"They still face a world in which equality is not given" - The develo...

Dunn and Welford (2019: 140) claim that “women’s football cannot be understood away from men’s football: it has developed within its shadow, and men’s football continues to be the benchmark against which women’s football is judged”. (Competitive) sport in general is organized around two biologically defined, fixed categories with an uncontested male dominance and orientation regarding embodiment and physical attributes as well as frameworks, (gate-keeping) practices and governance (Pfister & Bandy 2018). As a global cultural field that builds on generic social processes, sport entails and predisposes core discourses, values, functions, imperatives and categories and intersects with other dominant cultural fields such as media and business (Schirato 2013).

In the sense of Naglo’s (2014) “glocalization”, global medialized trends and forces of sport, and more specifically of football, intertwine with national and regional manifestations. Consequently, local interpretations impinge on global arrangements and homogenization trends – such as aesthetics and playing style in (male) football – mold local versions. According to Russell (2019), the commitment to local roots is central to football culture and can be witnessed in (fan) rivalries between teams even in geographical proximity such as the two London situated clubs Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal. Yet, these local rivalries are supplanted in the face of international tournaments where football unites people behind a national identity and a transnational imagined community. As a “popular culture superstructure” and a “cultural map” (Giulianotti 1999), football is an “ideal subject to analyse how symbolic points of cultural, social and political thinking are being created, which bring together global and local manifestations and allow for links to be made back to national constructs” (Waine & Naglo 2014, p. 14).

Given the “malestream of football” (Dunn and Welford 2019), gendered discourses and discourses on sexuality act as defining core discourses that produce, articulate, disseminate and accept the cultural field “football” and its entailed practices and performances on both local and global levels. Concurrently, these discourses experience an intensification and aggravation in a context where women’s football seems to challenge the long-standing male-dominated cultural field (Meân & Kassing 2008; Williams 2016): because of felt tensions on this contested ground, gender and sexuality become foregrounded and manifest themselves e.g. in reinforced gate-keeping practices, hateful, violent and misogynistic comments on women’s engagement with football and versions of stylized femininity and hegemonic masculinity on and off the field (Woodward 2019; Adams, Anderson & McCormack 2010).

In this talk, we address the question how larger (i.e. global and national) tensions regarding the latest developments on the cultural field “football” materialize in alternative and (more) traditional femininities and sexualities in Austria that contest or confirm the prevailing dichotomy. To this end, we analyze local discourses surrounding the First Vienna FC U16 girls’ team. Our corpus consists of 3 focus groups interviews (with players and parents) and 3 semi-structured interviews with coaches and the team’s manager, collected in 2018. The data will be analyzed with the help of Critical Discursive Psychology (Wiggins 2017; Edley 2001) focusing on emerging interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas.