ABSTRACT
A normative equation of violence with masculinity means that when women are violent, many people perceive them to be acting masculinely. Even in sports that require players to enact violence as part of the game, such as tackling in rugby, women still navigate a paradox around their gender and sport performance. This chapter relies on in-depth interviews with 15 female rugby players from the United States to examine how these athletes take pleasure in their bodies by enacting violence on the rugby pitch. Contrary to claims that women’s violence is an enactment of masculinity, the women in this study did not identify their violence as such. Instead, my interview respondents revealed that they derived pleasure from employing their bodies as powerful tools and thus confounding constructions of femininity as passive and in need of protection. I explore how whiteness amplifies players’ discussion of pleasure in their transgression of gender norms and argue that rugby players’ ownership of their bodies is illustrative of how white women can simultaneously capitalise on the advantages they derive from normative white femininity while expanding its parameters.
