ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly surveys publically available facts and figures showing patterns of women's involvement as sport fans. It demonstrates the growing attention being paid to women's participation in sport during a period when women around the world are being encouraged to take up positions in new global economies as agentic, mobile and adaptable subjects. Sport analytics suggest that women's sport fandom is on the rise, with changes in the gender composition of sport fan audiences documented in various surveys of match attendance and televised viewing of domestic sport leagues and international sport events. The chapter provides some background and context to the discussion of female sport fan experiences and representations, and to advocate for a critically informed, transnational feminist perspective in the study of women fans of sport. Developing from feminist critiques of colonialism and modernity, transnational feminism attempts to respond to new and emerging forms of gender injustice under the processes of globalisation and neoliberalism.
