“It Was a Combination of Feeling Super Badass and...Super Inept”: Exploring Girls’ Experiences Playing on Boys’ Tackle Football Teams

Abstract

This study explores girls’ experiences playing tackle football on boys’ teams to understand how girls experience a highly masculine sport space. Tackle football is largely a space reserved for men and boys. Girls’ opportunities to play football are limited and often involve playing on teams intended for and dominated by boys. The purpose of this research was to begin to understand girls’ experiences in tackle football to highlight girls’ ongoing oppression in patriarchal societies and to consider whether football can be empowering for girls. The idea for this research originated from my own experiences playing tackle football on boys’ teams for four years. I present my experiences alongside data I collected in interviews with 12 women from Canada, the United States, and Poland who have played on boys’ tackle football teams. These interviews, paired with my personal experiences, allowed me to identify aspects of toxic youth football cultures and, maybe surprisingly, the opportunity football presents for embodied feminist empowerment for girls. I identify some girls’ experiences as taking place in toxic football cultures based on their experiences with microaggressions and violence. These cultures work to retain boys’ and men’s control over football spaces by plaguing girls’ abilities to play football and hindering girls’ enjoyment of the sport. Discouraging girls’ football involvement is a powerful tool of oppression, because football could, in better circumstances, be empowering for girls. Playing football against boys allows some girls to confront embodied forms of patriarchy and challenge discourses about girls’ physical inferiority. This research highlights girls’ continued oppression in patriarchal societies and the embodied nature of patriarchal norms. It also shows how girls’ physicality could be used as a tool to challenge oppressive gender structures.