ABSTRACT

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