ABSTRACT
Following its launch in 2000, Soccer and Society has aimed to cover all aspects of soccer globally from anthropological, cultural, economic, historical, political and sociological perspectives. Since 2000, however, with the exception of Jinxia and Mangan’s discussion of women’s soccer in China and Majumdar’s research on women’s soccer in India, fewer contributors have dealt explicitly with what has come to be commonly known as ‘women’s soccer’.[ 1 ] In a similar way, with the exception of Clayton and Harris’s work on the role of footballer’s wives in the construction of idealized masculinity, fewer contributors have dealt explicitly with aspects of the soccer-gender nexus.[ 2 ] In this essay, I shall attempt to address this dearth of research by focusing on aspects of the sport-gender nexus in the Republic of Ireland with specific reference to the formal emergence and development of women’s soccer since 1973. The academic sub-discipline of the sociology of sport in Ireland is in its relative infancy, though a number of male sociologists including Bairner, Hassan, Magee, Fulton and Tuck have made valuable contributions to our understanding of aspects of the sport-national identity nexus in Ireland.[ 3 ] By comparison, with the exception of the author’s doctoral research, the sport-gender nexus is relatively under-researched. This essay should be seen, then, as ‘one symptom of a beginning’;[ 4 ] that is to say, it should be seen as an attempt to develop a more adequate sociological model for the subject matter in question, in this case, females’ increasing involvement in a traditionally associated male sport like soccer in Ireland. In this connection, I shall draw on empirical data gathered for a doctoral research project,[ 5 ] aspects of which have been discussed in detail elsewhere.[ 6 ] For the purposes of this discussion, I will focus more specifically on data from in-depth interviews and data gathered during my elite-level involvement as a player in women’s soccer since 1995.
