ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how media accounts of the women's and men's World Cups celebrate the postfeminist embodiment of successful femininity across transnational communities of women sport fans. It makes an important contribution to the literature by analysing how female fans of a major women's sporting tournament – the women's football World Cup – are configured in the wider cultural imagination. The chapter analyses how online reports about women fans at the 2014 FIFA men's World Cup and 2015 women's World Cup tournaments mobilise postfeminist rhetoric in different yet related ways and suggests that new modalities of postfeminist sport fandom foster myths of sport as an agent of emancipation via a celebration of women's fan participation. The chapter therefore contributes to the body of sport literature that mobilises critical postfeminist paradigms by considering both textual representations and empirical accounts of women sport fans.
