not actually important to why we perceive a disparity between men’s and women’s physical abilities. The body is a “site of cultural significance, a place where patriarchy is embodied, in the flesh, and contested, in the flesh” (McCaughey 1997, 166). In this regard, physical feminism is about challenging the perception of biological inequalities. By recognizing how culture has an impact on women’s bodies, we can challenge patriarchal structures that have normalized and viewed as natural.

In her book, Real Knockouts, McCaughey (1997) shows how physical feminism can be put into practice by explaining how women can recondition their bodies and alter their perceptions of their bodies’ capabilities. Physical feminism is not just about seeing how culture acts on women’s bodies; it also seeks to present women’s bodies as active agents. McCaughey

(1997) uses the example of women's self-defence classes because self defense classes teach women to use their bodies to overcome the bigger male bodies that women have previously been taught were inherently superior. According to McCaughey women's bodies gain agency through physical training (1997). As women enter spaces that allow "aggressive activities" such as boxing, football, and shooting, women are disrupting assumptions of the sex binary that patriarchy requires (Liechty et al., 2016). In my study, participants highlighted their ability to overcome notions of women’s inferiority when they talked about tackling.

86 The experiences of hitting an opponent at high speeds, launching your body across the field, and the feeling of joy some players get from a successful hit are among the best parts of contact sports. When I asked participants about these experiences, the tone of their voice changed, they smiled, and you could tell that they had a love for being physical. This is something not often discussed in research on women and girls in sport. I argue that part of the pleasure of girls get in football is a result of being able to overcome discourses about their fragility.

The following quotes capture the participants’ efforts to describe tacking and what it feels like to be able to experience your body's strength.

Impactful would be a good word. I like the feeling of being able to outsize someone.

Especially when it’s someone that did not see me as an equal. (Anna)

I felt really masculine. You know sometimes when like, you’d hit somebody so hard that

you hear it, and they don’t get back up. And you’re just like, “Dammmmn. I’m a beast!

Like, wooooow!” (Logan)

And I just ran at him and yep, I crushed him. I absolutely crushed him. I picked him up

and dropped him, crushed him. (Logan)

It’s a pretty cool feeling to be able to, you know, wrap somebody up, pick them up, and

dump them to the ground. (Elly)

I felt like a badass when I made a tackle. Like I felt so strong. (Vicky)

87 I was the last line of defence; they had me on safety. So, I was standing there, and this

giant monstrosity comes through all of the guys and I’m standing there like, “Yeah,

okay!” He thinks he has a touchdown. Everybody thinks he has a touchdown. And I’m

like, “I’m not giving it to you. It’s not happening.” So, I went and hit this gentleman, and

I hit him so hard, cause I matched his speed. I hit him so hard that I actually picked him

up and hit him. Like he flew back actually. (Laughs.) And everybody just, I’m not

kidding, it was one of those moments that you see in the movies, and everybody stands

up and is roaring! I’m like prancing off the field, because that’s my thing. I will

absolutely annihilate somebody and then dance off the field. (Laugh.) (Logan)

According to R.W. Connell (1995), gender norms and socialization practices make it hard for women and girls to be aggressive or engage in physical contact. While it contradicts mainstream definitions of femininity, a number of scholars describe how some women do enjoy hitting (Theberge, 2000; Lawler, 2002; Knapp, 2014). Lone Friis Thing (2001) argues that women’s enjoyment of hitting is not just about physical pleasure, it is also because women can experience bodily power and stress relief engaging in acts of aggression. Tackling allows women and girls to get in-tune with their bodies. Many participants explain how they learned that tackling something natural to their bodies that they can engage with instinctually. Participants tried to explain their visceral experiences while tackling:

It’s like a little bit of an adrenaline rush…But it’s kind of like a, I wouldn’t say a

complete euphoria of a high. It just makes your adrenaline pump… you have all those

nerves going into the game and different things and you get that first tackle, like that first

time that I got tackled in the game, it was like, “all right.” Like the nerves were gone, and

you were just focused on the game and you were ready to go. (Elly)

88

I almost felt like it was such a release. Like, it’s so exhilarating. (Sam)

I don’t know that little adrenaline rush, I love it. (Alex)

Is it bad to say that getting hit is a rush? It’s such an exhilarating feeling! (Brooke)

Being in control but also being out of control at the same time. When it’s a good tackle, when you get around the waist and wrap up and drag them down, it’s definitely instinctual that you just keep going, and it’s so satisfying. And you know that you’re going to get that like, “raw, raw,” going after. (Izzy)

My friend called me a jaguar. One time I laughed at him, because I feel like sometimes you are tracking your prey. Cause basically you are, and that’s one of my favourite things… I can cross tackle you and you don’t realise. Like, “where the heck did you even come from?” And then you’re just smoosh! Smoosh! It’s wonderful. They’re my prey.

(Logan)

Like I almost feel that sometimes I blackout when I'm tackling somebody. Just cause I'm just so focused and so hyper into it that like there is nothing else. (Logan)

It feels so good when you hit somebody. It’s just this huge relief of just everything. It’s like everything was really tense and then it’s just [long exhale]. (Logan)

89 Tackling can show girls that their bodies are strong. When girls learn to see tackling as something natural that their bodies are capable of, girls can begin to overcome social narratives in which girls’ bodies are things in need of protection. When girls and women tackle, they may be able to show themselves and others that those narratives are inaccurate (McCaughey, 1997).

Tackling can make visible the differences between physical truths and socially constructed ideas designed to reinforce patriarchal structures and male supremacy.

Some of the participants did struggle to overcome normative gender discourses. Here they talk about overcoming their fear of being hit:

I was scared but, like, once you hit them and it’s fine, like, you don’t break your neck,

it’s great! Yeah, I was always scared of getting kneed. Like, when they’re running, their

knees are so powerful, and I was always scared of getting kneed, that would like knock

my head back, but it never happened. (Abby)

Sometimes I feel like just a train hit me. But, in the game, when I was so stressed, and

when I first go to the field and someone tackles me down to the ground, I just think,

“after this, it won’t hurt anymore.” So, I am just more confident after that tackle. I think

every hit makes you more confident. It gives you more confidence. So, it can be really

strong sometimes. But it’s part of the game. In your mind you have to know that. I was

ready in my mind for it. But, when someone tackles me, I’m definitely okay. I want more

and more and more. (Laugh.) (Toni)

I remember like the first night that we put the gear on, and I got hit. I got the wind beat

the shit out of me. The guy LIT. ME. UP. Right in the chest, and I landed on my back and

90 he landed on top of me. He got off of me, and I struggled to get up and the coach started

to talk to me. I pretended to be fumbling with my mouth guard to sound like I couldn’t

talk properly. But, in reality, I couldn’t talk because I was completely out of breath…It

was a reality check of like, f*** that hurts! But you’re like, damn let’s do this again. So

yeah…I’ll never forget that moment. (Brooke)

All of these players suggest that after engaging in contact they came out stronger. When girls can physically challenge boys and emerge relatively unscathed, it can be freeing, because they can directly confront patriarchy’s embodied aspects (McCaughey, 1997). This freeing feeling is something that can contribute to large scale social change. McCaughey (1997) argues that women destabilize cultural norms when they learn to use their bodies in ways that are physical and combative. By being physical, a woman can create a “transgressive body” that represents women’s physicality as normal (McCaughey, 1997). Girls who don’t mind being hit by boys can help change the way female bodies are perceived.

It’s important here to recall that the participants in this study were not just playing against boys, they were also playing with boys. Many participants shared how they felt a sense of team strength through their experiences tackling. Tackle football is team-oriented; players need to accomplish their individual tasks for the plays to be successful. In the context of high-speed tackling, a play that goes wrong could put your teammates at risk. Having a strong team bond is not only about success but also about group survival (Messner, 1992). Tackling is largely about putting your body on the line for the larger good of the team. As Vicky explains while she is talking about her favourite tackling experience:

Dogpile. Like I felt strong just being a part of it all. I feel like that’s a really big part of

it too. Just the team strength as well… Like I felt so strong. And just like really happy,

91 because your team is celebrating… But even just a really good play where you just

stopped, you blocked a ball, or you intercepted it, or you got in on the dogpile. You

weren't the first one to hit but you were in there. It just felt really good to just be a part of

those moments…It felt really good just having their knees knock together and they’d

topple down. And stripping the ball after. If they’re getting tackled, I would always like

try to strip the ball and then we would just end up in a big pile of people and that was

always so much fun!

In football, the term “dogpile” refers to team tackles where there are many people on the same team laying on-top of the opposing teams’ ball carrier at the end of the play.

Vicky and the other participants suggest that by playing football, girls learn individual strength, but they also have access to a type of group strength that is not available in many other sports. Being able to “take one for the team” and show your worth to others in a group, especially when you may feel undervalued as a result of your gender, can be powerful.

Issues Related to Body Size in Girls’ Football Experiences

The physical pleasures of football are not always available to girls because of the impact of socially constructed gender norms. Discourses that position women's bodies as biologically incapable of strenuous physical activity have contributed to the historical exclusion of women from many sports. Discourses claiming to be rooted in biology are powerful because they legitimize gender-based exclusion by positioning current beliefs as definitive scientific “truths” rather than changeable social perspectives. Patricia Vertinsky (1990) argues that medical discourses are important because of the power they hold. Experts who rely on medical discourses often claim to know more about women’ bodies than women themselves know (Vertinsky,

92 1990). These discourses hold power and can persuade women to change their behaviours and rethink their bodies capacities (Vertinsky, 1990). Understanding the power of medical discourses on women’s understandings of their bodies is especially important considering that men were largely creating those discourses.

Historically, men have used medical discourses as a means of controlling women.

Collette Dowling (2000) argues that medical discourses grow in importance when men feel threatened by women, for instance, during the early 20th century when first wave feminist movement were taking place (Dowling, 2000). At that time, men were advantaged by restricting girls' bodies because it allowed them to maintain some dominance over women who were pushing for equality (Dowling 2000). During the World Wars it was necessary for women not to be perceived as weak so that they might participation in work outside of the home. In the United

States, Dowling writes, the federal government even began supporting women’s athletics during

World War II (Dowling, 2000). Discourses around women’s physical capacities have definitely changed over time, yet the idea that women and girls’ bodies are athletically inferior to men’s and boys’ bodies persist in sport (Adams, et al., 2005; Evans, 2006; Clark, 2012).

After my first football practice I went to my Nanny’s (grandmother’s) house and told her that I was the only girl on the team. My Nanny became incredibly concerned and tried to convince me to quit. She believed that boys were inherently bigger and stronger than girls so she feared that I would get hurt playing against boys. I reminded her that I was 12 years old and about 5ft 6in and 180lbs. I was one of the bigger players on my team. In my research, I heard similar stories, because some of the participants had been among the larger players on their teams. Alex explained:

93 I was the tallest one. So, I guess that wasn’t really an issue. For the most part, I kind of

over-towered my opponents. I think the tallest kid I went against was like up to here

(signals about chest height) on me. I think it was 5th grade; I was like 5’2. I’m 5’8

now. But I was 5’2 and most of the boys were below 5 ft. So, I kinda just like pushed

them over.

Alex played football when she was 10. I found that players' perceptions of their size seemed to be linked to the age they had been when they played. Eight participants had seen themselves as short or small when they played. The three participants who had not seen themselves as small were among the youngest players in my study. Sam said:

I played across an age range where boys are really small and then they get huge. So,

when I was like 12, 13, or 14, I was probably one of the tallest players on my team. I was

bigger, because I’ve been 5’4 ever since I was 12-years-old. So, I started off being one of

the bigger/taller players, and I really excelled. And then my last year, I was so much

smaller than everyone on my team. Everyone just towered over me and it was part of

the reason I ended up stopping playing men’s. I was so much smaller, and I just couldn’t

compete.

Girls often reach puberty faster than boys and experience earlier growth spurts. Contrary to mainstream ideas about sex differences, many girls are bigger and taller than boys during adolescence. Yet, protecting boys from girls who are bigger is rarely a concern and could lead to emasculating comments about boys.

Some youth leagues have rules that are intended to limit the size differentials between young players to increase safety. These rules can be detrimental to girls who are bigger than boys their age. Izzy explains:

94 Let’s say 6th grade to be a running back you had to be under 145lbs. To be a lineman, you

had to be under 165lbs, and that lineman weight was the max weight for anybody. Like,

if you are over 165lbs you can’t play…You can age up. If you want to. But most of the

kids just try to lose the weight. I mean, I can remember four or five kids every single year

just before the season started, before weigh-ins – which was usually the week before the

games start – they would just be running. A lot of them in sweatsuits. I mean, they were

on strict, strict diets. I mean, it was intense sure, only being a town team…I can

remember a kid lost like 15 pounds one season just cause he didn’t want to eat cause he

knew he wouldn’t play then. He wouldn’t play if he didn’t lose the weight and he was

here cause he’d be one of the bigger kids…It was really the bigger kids that ended up

having to lose the weight.

As Izzy mentions, there are negative effects of weight-based restrictions, as they can lead larger players to try to lose weight. Weight policies are designed to increase player safety, but they are not necessarily effective. Zachary Kerr and colleagues (2015) compared injuries among leagues with and without weight policies and found no significant differences.

Izzy also felt that weight policies affected her experience as a result of her gender. As she explained:

If I wanted to be a running back, there were a couple of years that I would not have been

able to. Umm, and maybe that was a problem that they saw – the coaches – they didn’t

want to tell me to lose weight because I was a girl. And like, they probably knew it was

easier for me to just be a lineman. So, I’d have that extra like 5 pounds or whatever.

Umm, I don’t know. I never really thought about it until just now actually.

95 As Izzy suggests, many people assume that women have more body image issues than men. This assumption is rooted in awareness that norms related to femininity can expose women and girls to social situations that lead to body dissatisfaction (Brennan et al., 2010). Many sport and coaching organizations offer training about body image issues and counsel coaches to avoid subjecting girls to weigh-ins or other situations in which girls’ body weight is being monitored

(Sabiston, 2020; Beckner & Record, 2016). This is an important development, but in the context of co-ed football it can limit the positions girls can play in football.

Football requires a diverse range of body types and sizes to fill the different positions on a team. Small bodies can actually be beneficial in some positions despite many contact sports favouring larger bodies. For example, one of the best players on my high school team was the shortest player. He played safety, and he could seemingly come out of nowhere to make tackles.

His small size allowed him to sneak up on his opponents and he was regularly underestimated.

Logan played a similar role on her team:

Everybody probably had like 60 pounds on me. I’ve never been very big, so back in

middle school, I was teeny. It was really awkward, because everybody still to this day,

everybody underestimates the small person, everybody. It isn’t about how big you are,

it’s about how big you play. And I never had a problem with it because I, right out of the

gate, showed them that, yes, I’m little. Yes, I’m a girl. Yes, I’m going to hit you, and it’s

still going to hurt.

Size does not necessarily have a negative impact on football participation. Even in terms of tackling, Logan believes that with good speed and technique, someone’s size is not a factor.

Vicky goes one step further with this story, explaining that her small size was an asset:

96 Like, you have all these guys, and you are comparing yourself to how big they are. But

also, you can do things that the other guys can’t. Like, I was small enough to get through

the holes... So, I was able to get through those a lot easier than all of the other guys who

were broad and slower. So, that was something that I really enjoyed about the sport… I

felt really strong, and I felt like one of the guys.

Being smaller can be advantageous in football. Linemen are typically among the biggest players on a football team. Vicky found that being a smaller defensive lineman allowed her to sneak past her opponents in ways that larger players found difficult. Body size does not necessarily determine whether someone can play football.

While some of the participants argued that their size did not hinder their performance against male opponents, others did see their size, and the size general or average difference between male and female bodies, as an important.

What's driving me nuts lately is people who say that girls and guys can play together.

And I absolutely 100% disagree with that. I think that is a terrible idea… I know there are

bigger girls who can hang. But size wise, physicality, it's just never going to be a great

match. And if we have teams that are co-ed it means fewer girls are going to get to play.

(Lauren)

I was initially shocked by Lauren’s comment, but several of the other participants agreed with her. I did not understand why girls who played football with boys would think that other girls should not do the same. Had these women not themselves challenged discourses of inferiority and proved that girls can play against boys? I quickly realized that simply challenging inferiority discourses do not necessarily mean overcoming them. Challenging inferiority myths is not

97 something that can be individually achieved. Rather, notions about women’s physical inferiority need to be challenged on a larger social scale and in an ongoing process. Lauren further explains:

I had a really hard lesson with pole vaulting… We were all new to the sport and the guys

could jump a good 2ft higher than girls immediately. I mean, it was a really shitty thing.

Cause up until that time, I was always like, “I can do anything the guys can do…” I just

can’t physically be like that.

Despite Lauren playing football, she had an experience that changed the way she viewed girls’ bodies.

Similarly, I quit playing football because, despite having played the year prior, I no longer felt that I could physically compete at the same level as the boys on my team. My muscles in my hands started to tear and I felt that physically I was not able to keep up with my male teammates. I had trained myself to believe that girls can do anything boys can do. But women can’t do everything men can do. Foolishly, I believed that boys become men in grade 11. Despite being one of the better players on my team in grade 10, I thought that I had to stop playing football in grade 11 because I believed I would not be able to compete. Although, four of the participants played senior football and two even went on to play football against men. Nancy

Theberge (2000) found similar results with women’s hockey players who had previously played on co-ed teams with men and later lost their confidence and refused invitations for pick-up games. Theberge (2000) notes that in hockey, women often gain an increased concern for safety as they age and tend to steer away from the men’s version of hockey that commonly includes checking. Thus, this loss of confidence is likely systematic rather than individualistic.

98 The Embodiment of Social Constraints

Iris Marion Young (1980) argues that patriarchal social structures confine and restrict women’s bodily capacities and encourage women to experience their bodies as objects rather than agentic aspects of themselves. Young builds upon phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-

Ponty's (1962) ideas about how bodies interact with the world. Merleau-Ponty (1962) argues that our bodies allow us to transcend our selves by interacting with the world; he says that interaction is direct and intentional. Young (1980) uses the idea of “ambiguous transcendence” to argue that

Merleau-Ponty’s idea is only true for men. Women are constrained in their movements because they are socialized to believe that their bodies are a burden and something to protect rather than use (Young, 1980). Young (1980) uses the example of how girls throw to develop her argument.

According to Young (1980), girls often learn how to throw using only their arms and leaving the rest of their bodies in place. When the girl throws, her arm is moving fluidly in the world, but the rest of her body remains controlled, locked in place, and unable to explore the world.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) theorized that the world’s possibilities are produced by the body’s ability to say, “I can.” Young argues that feminine existence is rarely paired with confidence to say, “I can.” As in the throwing example, women and girls tend to underuse their bodies and rarely meet their full physical potential. Young talks about “inhibited intentionality” as the “I cannot” that is constantly paired with the “I can” in the experiences of women and girls engaged in physical practices. The "I cannot" highlighted by inhibited intentionality is incredibly important, because, as Young (1980) summarizes, “Women in sexist society are physically handicapped. Insofar as we learn to live out our existence in accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigned to us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and

99 objectified” (152). Inhibited intentionality is a consequence of individual bodies being constrained as a result of patriarchal structures working to dominate women and girls.

Young’s ideas provide a lens to view how girls experience their bodies in relation to society. However, a lot has changed in how girls interact in the world in the 40-years she first wrote her piece. Messner (2002) argues that sport has grown immensely for women and girls since the 1980’s, from a space almost exclusively for men to a space getting closer to gender equity. In 1998 Young recognized this trend and published a critique of her earlier work in recognition of women and girls’ increase in sport participation. Young (1998) noted that her earlier work focused too much on gendered ideologies and not the actual lived bodies of women and girls. I agree that Young’s work needed an update to include the body as an agent and recognize the shifts in gender performances overtime. But her original work still holds value to help us understand how women’s bodies are acted on by social norms. Sandra Bartky (2009) defends Young’s original work claiming that despite an increase in women and girls’ sporting participations, the structures that Young discusses still exist. The social structures that limit women and girls have become covert so that women themselves may not even notice their own victimization (Bartky, 2009). Bartky highlights the continuation of oppressive social structures that are often thought to have disappeared.

Given the less overt nature of the oppression that Young identifies, it is important to identify how patriarchal structures still operate to constrict women and girls. A clear example of how these social structures shape football can be viewed through girls’ experiences with football equipment. Football equipment demonstrates how society writes patriarchal structures onto girls’ bodies and inhibits their abilities. When I played football, I believed that football equipment could keep me safe, but football equipment companies do not often have girls in mind when they

100 design their products. Like most things in our society, men are the norm and are used as the models for designs. Football equipment creators focus on increasing safety for men and boys, but rarely consider the safety of women and girls. This lack of consideration works to keep girls out of football spaces. As Young (1980) says, “the culture and society in which the female person dwells defines woman as Other, as the inessential correlate to man, as mere object and immanence” (31). The positioning of girls as “Others” can cause physical harm to girls who play contact football, because they are forced to wear equipment that was not designed or tested for their bodies.

The participants in my study were not immune to the dangers of football. All of the participants could recall some form of injury that came from playing the sport. Concussions were a large concern. Six participants had been diagnosed with a concussion resulting from football.

Izzy said she had had “at least 15 decently bad concussions.” Three participants said that they quit football because of injuries. Not all of these injuries were a result of ill-fitting equipment, but Izzy definitely believes that she could have avoided her fractured hip bone with equipment designed for girls:

I do remember my mom saying a lot that the hip pads weren’t high enough. Cause she’s

like, “they weren’t made for women’s bodies.” So, I remember she bought those hip

pads that come, the really high ones. Because my hip pads were literally at my waist

and the top of my hip was always exposed. I actually got hit there once with the helmet,

like right there on the hip bone, and I got a fracture on the head of it. (Izzy)

As Young (1980) notes, women are regularly unable to move freely in the world, because they see their bodies as a burden and something to protect. Ill-fitting equipment is a small example of

101 why women are hyper-aware of their bodies as objects to protect rather than tools for transcendence.

Inappropriately designed shoulder pads came up in several interviews:

I had the boys’ shoulder pads. They were like, awkward. I hated them. They were bulky

by the shoulders and my shoulder pads would come up and my helmet would be hitting

against my shoulder pads and it's different. Like, the equipment was terrible. It was

heavy as hell. (Morgan)

I would wear these really really small unsafe shoulder pads, just because they were

more comfortable… My last season (women’s league) I played quarterback for a little bit

and they gave me really big shoulder pads…and I couldn’t even move in them. Like

trying to throw a ball was impossible. (Sam)

Girls often do not get the luxury, as boys do, of wearing a pair of shoulder pads that fit both their chest and shoulders. Larger shoulder pads provide more protection for girls’ chests, but they can also move around so they do not adequately protect high impact areas. They also add weight and can negatively impact performance. In contrast, smaller shoulder pads allow for a wider range of motion on the shoulders, but they can be dangerous because they leave girls’ chests largely exposed and can increase the risk of injury.

Figure 2, below, from my first year playing football, shows the difference between the fit of my shoulder pads and those of my opponent. In this image, you can see that my arms (player in the black and orange jersey) cannot move past 90 degrees. In contrast, the boy in white, who is wearing shoulder pads that fit, can fully extend his arm in pursuit of the ball. Looking at this image it appears as if I am executing traditional feminine norms by enacting the “I cannot”

102 narrative, where I am subconsciously holding back and taking an inefficient route towards the ball. But the shoulder pads are actually acting to restrict my range of motion.

Figure 2

Ill-fitting Equipment

I agree with Young that feminine bodies are constrained by patriarchal social structures – some of which are ideas and some more concrete. Football equipment is one materialized example of how gender structures inhibit girls’ physicality and perceptions of their bodies’ abilities. Football equipment is a powerful example, because it is intended to provide freedom to football players to encourage them to see their bodies as resilient weapons. This way of viewing bodies could be incredibly powerful for girls who are socialized to use their bodies in ways that are constrained. However, football equipment that is not designed for girls’ bodies can actually constrain girls and diminish their sense of their own abilities.

103 Sharing Empowerment

Proponents of physical feminism would say that simply by participating in football girls are taking action against patriarchal structures by overcoming narratives about girls’ bodies being inferior. McCaughey (1997) argues that aggressive and strenuous physical activities can empower women and give them a sense of bodily utility and pleasure. According to Judith

Lawler (2002), the embodied experiences of joy that can come of playing sports can empower and turn them towards feminist aims. I struggled with this idea throughout my time playing football. From the day I started playing football, the moms and sisters of my teammates would come up to me and tell me how much of an inspiration I was to them because I was playing football. I had a few young girls tell me that they wanted to play, because they saw me playing and football was now a possibility for them. I wanted girls and women to see that football was a possibility and that they were capable of playing it, but I also did not necessarily want to be a symbol of empowerment. I was just trying to play football. It was not until the last couple of years studying with Dr. Mary Louise Adams that I even felt comfortable claiming to be a feminist, because I did not know much about it, and I always connected it to having oppositional and negative connotations. So, to say that I was pushing for feminist aims through my football participation was something that I felt was thrust upon me.

Being labelled “an inspiration” is a common trend for girls who play football. Logan said:

I don’t feel like I’m that inspirational. (Laughs.) I’m just a little player who wants to hit

people, and I’m happy. But yeah, I just basically showed young girls that you could play

if you want to. Like, nothing is stopping you but yourself. (Logan)

104 Logan did not start playing football as a feminist act. Yet, by playing football, Logan became an inspiration to other girls. Logan’s football participation became a feminist act because of the need for her to confront gendered barriers. As Cheryl Cooky and Mary McDonald (2005) note, women in sport who are "portrayed as 'just doing it' are often romanticized by onlookers as the new representatives for the girl power movement,” and they are “endorsed as role models of female strength and empowerment” (158).

Lauren shared a similar experience to Logan’s. In this example, Lauren is an adult looking to buy cleats to use on her women’s football team:

There was a moment where I was trying on cleats in a store, and they were like, “what

kind of cleats do you need?” And I was like, “football cleats,” and there was a little girl in

there looking, and she was like, “Wooooah." So, I hope we are like inspiring the next

generation. (Lauren)

Lauren hopes that increased visibility of women and girls in all sectors of society can be powerful. When some women and girls occupy positions that they were previously restricted from, other women and girls can become aware of the barriers restricting their opportunities and begin to challenge them (Heywood & Dworkin, 2003). When girls see themselves in an array of sports, their rates of participation will increase.

Both Logan and Lauren finished their statements with motivational narratives about girls overcoming the restraints of femininity. Despite not originally intending to become part of a movement for change, girls who play football often become empowered to push for social change when they are thrust into motivational roles. All the participants shared their hopes to empower young girls to continue to disrupt gender norms. Here are a few examples:

105 I would like girls to know that they can do whatever they want. Play football, play every

different sport. Cause girls all the time have a stereotype in their heads. So, I think maybe

when I show people that I play football… I'm small, I'm still girlish when I play football.

They may look at that sport and girls in that sport differently. And I really hope that it

will change. So, yeah. In general, I would like to do something more with football to

make girls more confident in sport. Especially in football, but in general in sports. To

show them that they can do whatever they want. (Toni)

As long as you find [playing football] enjoyable. We need to look at it as if this is our

opportunity, because, when we get older, who is going to come behind? … When I was

growing up, women were meant to be cheerleaders. But no. That's not the case. Girls

want to play football too. Like, any other male sport that you can think of. Now's when

you're seeing a lot more women in high school football and college football, and women

coaching professional at the NFL. We have about three or four coaches now in the NFL. I

mean, but who wants to take that risk? I don't know if they think football is a male-

dominated area, but I don't know. I mean, I'm working on it. (Morgan)

Toni’s comment that girls can do “whatever they want,” is something that may seem problematic given the analysis of girls’ experiences in tackle football that I have presented here and in the previous chapter. However, this comment speaks to the socially constructed nature of the limitations that women and girls face. McCaughey’s (1997) argues that we need to create new

“accepted” forms of feminine bodies. Girls who play football are using their bodies in new ways, and they are altering how women’s and girls’ bodies are understood. Not all players transition out of football to be feminist activists, but their presence in football is still making a statement to

106 increase women and girls’ opportunities to use their bodies however they want to – even if it is tackling boys.

Conclusion

Girls’ access to and experiences in football have been plagued by gender inequality and notions that girls’ bodies are athletically inferior to boys’ bodies. These ideas are rooted in biological determinism and perpetuated over-time through girls’ and boys’ socialization. Playing football allows girls the opportunity to directly combat boys physically and to confront limiting discourses. Playing football can also be heavily impactful, empowering girls to use their full bodies and work towards feminist aims. Patriarchy is an embodied process; playing football against boys allows girls to directly confront embodied patriarchal structures and can help girls be symbols of and experience empowerment.

107 Chapter 6

Conclusion

“Once you experience playing football there is no giving it up. There is no not wanting it anymore. It’s one of those things that you can never lose that love for that sport. Well, I mean, I haven’t met anyone who suddenly hates football.” (Brooke)

Before conducting this research, my goal was to talk to women about their football experiences and see where the data led. Based on my experiences in football, I had some ideas about what I would be writing. I planned to discuss microaggressions, the pleasure of breaking barriers, and how football affects girls' gender presentations. Speaking with the participants in this study showed me a new way of looking at girls’ football experiences and made me rethink my own experiences. I conclude that football can be empowering for girls, we should encourage more girls to play football with boys, and that we need to work to alter toxic football cultures.

Through this research, my goal is to present a way to understand girls’ football experiences, highlight persistent patriarchal structures that operate to maintain football as a space for men and boys, and see if football can be empowering. I started by asking the question: What have been the experiences of women and girls who have played on youth or adolescent boys' tackle football teams? Through this project, I found that girls’ football experiences vary and are dependent on football cultures and individual identities. Some girls' football experiences were positive, and they felt like valued members of a strong team. Others enjoyed their experiences but were aware of many microaggressions. And some girls had a negative football experience that even made them feel unsafe.

The participants’ experiences varied greatly. This variety in experience is important because it highlights that football experiences do not exist within confines free from social and cultural conditions. Football offers an opportunity to explore these social structures in a way that

108 often goes unnoticed. In gender-neutral spaces or feminine spaces, women and girls are often in positions where their gender is not a point of contention. So, patriarchal structures are not evident. But football offers a unique opportunity to put those structures on display and highlight the inequalities that affect women and girls every day by limiting aspirations and opportunities.

One of the ways that we can see these social structures is by looking at how gender shapes girls’ football trajectories. I looked at this using my third research sub-question and explored this idea in chapter 4. Overall, I found that girls' football trajectories are often limited because of social cultures operating through football that act to keep girls out and push girls out of the masculine space. These structures often operate through toxic football cultures that stigmatize, inflict violence on, and discourage girls in an attempt to maintain football as a space to train boys in masculinity and recreate patriarchal structures. The policing girls experience is not just executed by men and boys. Rather, an array of social actors work to police girls out of football spaces to reserve them for men and boys. Through this chapter, it is evident that football cultures can be a dangerous space for girls to navigate and often operate as a tool to police patriarchal gender divisions.

One of the issues that I came across while writing my analysis chapters is that it was all very negative and the data that I was presenting did not present the love that many of the participants, and myself, have for football. So, I largely used chapter 5 and my first research sub- question to brighten up the discussion. Sub-question 3 asks, “What bodily experiences do girls have while playing football?" The answer to this question is again varied by the participants' diverse experiences. Overall, I argue that girls' bodily experiences in football are often constrained by patriarchal social structures positioning girls' bodies as small, inferior, and fragile.

But those discourses of inferiority allow girls to become empowered, and symbols for feminist

109 empowerment narratives, because girls can learn to use their bodies in new ways, and they can directly challenge these discourses by competing against boys. The participants describe their love for football as something that transcends words. Tackling is larger than hitting. It is about teamwork, overcoming your perceived limitations, letting out aggression, and getting a sense of transcendence or euphoria. Football is about pride, status, and pushing your limits. These experiences are not ones often linked to feminine norms. Football offers a unique opportunity for girls to become empowered in an embodied way. Therefore, football is more than a space where girls can experience gender oppression. It is a place where girls can challenge, confront, and develop femininity into something that they connect with and embody.

Larger Context/ Implications

As I have been working on this thesis there has been a lot of attention to women in men's tackle football. In this section, I focus on two examples of women in football that have gained a lot of media attention within the past few months. I present these examples to gain insight into how women's and girls' football spaces are taking shape. Furthermore, I use this section to outline how my research can contribute to the growth of women and girls in tackle football and spaces previously reserved for men and boys.

The first example I want to highlight is the NFL and the recent "firsts" for women. The

NFL is the most publicized tackle football league in the world and Super Bowls are the most- watched television event consistently every year (Draper, 2021). So, analysing women's roles in the NFL helps highlight how women's and girls' football is growing and perceived. Women have historically been largely excluded from most roles in the NFL. The league started in 1920 but many of women's "firsts" did not start happening until recently. In 1997, Amy Trask became the

110 first woman to be a chief executive in the NFL. Almost two decades later, in 2015 Dr. Jen Welter became the first woman to coach and Sarah Thomas became the first woman to referee in the

NFL (Brassil & Draper, 2021). Last year, Katie Sowers became the first woman to coach in a

Super Bowl (Brasill & Draper, 2021). Despite women coaching for six years, the first Black woman with a full-time coaching position in the NFL did not start until this year when Jennifer

King started in January (Mather & Shpigel, 2021). Finally, during Super Bowl LV in January

2021, Sarah Thomas became the first woman to referee a Super Bowl and Tampa Bay

Buccaneers coaches, Maral Javadifar and Lori Locust, became the first women to win a Super

Bowl (Boren, 2021). Therefore, the NFL is offering women more roles, but the types of roles women are being offered are important to analyse.

The biggest concern with the current evolution of women’s NFL involvement is that these women are only gaining entrance into roles on the sidelines. My research highlights the importance of women and girls being able to engage their bodies and use them while challenging patriarchal social structures. By the NFL granting women more space in their league but limiting those roles to executives, coaches, and referees, it reinforces discourses of women's bodies as inferior. Women working on the sidelines show girls that there are football opportunities for them. But the NFL offers limited opportunities and women's roles largely only value women's minds to coach and referee but not their bodies to play. So, using the findings of my research, I hope that we can better understand the role that women's bodies play in their football experiences and work to support the growth of platforms that showcase embodied roles for women in football. Ideally, I would like to see sex-segregated sport systems abandoned in favour of co-ed sport which would allow men and women to play football at the highest level in a league like the

NFL. Although, this may be a lofty goal. I think a good place to start to alter inferiority

111 narratives of women and girls in sport is to support existing women’s sport systems and foster equal opportunities and media coverage to showcase women's professional sport to create a perception of women's professional sport that parallels men's professional sport.

The second example that I want to draw upon is Sarah Fuller becoming the first woman to play for a Power 5 school. In 2020, Vanderbilt asked Sarah Fuller to play as their kicker when

COVID-19 made it difficult for the school to field its football team. Fuller is a conference champion soccer goalie for Vanderbilt, the third woman (behind Katie Hnida and April Goss) to play Division 1 college football, and the first woman to play for, and score points for, a Power 5 football team (Sallee, 2020).

Sarah Fuller’s entrance into the sport highlights a willingness to join a campaign for women and girls’ increased involvement in sport. Fuller was clear with her message upon arrival into the football space. She was not there to quietly fill a role. She was there to take up space and make a difference for her team and viewers (Vera, 2020). By playing with the sticker “play like a girl” on her helmet, Fuller highlighted that she was incredibly aware that her kick in her first game was of greater importance than just executing a kick-off (Vera, 2020). Fuller approached her time in football purposefully and with an agenda to highlight girls’ ability to play football.

Fuller’s active and vocal approach to the game became especially clear when she insisted on speaking to the team at half-time after believing she could increase team morale (Culpepper,

2020). This specific action drew a lot of online hate towards Fuller (Culpepper, 2020).

Vanderbilt's football team invited Fuller into the masculine football space and she used that invitation to make waves and try to change the patriarchal structures in a very public way.

The reactions that Fuller invoked by playing football largely varied. Fuller became an inspiration for many and was even invited to virtually attend the 2021 Presidential inauguration

112 and introduce Vice-president Kamala Harris (The Athletic Staff, 2021). Although she also received a lot of hate online from commenters claiming that she was playing as a publicity stunt, men at home claimed they could have done better, and largely just a lot of comments based on sexism and hate (Ingemi, 2020). Overall, Fuller's experience is similar to those of the participants from my study. She is a barrier breaker who became an activist and faced similar forms of social policing from toxic football cultures. The main difference is that the media attention allowed the toxic football cultures to form through fan bases and online commentators rather than on the team directly.

The most important thing I believe to have come out of Sarah Fuller's short football career is the show of support from the women and girls' football community. As I have mentioned throughout this project, girls often play football on boys' teams where the football cultures work to make them feel different and treat them as outsiders. Therefore, it is incredibly important for girls to receive support from teammates, coaches, parents, and friends. It can be hard to receive support directly from other girls who share similar experiences because of how sparse the girls' football community appears. But the women's and girls' football communities came out in full force to support Sarah Fuller and counter the hate messages she was receiving.

The #iamsarahfuller campaign began as a way to support Fuller. This campaign largely features images of girls and women playing tackle football coupled with empowering messages about their experiences. The main message the campaign presents is that Fuller is not the only woman or girl who plays football. Through this campaign, women and girls can show support by standing up against the online hate directed at Fuller, break up the narrative that girls' and women's football participation is abnormal or lesser, and share their football presence as a way to encourage more women and girls into the sport.

113 Recommendations

In this section, I focus on recommendations for the growth of girls' football. I start by explaining what I think girls' football should look like. Then, I provide suggestions about how coaches, parents, and teammates could help make football spaces more welcoming to women and girls. Finally, I explain the importance of boys and men acting as allies to help open football spaces for girls.

When I proposed the idea for this project, Dr. Courtney Szto asked me a question that I had a hard time answering, "Would you prefer that girls play with boys or on girls-only teams?" I decided to ask my participants and come back with a better-informed answer. When I asked the participants if they would have preferred to play on an all-girls team two said yes, four said no, and six did not decide. Some of the pros the participants identified for all-girls teams include creating a better feeder stream for women’s sports, creating more room for girls in the sport, and letting girls play in a space that they will likely feel more welcome. In contrast, the participants in favour of playing with boys discuss that football lets them push themselves to challenge inferiority discourses and they often have negative perceptions of what a girls-only team would look like as they believe it would be less funded, less competitive, less developed, and there would be adaptations to rules and gameplay. Based on the participants' answers, I suggest that girls should continue to play on boys' teams. I think that having the ability to play football against boys is something that benefitted the participants by allowing them to directly challenge embodied forms of patriarchy.

More specifically, I think that girls should play on co-ed teams with both boys and girls.

Having the challenge of overcoming inferiority discourses that comes with playing with boys and the support of girls going through the same struggle is likely the best possible outcome. In

114 this study, three participants (Brooke, Abby, and Vicky) note playing on teams mostly occupied by boys with one or two other girls, and their experiences were largely positive. Vicky regularly had two girls play football with her and she explains,

All of us girls had a much bigger bond afterward. Also, I think it gave us a bit more

confidence. Just in general. Because we were playing this badass sport and we did really

well and had a great time. So, I feel like having girls on the team was a really big benefit.

(Vicky)

I think that girls being able to share their experience with other girls is important. Girls often see their football participation as an oddity and can feel isolated. So, I think that having a support network is important. Therefore, I believe that co-ed teams that can grow out of current boys' systems and admit more girls, would create the ideal outcome for youth tackle football.

We need to encourage more girls to play football to help them combat patriarchal social structures. I think that the big thing that needs to happen for football to become more open for girls is for patriarchal structures to end. The first step to that may be to recognize the impact these structures play in football and try to make changes. Communities and football leagues need to work with women and girls to gain a better understanding of their specific needs in football spaces to be better informed of what these issues are and how to address them. Additionally, researchers should work to better understand the issues football cultures pose. My research provides a starting point to understand some of these concerns. Based on my findings I present a few ideas that could help encourage more girls to enter the sport and that could help change football cultures to make them less toxic.

115 1. Positive Mentors:

a) Coaches should encourage girls to play football and create open avenues for

communication. The coach sets the tone for the team. So, coaches are the most important

players in creating a positive space for girls in football (Steinfeldt et al., 2012). Coaches

creating an open environment for girls to be able to discuss their needs, and report

concerns will create a support system for girls with an influential actor in football spaces.

This recommendation could implement through a Football Canada training policy

added to mandatory coaches training. After adding this element, Football Canada should

monitor the effectiveness of the training using annual coaching surveys, administered to

parents and players by the league, to identify areas of concerns where coaches can

improve and where to add more training or intervene. This survey should have a specific

section related to the experiences of girls playing on boys’ teams. But Football Canada

should administer the survey to all players to find areas that they need to intervene in

toxic football cultures. With this information, the league could target extra training and

screen for coaches that are perpetuating toxic football cultures.

b) Parents need to raise girls to challenge social structures by letting them follow

their passions and try new things regardless of gender markers. I found that girls often

identify their parents as the biggest supporters of their football participation. But parents

can also be some of the earliest critics and can restrict girls from playing football. This

restriction is a form of gender policing and starts off girls’ football experiences by

stigmatizing their interests. So, parents need to present football as an option and support

their daughters when they decide to play.

116 This recommendation is difficult to achieve because it largely relies on altering

people's perspectives on parenting and gender structures. Ideally, parents would be the

ones presenting girls with opportunities to play football. But I think that until we dispel

the idea of football as a masculine sport, the onus will, unfortunately, lie with girls to

push for involvement. I think a first step at initiating this recommendation is providing

girls resources to use to speak to their parents about their interest in playing football.

Teams and leagues should offer pamphlets to girls to give their parents that addresses

safety concerns, the benefits of football, and the strides women and girls are making

towards inclusion in the sport. Additionally, there could be resources to online videos and

groups that highlight football role models such as Jen Welter and Sam Gordon who

openly advocate for girls' football involvement. Providing this information to girls will

allow them to be more informed about girls' football involvement as they pursuit football

and it will allow them to aid their parents in making an informed decision.

c) Boys need to be welcoming to girls on their teams. Boys playing with girls should

work to overcome exclusive team structures and willingly partner with girls in a way that

allows them to fully compete against them as equal competitors. It can be hard for boys

in football spaces to overcome group norms and be welcoming to the lone girl. But boys

and men are largely the people who benefit from gender exclusion. For large scale

changes to occur, boys and men also need to challenge gender exclusion.

I think that parents, coaches, and teachers need to start making these changes by

educating boys on anti-bullying practices. Anti-bullying policies are largely already in

place in schools. Parents can play an active role in these changes by educating their sons

about problematic forms of masculinity and patriarchal structures. Additionally, parents

117 should encourage their children to recognize bullying and intervene rather than be a

bystander. Finally, coaches should work to identify bullying within their teams and

intervene. Some easy interventions that could improve boys' perspective towards girls

include assigning partners for drills to ensure inclusion, offering opportunities for girls to

showcase their skills alongside boys, recognizing girls' potential in leadership roles as

like being a team captain, and reprimanding boys for bullying to clarify the standards of

inclusion within the team.

2. Make Women’s Football More Visible:

Girls need to see football as a possibility for them to want to play football more. While I was playing football, I thought I was one of the first girls to have ever played. I had no knowledge of the history behind women's football or people in other areas. All I knew was that men play football on television. I only knew of one girl who started playing in high school when

I started playing in grade 6. I had no concept of how big the women's football community is until

I started doing this project. For example, during the interview stage, I was talking to the participants and saying, with confidence, that there were only two women's teams in Ontario.

Since then, I have learned that there are several more women's teams in Ontario and that I have no way of knowing how many women's teams exist because of the lack of visibility.

In the interviews, I asked the participants if they knew other girls who had played football or anything about the existence of women's football when they started playing. Only two of the twelve participants I interviewed knew that traditional forms (not lingerie) of women's tackle football existed when they started playing. Most participants learned of women's teams only after they had played on boys' teams. One of the participants mentioned that they believed that the X

League (previously the Lingerie Football League) was the only football option for women. This

118 is alarming to me because the largest feeder to women's league should be girls who have played tackle football. But many of the participants only found out very late that these leagues existed.

To enable more girls to play football, they need to see it as an option by seeing women who are playing. So, media coverage and sustainable women's leagues are vital for increasing girls' involvement.

Many of the women that I interviewed for this study happened to also be professional women's players and they had a lot to say about the current women's football structures. Women are often paying mass amounts of money to play professional football because of medical insurance, travel, and equipment costs far outweigh the pay predominantly only given to classify them as professionals. Professional and even national women's teams regularly see smaller crowds than high school boys' football games. Finally, the leagues are so divisive that they struggle to maintain support and grow. I think that media agencies need to recognize the potential of women's football. If women's football leagues receive more support, they could create a sustainable league model that focuses on valuing their athletes' performances, heightening media coverage, and paying athletes a livable wage, women's tackle football leagues could unite and grow into a league that girls see on their televisions and aspire to join.

Ultimately, I believe that the goal would be to establish a professional women's football league that parallels' the NFL in athlete compensation and media coverage to showcase women's value in football spaces and allow girls to have equal aspirations to boys.

3. Save the Sport

Finally, opening up football as a space that is more welcoming to girls is an important step to help save the sport. Football participation rates are dropping rapidly in recent years due to a variety of factors with potentially the most prominent being concerns for injuries (Bachynski,

119 2019). This drop has caused a lot of football programs to close and is worrisome to me. I was talking to one of my high school football coaches a couple of years ago and he informed me that the football program I played on in high school folded in 2018 because of a lack of interest.

Football has its problems and concerns over injuries are important. But there are so many benefits that I gained from playing football including discipline, perseverance, and dedication.

Football helped me become who I am and when teams fold, it takes away opportunities for girls and boys to have similar experiences.

I believe it is important for men and boys to join the push for women and girls to enter football spaces. Girls could be a whole new pool of potential athletes to recruit for football. Girls playing football could add to the diminishing athlete pool and provide the players necessary to save some football programs which would provide more football opportunities for both girls and boys. As I have mentioned throughout this thesis, girls’ opportunities are largely constrained by social structures perpetuated through the actions of men and boys. Men and boys are key actors in the exclusion of women and girls. So, men and boys also need to be key actors in the push for girls’ inclusion in the sport if we want to make any real change.

Limitations

In recognition of the role of men and boys in girls' football experiences, I think one of the largest limitations in this study is whom I sought for participants. Speaking with boys who played with girls, parents, and coaches could have provided additional perspectives to my research that would have allowed me to better understand the motivation of a lot of the actors that I have critiqued. Additionally, I chose to only interview women because of ethical concerns.

But I think that interviewing girls who were currently playing football could have allowed for a

120 more in-depth and timely analysis of experiences because they would be aware of current football systems. Finally, I think this project is largely limited by a lack of intersectionality. I did not do any targeted recruitment looking for women from marginalized groups. Furthermore, I regret deciding not to ask participants to disclose their identities. Not having statistics and identity categories associated with the participants made it incredibly difficult to perform an intersectional analysis.

Future Directions

Future research directions would be to focus on girls' experiences in sport, masculine sport, co-ed sport, and football. This project provided an introductory and exploratory perspective on these topics. While doing this project, I noticed that there is not much research specific to youth sport. I found even less research that was specific to girls' experiences. I think scholars need to research youth sport more because it is where children learn to understand their bodies, socialize, and learn social norms. Sports participation is a large part of many children's lives and is an important arena to study because it allows sociologists to understand how children are being socialized and what social values sport reproduces. I also think that there is value in understanding girls' sporting experiences. Collette Dowling (2000) argues that sport is one of the few institutions that clearly separates people according to sex. Given this, I think that sport is an important institution for feminists to study to highlight and challenge persisting patriarchal structures.

My findings also point to a need to study an array of other topics specific to girls in football. First, I think scholars need to do more research to understand the role of boys in girls’ football experiences and what implications having girls in boys’ football spaces have on boys.

121 This information is important to understand the implications of girls joining boys’ leagues to see if the recommendation I suggest is beneficial for boys as well as girls. Second, research with an intersectional focus could improve our understanding of girls’ football experiences. For example, race is a topic that I struggled with in this thesis. In Chapter 4, I discuss some of the participants’ experiences with racial structures within football cultures. I think that this topic needs to be further investigated with projects that target racialized participants to understand the impact of race in football cultures and specifically, in girls’ experiences in football spaces.

Concluding Remarks

I am very grateful for this research experience. Throughout my time playing football, I felt othered. Being the only girl playing football made me question if there was something wrong with me. For years when I reflected on my experiences, I thought that the problems that I experienced were my fault for not being outgoing enough. Throughout this research process, I learned that a lot of the issues that I had while playing football are structural issues shared by many girls playing on boys’ teams. As I mentioned in the introduction, learning about C. Wright

Mills’ (1959) notion of the sociological imagination was what originally allowed me to question my football experiences. Reading scholars who identify similar issues and being able to speak with the participants has allowed me to feel connected to something larger than myself. It’s as if

I was an outsider on my football team because I was an insider in a community that I was largely unaware existed.

Tackle football is a great sport that I think every girl should get to play. The opportunity to compete against boys in a very physical sport, the desire to work hard, and the experience of fighting to prove yourself physically are things unique to girls' football experiences. These

122 experiences can be challenging, problematic, and even dangerous; but we persevere. Parents, coaches, teammates, and peers tell girls that playing football is weird and masculine, but we do it anyway. Women's football struggles for media and girls often feel like oddities through their football participation, but we keep playing.

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143 Appendix A Thesis Advisory Committee/ Thesis Proposal Amendment Form

Date of thesis proposal: December 2019 No significant changes from the approved thesis proposal occurred.

144 Appendix B Interview Guide Tackling Gender Divisions: Women’s Experiences in Organized Youth Boys Tackle Football • Read and provide a copy of a letter of information to the interviewee to familiarize them with the project • Read and provide a copy of the consent form to the interviewee. Obtain written consent. • Remind the interviewee that they have the right to abstain from any portion of the study and that they may withdraw their consent at any point throughout the interview Part 1 (Research Question: What have been the experiences of women and girls who have played on youth or adolescent boys’ tackle football teams?) • Where did you play football (Country? Province/State?) • What position/s did you play? • How many years did you play football for in an organized league? (At what age? What levels?) • How did you get interested to start playing football? • What did your family/ friends think? • How do you think the boys reacted to you being on their team? Are there any experiences that you had that led you to this conclusion? • Did you know of any other girls that had played football? Did you know about the existence of women/ girls in football before or during your time playing?

Part 2 (Research Question: What bodily experiences do girls have while playing football?) • Do you think that being a girl gave you any trouble getting (or fitting into) equipment? • Did you ever see your size as a problem when you played football? • Did you have any injuries that occurred as a result of football? • Did you frequently have bruises or minor injuries as a result of football? What did you think of them (Did you try to cover them? Did you show them off? Where you indifferent to them being there? Were you proud of them? Embarrassed?) • Can you describe what it feels like to tackle someone? What does it feel like to be tackled? • Can you tell me a story about when you felt your strongest while playing football?

Part 3 (Research Question: How do girls’ experiences in the masculine space of boys’ football teams influence the way that women and girls present themselves on and off the field?) • Would you have preferred to play on a girls’ team if it was available? • Where did you change for games? • Do you remember ever hearing people refer to your team as “boys” or adding your name in particular for inclusion purposes? How did that make you feel?

145 • Did you ever feel left out or awkward with your teammates or coaches as a result of your gender? • Did you ever have any negative experiences that you think is because you were a girl? • While playing football were there times that you felt particularly feminine or masculine? How would you describe what it means to feel masculine or feminine? • Did you have any team memorabilia that you wore? How often would you say you wore that? • Have people ever made assumptions about your sexuality because you play football?

Part 4 (Research Question: What is a typical trajectory of girls in football and how is it shaped by gender?) • Do you think that you inspired anyone by playing football? If yes, did you have any experiences that led you to think this? • Do you still play? When did you stop? Why did you stop playing? • Which economic class do you think best describes your family while you were playing? Do you think that had an impact on your experiences in football? How so? • Do you think that your racial identity impacted your football experiences? How so?

*** I appreciate you discussing this with me. Do you have any other things that you would like to add? Do you have any questions that you would like to ask me? ***

146 Appendix C Research Ethics Approval

147 Appendix D Letter of Information and Consent Form Title of Research Project: Tackling Gender Divisions: Girls’ Experiences on Organized Boys’ Tackle Football Team Investigators: Principal Investigator: Kasanndra Murphy MA Supervisor: Dr Mary Louise Adams MA Student, School of Kinesiology and School of Kinesiology and Health Studies Health Studies Queen’s University Queen’s University [email protected] [email protected]

Introduction My name is Kasanndra Murphy and I am doing a Master’s degree in Sport Sociology looking at girls’ experiences playing on boys’ tackle football teams. I started this project because I played 4 years of tackle football with boys in youth leagues and high school. I am writing to invite you to be a participant in the research I will conduct for my Master’s thesis. The research will explore how women have experienced playing boys’ tackle football with a specific focus on how this relates to gender and bodies. The purpose of this study is to see what impact this experience has on women’s lives and to analyze the evolution of girls’ involvement in tackle football Description of the Project The project will involve interviews with women who have previously played on an organized boys’ tackle football team. If you were to agree to participate in the project, I would do an interview with you over Skype. The interview would take approximately one hour. In this interview, I would ask you a series of questions about your experiences playing tackle football, related to the topic of gender, masculine space, bodies and the trajectory of girls in football. You can decline to answer any of my questions, and if you want to, you can stop the interview at any time. The interviews will be audio-recorded and later transcribed, so that I have an accurate record of what was said. Participation Your participation is voluntary, and you can decline to participate in the research or any aspect of the research at any time. You may withdraw from the study at any time, either before or during the interview, or up to two months afterwards. Data will not be able to be withdrawn after this point because research findings will begin to be released. To withdraw, you would just have to let me know via email to [email protected] . If you were to withdraw from the study, I would destroy the audio recording and transcription of your interview. Confidentiality Any identifying information given to me, or revealed during the interview, (ex: name, age, location) will be kept confidential. I will be de-identifying each interview and giving each participant a pseudonym in all publications of this study. Only my supervisor and I will have access to the code file that links real names with pseudonyms. This file will be stored separately from the rest of the study on an encrypted USB key. None of your personal information will be

148 published or shared, it will be stored securely on a password-protected computer. Any hard copy of sensitive information will be stored in a locked cabinet in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies building at Queen’s University. The de-identified interviews will be published as part of my thesis and may be presented at conferences. No identifying information from the interviews will be published or disseminated. I will keep the data securely for 5 years, per Queen’s University Policy. All files containing data will be stored on a password-protected hard drive for five years, after which it will be archived indefinitely in the Queen's University Archives. The pseudonym code file will be kept on a separate encrypted USB key for five years, after which it will be destroyed. Access to study data is limited to those researchers on the study team, as well as the Queen's General Research Ethics Board (GREB) may request access to study data to ensure that the researcher(s) have or are meeting their ethical obligations in conducting this research. NOTE: GREB is bound by confidentiality and will not disclose any personal information. Potential Risks There are no known risks to participating in this study. Potential Benefits There are no direct benefits to participating in this study beyond having a chance to share your views and stories. Further Questions Should you have further questions about the research study, please contact me, Kasanndra Murphy at [email protected], or my supervisor Dr Mary Louise Adams at [email protected]. If you have any ethics concerns, please contact the General Research Ethics Board (GREB) at +1-613-533-2988 (Toll free in North America) or email [email protected]. Funding This research is Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Consent Form: I, ______, have read the above Letter of Information and have had all my questions answered to my satisfaction. I understand that my participation in this project will involve answering questions regarding football, gender, masculine space, bodies, and the trajectory of girls’ football in an interview. I understand that my participation in this project is voluntary and that I may withdraw at any time before, or during the interview, or up to 2 months afterwards. I understand that any identifiable information that I share in the interview will be kept confidential, will not be published, and will not be used for any other purpose than this research project. I understand that there is no compensation for my participation in this research project. I understand that a copy of the final research publication will be made available to me upon request. I am aware that should I have further questions about the research study, I may contact Kasanndra Murphy at [email protected]. If you have any ethics concerns, please contact the General Research Ethics Board (GREB) at +1-613-533-2988 or [email protected].

I have read the above statements and freely consent to participating in this research: ☐ Yes, I consent to the collection of audio recording from the interview.

149 ☐ Yes, I consent to the use of direct quotes from the interview.

By checking this box and typing my name below, I am electronically signing this consent form. Name:______Date:______You have not waived any legal rights by consenting to participate in this study. Please return this consent form to me via email, at [email protected].

______Signature of Person Conducting Name Date the Consent Discussion

150