ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of sport fandom in women's everyday lives and how it shapes their social identities and sense of self. It begins with a brief overview of the scholarship on identity in sport, which forms the basis from which to establish and explains how sport fan identity has been traditionally constructed in masculinist terms. The chapter investigates the impact of gender attitudes and assumptions in terms of how women self-identify as sport fans and how they perform this identity, as well as the ways in which group norms come to define sport fandom and how such norms police who is seen to belong and who is marked as 'not belonging' to supporter communities. It considers the strategies through which women followers of sport negotiate the tensions between performing gender identity and sport fan identity, and the pleasures that sport fandom can bring for people who might not be considered 'typical' sport fans.
