Gendered Pleasures, Power, Limits, and Suspicions: Exploring the Subjectivities of Female Supporters...

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Gendered Pleasures, Power, Limits, and Suspicions: Exploring

the Subjectivities of Female Supporters of Australian Rules

Football

“Professional Australian Rules football is a man’s game” began the cultural

studies scholars Beverley Poynton and John Hartley in their pioneering 1990 analysis

of the intersections and elisions between televised football, gender and sexuality:

Men play, coach, promote, officiate, ministrate, commentate and follow

footy. It seems only natural, therefore, that the transformation of football

into television would produce an audience for the game that is similarly

gendered.1

Poynton and Hartley could have been speaking about any popular contact-‐based

team sport, for all have been, and generally continue to be, dominated by men. They

had chosen Australian Rules football – the football code that developed in Southern

Australia during the late 1850s – because it was the game Poynton had grown up

with. “Aussie Rules” football was more akin to ice-‐hockey as a spectacle than the

“mild forms of trench warfare” like codes of rugby and American football, and was

renowned for the athleticism of its players and the tight (unpadded) tops and shorts

that “footy” players then wore.2 Yet arguably the most distinctive feature of

Australian Rules football was that from its inception women (and girls) had made up

close to half the spectators that attend games, in stark contrast to other elite male

contact-‐based team sports.3 Although Poynton and Hartley were unaware of the

details of this history, the great number of female spectators informed their interest

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in what they saw as the “systematic exclusion” of women “from the [televisual]

discourse of football.”4

As a kid however, Poynton felt included rather than excluded by the culture

of Australian Rules football.5 Poynton had begun her involvement with Australian

Rules football in “the conventional manner”, being born into “a family of footy

followers” where it was expected that you would support and watch the local team

and do your bit to will them towards a premiership victory.6 Looking back Poynton

was struck by the way her “gender seemed inconsequential, although it never

occurred to me that I might actually want to play the game. The fact that my gender

made me ineligible to play was never questioned.” This sense of inclusion doesn’t

seem to have been enough for Poynton to become a passionate supporter –

“barracker” – as an adult. Instead she described herself as a “fan of Australian Rules

football through family commitments” watching her sons play junior football and

supporting their club with volunteer labour.7 “But in between footy experiences of

childhood and parenthood” Poynton “discovered the plentitude of football’s

representational counterpart – television football.”

Otherwise involved in making independent films, Poynton was fascinated by

the “visual effect” of breaking down the television coverage to just the pictures

shown on the screen:

What attracted my interest were the images of male bodies. Here were

barely clad, eyeable Aussie male bodies in top anatomical nick. The cameras

follow their rough and tumble disport with a relentless precision, in wide-‐

angle, close-‐up and slow-‐motion replay.8

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When Poynton turned down the commentary and provided accompanying music the

performance could be “enjoyed as choreographed spectacle: lyrical, flagrantly

masculine, and erotic.”

Poynton had found an intriguing erotic subtext to telecasts (and maybe

specatorship more generally) of Australian Rules football, but she was wary of

overplaying it. Instead, she pointed to the way “the carnal connotations of the men

in action imagery are vigorously and persistently effaced by the processes of the

text.”9 Nevertheless, Poynton and Hartley argued that the television coverage of

footy “objectified” the male bodies on display. “The relation of looking and being

looked at – a relation in which conventionally the feminine body is rendered as the

object of specularity – is tenuously reversed”.10 They added the proviso however,

that “men still retain their subjective dominance as spectators or audience”, going

on to argue that women were excluded in the discourse around spectatorship, like

“the original Grecian Olympics”, to limit the potential for footy to be read erotically

and thus also homo-‐erotically.11 Women spectators were the victims then of the

injunction for sport and sex to not mix “except in jest.”12

Feminist sports histories have sought to give voice to the experiences and

subjectivities (identities, feelings, beliefs and desires) of female athletes, as well as

to the women who watch these athletes perform.13 There is also an emerging body

of literature exploring the experiences of, and attitudes towards, female fans of the

elite male team sports that tend to be at the centre of popular cultures around the

world.14 Studies of Australian Rules football supporters, for example, generally

examine both male and female supporters, with a number focussing solely on female

fans.15 But the intriguing questions that Poynton and Hartley raise around the

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possible pleasures and power (to objectify the athletes on display) of female fans,

and the anxieties that these might provoke, are yet to be explored in further detail.

In other words the passions of female fans, and in particular the way these passions

are shaped, or not shaped by gender, remain neglected. This is a vital issue for

feminist sport history because the great social, cultural and economic power of

spectator sports rests on the intense emotions, desires and dreams of sports

spectators.16 Thus if feminist historians of sport want to critically engage with the

powerful effects and affects of popular spectator sports in the past and present, we

need to consider the layered intersections of gender with these emotions, desires

and dreams by creating space for female voices and experiences of these passions.

This paper will follow on from Poynton and Hartley by tracing the affects and

subjectivities of female followers of Australian Rules football by way of in-‐depth

interviews with zealous female footy followers of elite football teams, along with the

writings of, and about, women fans.17 At the centre of this paper are the memories

of Helena, Sienna, Deirdre, Rachel, Nadia, Veronica, Margaret, Sam and Charlotte –

memories that while necessarily partial and subjective, shed light on the way their

experiences of Aussie Rules football shaped their identities, feelings, beliefs and

desires as Aussie Rules fans.18 What, I want to ask, has it meant to passionately

follow a team playing a game which you are not allowed to play at the highest level?

How can gender seem inconsequential for some female fans? And what might a

focus on the pleasures of female spectators reveal of cultural anxieties around the

gaze of women and the potential erotic readings of football?

It is questions like these that shall help us write in the passions of female

sports fans, and thus allow for a richer understanding of the historical interplay of

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gender, sexuality, power and pleasure at the centre of our popular sporting cultures.

I will explore these questions by first charting the relatively inclusive passions

fostered by the spectator culture of Australian Rules football, then sketching the

gendered limits around the possible dreams provoked by footy, before turning to the

supposedly ‘feminine’ fantasies of female fans, and then concluding with a coda on

the problematic intersections of football and sex.

Unbridled Passions

Every fortnight in the early 1960s Helena and her siblings would troop down

to the South Melbourne Swans home ground with her mother and grandmother.

These two women were “very polite, quite shy, modest” and “mannered”.19 But “put

them in front of a [football] game”, particularly her grandmother, the daughter of a

publican who had learned some “earthy language”, and “every now and then she’d

let fly at the umpires”. Helena and her siblings found such occasions “absolutely

shocking and fantastic”. The attraction of footy in those early days was as much

about the “fabulously exciting” chance that her mother or grandmother might

“become unmannered” and “say a rude word” as it was about hoping for a win.

Like Helena, Melbourne writer Marieke Hardy was brought up by a woman

renowned for her fierce outbursts at the footy. When her parents were courting, her

father had taken her mother to the football, full of trepidation that the wildness of

the men in the crowd would so offend her as to lead to the termination of their

relationship. Instead, half-‐way through the first quarter:

a poor umpiring decision was made close to the boundary line at which point

my mother propelled herself to the fence, hoisted herself up to eye level with

Matthew Klugman� 19/3/12 11:49 PMDeleted:

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both little gloved hands, and screamed at full volume, “UMPIRE YOU FUCKING

WHITE MAGGOT WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU CALL THAT THEN” and my father

sighed happily and decided then and there that this was indeed the woman he

was going to spend the rest of his life with.20

The pregnancy that followed their subsequent marriage did little to moderate the

passions of Hardy’s mother who would continue to “bellow” forth with vehement

invective while “running her hands over her baby bump in agitated fashion”. Hardy,

as she puts it, “soaked up” her mothers fanaticism “in utero” and became

“inextricably linked to the Fitzroy Football Club.”

Swearing, especially in public, has typically been associated with ‘masculine’

behaviour and the construction of masculine identities.21 While the sociolinguist

Karyn Stapleton cautions that “the relationship between gender and intemperate

language is more complex than such folklinguistic theory would suggest”, she notes

that women still tend to mainly swear in “intimate environments”.22 But Australian

Rules football matches have long provoked women as well as men into acts of

fervent shouting and verbal abuse that would generally be considered excessive.23

Indeed what is striking about the reported behavior of female footy spectators is not

the issue of gendered differences so much as their similarity to the reported

behaviour of male football followers. At particular moments in the 1890s and early

1900s the fact that women as well as men were behaving boorishly at football

matches did cause instances of moral panic with newspapers decrying accounts of

women swearing, threatening and sometimes even stabbing players and umpires.24

In 1896 for instance, the conservative Melbourne broadsheet the Argus, complained

that:

Matthew Klugman� 19/3/12 8:02 PM


Deleted: relative lack of them.

Deleted: with umbrellas and hatpins

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The woman ‘barracker’, indeed, has become one the most objectionable of

football surroundings. On some grounds they actually spit in the faces of

players as they come to the dressingrooms, or wreak their spite much more

maliciously with long hat pins.25

But women continued to attend matches in great numbers and to publicly

demonstrate an intense zeal for the game. In 1934 the Argus believed “the bobbed

hair cut” had led to the “abandonment of hatpin attacks on umpires” yet still

wondered if “the woman barracker” might be feared “more than the male”, and

wrote waspishly of a woman at a game who “abused the umpire”, “quoted the

rules” and “harangued” the opposition.26 Rob Kingston notes that the women

barrackers in the 1930s benefited from the “widespread assumption” that “within

the spectating area normal standards of public decorum did not apply, even to

females.”27 This assumption was still widespread thirty years later when “Roman

Holiday” would write a letter to the Melbourne tabloid Sun News-‐Pictorial noting the

distress caused when “Taken to my first League match at the age of eight I saw my

wonderful father suddenly become, to my childish mind, a bloodthirsty, terrifying

savage and my beautiful, gentle mother turn into a screaming virago.”28

I do not mean to suggest that women have never been excluded or

discriminated against when attending games of Australian Rules football. The

Melbourne Cricket Club, on whose ground the Grand Finals (Super Bowl equivalents)

were generally played, excluded women from being members until late in the

Twentieth Century, while Kingston reports that a number of women were

“dissuaded from” attending games because “football was not a desirable feminine

pursuit”.29 Nor do I want to imply that all female (or male) fans swear and shout

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regularly. Many women and men are largely silent while others are careful to be

civil, especially around children.30 Instead I want to note that women have long been

included – or included themselves in – the considerable displays of passion which

have marked the spectator culture of Australian Rules football.31 The importance of

such displays of excessive passion by women as well as men, lies in what such

outbursts reveal of the perceived power these fans feel over the (male) footballers

on display, as can be gleaned by briefly delving into the accounts of two current

female fans.

Sienna is a loud barracker who follows the Carlton Football Club.32 She

attends games with a group of women who typically show their support by praising

and instructing the Carlton players on how they should be playing the game. Yet, like

many of the other women she attends with, Sienna will also yell out invective at

players and umpires if the situation seems to demand it. Unlike some of these

women, Sienna tries not to be personal in the abuse that she directs at players.

Instead “I’ll name them, name their crime, and tell them how to fix it.” The way

Sienna sees it, “I’m flying the flag, dammit!”, helping the team by telling the players

what to do. ““I’m screaming to the players to get down here and do something

about it, and if they do, it’s like, ok that’s done, cause they can hear you, even when

you’re yelling at the TV.” There’s an indication here that Sienna knows that her

behavior is absurd, but it provides significant pleasure and she takes her spectating

very seriously:

I love the fact that you can go and scream and it really doesn’t matter. That

said, I try and notice if there are people around who are offended by what I

yell. I was absolutely abusing Nick Stevens the other year and then noticed

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that some family members of his were sitting nearby, and the little girls were

getting upset about their Uncle Nick. So I moved away because I still wanted

to abuse him if he did something wrong!

Unlike Sienna, Deirdre is a quiet fan who follows the St Kilda Saints.33 Deirdre

attends games with her father. She doesn’t boo Saints players, and tries to be fair

and to clap good play by the opposition as her father does. Even though Deirdre

hates the umpires “like everyone else”, she will only swear quietly at them if

provoked by a particularly egregious decision. Yet she still maintains a position of

perceived power over the players, demanding that they put the health of their

bodies on the line for the good of the team. “I don’t want to see people pulling back

because they might get hurt”:

That’s what they are paid to do. To be exceptionally harsh, we don’t care if

they are intelligent or bright or charming or nice people, they are paid to play

a game at that point of time, and they’re paid very well, for our

entertainment [slightly uncomfortable laugh].

Sienna has a similar attitude, relating how “an old lady yelled at me after I yelled at

[the Carlton player] Simon Beaumont to ‘get off the field and bleed in your own

time’ because he was holding up the game.” Sienna then paused, “Did I really say

that?” she asked herself. “Yeah I meant it” was her immediate answer, “get a

bandage on and get back on [the field]!”

The historian Margaret Lindley has argued that spectators cannot objectify

football players because the powerful movements of these players are not

performed “for the sake of the observers” but rather for “their team’s purposes” in


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contrast to a striptease.34 Yet the comments of Sienna and Deirdre provide an

intriguing window into the way female spectators relate to the bodies on the field.

From their perspective, the players are performing for them (and the considerable

salaries of the players are a result of the game’s spectator culture). Moreover, the

players are not regarded as individuals with their own subjectivities and freedom,

but as figures with particular duties and responsibilities whose contribution to the

spectator’s world can be assessed (often harshly) in terms of their deeds out on the

field. Sienna, Deirdre and other women treat the players as objects, demanding that

these players bring them victory (and the manifold pleasures around this) regardless

of the bodily risks the players face. In other words, the players are objectified,

though this does not mean they are seen as sexual objects (the question of sexual

objectification will be considered in following section while the coda will also return

to the nuances of objectification). These fans care deeply for the players but judge

them primarily for their on-‐field contributions. Deirdre winces and feels angry when

a Saints player is hurt, but she doesn’t “care if they are intelligent or bright or

charming or nice people”. Failure by players (and umpires) often provokes

frustration so intense that some women like Sienna and her friends feel compelled

to yell out abuse, just like many male barrackers.35 When Poynton spoke of the way

“gender seeming inconsequential”, she was pointing therefore to the relatively equal

access females and males have to the considerable power which Australian Rules

football spectators feel over the players on display. Outside of spectating however,

the gender of female fans can be of considerable consequence as I will show in the

following section.





Deleted: a culture in which

Deleted: assert a particular dominance over

Deleted: from a position of perceived dominance

Deleted: and also coda

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Bridled Dreams

Like many girls in Melbourne, Helena grew up believing that her passion for

her Australian Rules football team was similar to – and just as legitimate as – the

passion held by boys for their teams. But from early on in her life as a fan, Helena

would be confronted by a stark limit to her relationship with the game. The boys she

knew grew up dreaming of becoming star football players. Football was a key focal

point of their imaginative play. Helena joined in with gusto when her brothers and

other local kids initiated games of footy. The kids in her family would “water the

backyard until it got that nice muddy consistency” of the Lakeside oval that the

Swans played at, “and then we’d put on clean clothes and go and roll in the mud

competing for the footy ball”.36 Helena imagined herself as Bobby Skilton – the

Swans star rover – but in contrast to the boys she didn’t indulge in loud commentary

proclaiming her (fantastic) identity because it wasn’t “seemly” for a girl to dream of

being a footballer.

In a way Helena was privileged, Poynton for example, does not recall even

imagining that she could play the game. Yet the desire of women to play Australian

Rules football goes back to at least the early 1900s, and probably back to the

inception of the game itself. Women have played competitive matches of Australian

football since at least the First World War, but the history of women playing formal

games of Aussie Rules is marked by discontinuity, and most women did not have the

opportunity to play football at a club level; the first ongoing competition, the

Victorian Women’s Football League, was formed in 1981 and women are still barred

from playing against men and thus excluded from the most professional levels of the

game.37 Yet even when no formal opportunities were available, some women still

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wanted to play. In the 1930s Rachel kicked a football around with her brother after

school. He was a left-‐footer, she a right-‐footer and so he would lend her his right

footy boot. They lived in Essendon and Gordon ‘Ginger’ Bell, one of the Bombers

players, often passed them on his way home from work. “‘You’re sister’s a better

kick than you are son’, he’d say”, related Rachel, “and I was!”.38 Rachel wished she

could play football competitively like her brother did. While he played at the elite

level for Essendon, she ended up in the crowd (though in summer she was able to

play cricket for the local women’s team). Well into her 70s she would still enjoy

joining in games that she was passing by and showing that women could kick a

football properly.

Playing at being a star footballer is a rite of-‐passage for many Australian boys

(as war-‐play has tended to be for boys around much of the world) and a site of

dreams, promise and excitement.39 The general preclusion of girls from such

imaginative activities could limit their engagement with the rich desires that

Australian Rules football can provoke, and also lead to broader feelings of alienation

from the game, as occurred with Nadia.

In the 1980s Nadia and her brother were brought up to follow Collingwood

by their obsessed father.40 Initially he taught both of them to play the game, but

when she neared puberty her father started initiating games with just her brother.

Nadia broke her leg shortly before Collingwood played off in the 1990 Grand Final

against Essendon. She and her father secured tickets to the game in the Grand Final

ticket ballot, but her brother missed out. Nadia used the excuse of her broken leg to

give her ticket to her brother, but the gesture was as much about a disconnect she

felt to the game. Later, during her early years at university Nadia became appalled

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by the misogynistic elements of football culture – in particular with the focus on

male players and the demeaning, at times aggressive off-‐field behaviour of these

players to women – and she drifted away the game.41

The misogynistic aspects of football were also something that Helena

struggled with. You “really weren’t supposed to like football” when involved in the

women’s liberation movement as Helena was, and she kept her barracking a secret

from the feminist communities she was involved in. When South Melbourne were

moved to Sydney in 1982, it was the final straw. “I hate Sydney [the city] like I hate

Collingwood [the football club]”, Helena explained. Yet despite her ambivalent

relationship to footy, the loss of her club was “devastating”:

It felt like you had lost one of your core cultural things, a connection to family,

the one thing you could talk about over dinner that was safe was footy, movies

and footy. So the kind of loss that was really difficult. Football was a family

binding thing, always safe for us, always enthusiastically embraced for

discussion.

A change of club culture gradually led Helena back to supporting her team.

When the Australian Football League developed a mixed competition of touch-‐

Australian Rules football in the mid 2000s Helena jumped at the opportunity to play,

as did Nadia who had also come back to the game after finding some politically

progressive friends who followed the footy. Though separated in age by more than

two decades, the chance to play football helped reconnect both Nadia and Helena to

the game – both felt more included in the culture of the game, and this gave them

further freedom to lose themselves once more in the passions of spectating.

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Although the misogynistic aspects of Australian Rules football culture had clearly

shaped Helena and Nadia’s relationships to the game, a broader consideration of

this culture is beyond the scope of this paper.42 Rather, I want to turn to the

problematic discourse around the particular desires which supposedly draw women

to watch footy.

‘Feminine’ Fantasies?

As an adolescent Veronica did not dream of emulating her Collingwood idols,

though later she did play some competitive football.43 Instead she and her closest

friend spent hours speaking about their favourite player, Gavin Crosisca – a rugged

defender who did not have the broader fame and adulation of his better skilled

team-‐mates, but played with desperation and a disregard to his physical well-‐being.

Crosisca, they were sure, was a sensitive soul who liked reading literature and poetry

as well as giving his all out on the field for the Magpies. In their imagination, in other

words, he was the perfect man – tough and courageous as a footballer, and an

aficionado of fine writing to boot. They would spend hours talking about him,

discussing among other things, what were likely to be his favourite novels and poets.

A couple of years later, however, Veronica met Crosisca at a Melbourne nightclub

with a dubious reputation, and he didn’t seem like a lover of fine writing. Although

“a bit shattered”, she also realised he “was just a human being with feet of clay, like

everyone else”. Crosisca remained her favourite player, and she still followed his

post-‐playing career with interest, but she no longer pictured him as a renaissance

man.

Matthew Klugman� 19/3/12 11:59 PMDeleted: Instead

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Veronica’s adolescent fantasies about Crosisca were intense, but they were

only one part of the rich experience of following her team, and she still went to

games to support Collingwood, not primarily to enjoy the sight of Crosisca. But

Veronica, like many other women, was regularly confronted with presupposition

that they were in the game just to enjoy ‘perving’ at the bodies of the players and

the spectacle of athletic men in tight shorts.44 While this tends to be said to women

as a joke, the effect is to question and demean the legitimacy of their fandom.

Sienna, for example, sometimes finds particular players attractive, but doesn’t care

about how the Carlton players look – she just wants them to play good footy. Yet her

male colleagues teasingly accuse her of attending games for the sake of titillation

and tend to dismiss the knowledge and passion she has for the game. The

implication of the jokes that she and many other female fans face is clear – they are

voyeurs and not real fans. “I get insulted by it” Sienna told me, “I am not watching

players’ butts”, and “their attractiveness is not even a remote consideration”. Sienna

wants to tell her colleagues to “go to the football, look around, there are a lot of

women there, we’re often the rudest and loudest ones!”

Some women do apparently watch football games primarily for the scopic

enjoyment of the toned male bodies on display45, and Nikki Wedgwood has begun

the process of thinking about the women who do love and sexually pursue elite

Australian Rules footballers.46 Yet none of the female fans interviewed by me or

others has indicated that the (supposed) sexual spectacle on offer is a key driver

behind their spectatorship, and many expressed bemusement or offense at the

notion.48 Indeed, for some female fans like Nadia the idea of sexualising the players

is an anathema because they feel like family. Other women I interviewed had non-‐

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sexual daydreams involving players of the teams they follow. Margaret, for example,

imagines herself as a maternal figure. For her the players are nice boys who might be

in need of some extra nurturing, and she’d be happy to whip up a pot of soup if need

be. Sam also likes to think that the players of her team are nice boys, and sometimes

imagines having her favoured ones over for tea, though she was also clear that she

wanted these day-‐dreams to remain a pleasurable fantasy.49

Charlotte, the one woman I interviewed who did find some erotic pleasure in

watching men play football, only found this pleasure in games that didn’t involve her

club, Geelong. She jokingly refers to St Kilda’s Nick Dal Santo as “my boyfriend”

when talking with friends and family.50 “He’s gorgeous”, she notes, “he plays footy

like a dancer, with incredible balance and timing”. However, for Charlotte, the

attractiveness of players like Dal Santo is something to jest about; it’s recognised and

enjoyed, but not all that important in the scheme of football. And if Nick Dal Santo

was playing well against the Cats, Charlotte says:

I want him to break his legs [laughs] – no I wouldn’t mind him being on the

bench for just that game. If [opposition] players get like a mild injury I’m

secretly pleased. If they get a horrific injury I get upset no matter who they

play for, I think it’s terrible, but if he just hurt his calf in the last ten minutes

that would be good.

It’s not, however, only some women (and men who identify as queer) who

can playfully relate to players as sex objects. Indeed, in Charlotte’s experience, it is

her straight-‐identifying male friends who sexualise footballers more than women do:

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They see them as virile men, whereas I see them as blokes who play football,

for the most part. They see them as the chosen of the species and they’ve got

a more god-‐like quality for boys I think. Whenever my male friends are talking

about footballers they talk in this passionate love way which they then don’t

qualify whereas they normally would if it wasn’t a footballer – they don’t need

to say ‘but not in a gay way’ because it is alright to talk about footballers in this

way, because you can be in love with a footballer.

The internet has also become a place where straight-‐identifying male barrackers

sometimes play with the notion of players’ sexual attractiveness, with phrases such

as “man crush” and “man love” being used by male fans with increasing frequency to

describe their affection and at times devotion for particular players.51 A detailed

analysis of this intriguing phenomenon is also beyond the scope of this paper, but it

raises intriguing questions about the homo-‐erotic subtext to Australian Rules

football identified by Poynton and Hartley. It can also be seen as an indication of the

remarkable pleasures which players provide fans – of the extraordinary visceral

agony, frustration, ecstasy and more which can be unbearable, indescribable and

very addictive.52 And it’s these often extreme corporeal affects and delights, rather

than erotic titillation, that so many women as well as men return to year after year.

“Except in Jest” – A Brief Coda on Sex and Football

In September 1994 the Australian historian Margaret Lindley delivered the

Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture and created something of a sensation. Australian

Rules football, she stated, had evolved to be a sport “played by men, at considerable

personal hazard, for the sexual pleasure of women. That was the meaning, the





Deleted: , rather than erotic titillation, which are consumed from a position of perceived dominance by female as well as male fans, and

Deleted: for which

Deleted: they

Deleted: in great numbers

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purpose, the essence of the game.”53 Lindley was speaking largely in jest, following

in the footsteps of Ian Turner, the first scholar to explore the history of Australian

Rules football. Turner had established the irreverent Barassi Lecture to foster

nascent interest in the game, and would regale his audience with a mix of revealing

anecdotes, intriguing facts and wild theories. Turner himself was intrigued by the

“latent sexuality” of football, but his reading of this was infused with a masculine

sensibility, as evidenced by his 1978 lecture when he argued humorously via Freud,

that “the game is one long playing out of the sex act” with the original scoring

system a manifestation of Oedipal desires and conflicts.54 Not surprisingly perhaps, it

was not Turner but rather his partner Leonie Sandercock who worked to draw

attention to female involvement in Aussie Rules when she expanded and completed

Turner’s study after his death.55 Lindley’s 1994 oration was the first Barassi Lecture

since Turner’s untimely death in 1978. Like Turner, Lindley wanted to amuse,

entertain, and provoke, yet she felt she needed to come from a different, less

masculine perspective.56 However, in turning the focus from sublimated male desires

to the sexual pleasure of female spectators, Lindley was entering the “murky terrain”

of sex and sport.57

As with Allen Guttmann before her, Lindley was attempting to generate a

debate around the erotic nature of sport, and her oration sparked headlines,

columns, talk-‐back radio and letters.58 As the journalist Amanda Smith put it, Lindley

was the “the woman who put sex into football”.59 Yet like Guttmann, the response

Lindley received was largely critical – both were seen as trivialising sport, spectators

and athletes, and despite their protests to the contrary, both appeared to underplay

the problematic power relations implicated in the sexualisation of athletes and

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spectators.60 Lindley, for example, failed to engage with the history of jokes about

the sexual gaze of women, and in particular the way these had been deployed to

disempower, rather than empower, female fans.

So what can we make of the erotic subtext of Australian Rules football

discovered by Beverley Poynton when she turned down the TV commentary in

favour of an alternative soundtrack? What strikes me first is the revealing tendency

for the observations of Poynton (sometimes together with Hartley) to be read as

evidence of the voyeuristic tendencies of female spectators, despite Poynton never

indicating that she watched footy for the erotic pleasure it provided. Most of the

scholars who cite Poynton refer to her attraction to the male bodies on display while

neglecting the points she and Hartley made about the seemingly homo-‐erotic

substratum of Aussie Rules.61 It is as if the focus on the supposed sexual interests of

(presumed to be heterosexual) women distracts attention away from an

examination of just what it is the (supposedly heterosexual) men are gazing at. At

issue is the problematic way particular intersections of football and sex are

promulgated to the detriment of women, at the same time in which other junctions

that are indicative of the intermixing of erotic desires and footy continue to be

ignored. Indeed, the frequent jokes about the sexual pleasures of female footy fans

hint at considerable concerns regarding the erotic pleasures that male fans might

also receive from the male bodies on display. The homoerotic subtexts of spectator

sports have received some scholarly attention, particularly in their homophobic

forms, but the expressions of “man-‐love” and associated erotic play by straight-‐

identifying men suggest another reading of this text that deserves further

exploration.62



Deleted: gaze

Deleted: which

20

The focus on the assumed sexual desires of female fans also distracts from

the other pleasures they might experience as football spectators. In particular, it

means that the gaze of these women has been taken for granted or passed over

rather than examined for how it might shape the subjectivities that have been

available for female followers of Australian Rules football. We know that popular

contact-‐based team sports like Australian Rules football facilitate the production and

regulation of gender and sexuality in ways that frequently disempower girls and

women. These sports have celebrated the talents and bodies of male athletes,

placing powerful male sports ‘stars’ at the centre of popular culture. But there is also

an intriguing power to be found in watching these athletes. Since at least the late

1800s some women have found the freedom to behave at Australian Rules football

matches in ways that run counter to their proscribed gender roles. Instead of being

subject to the gaze of the men around them, these women have joined the men in

turning their eyes to the muscular male players on the field in front of them. And

while the crowds of women and men frequently worship these players, they also

relate to them as objects for their pleasure. As this paper has shown, Aussie Rules

allows women to judge players not for who they are but how they perform, to

demand that footy players sacrifice their bodies for them, and to publically abuse

them when they fail. There’s an absurd aspect to this power – the players are not

bound by it, and yet they can be the subject of uplifting devotion and devastating

scorn and ridicule from the female and male spectators who provide critical

feedback on every aspect of their play. Indeed, the players seem to perform for

them and even with them. Each moment, each bump, tackle, goal and error is

shared. When a player does something extraordinary, the supporters of his team


Matthew Klugman� 19/3/12 10:05 PMFormatted: Font:Italic






Deleted: the perceived dominance which women enjoy over football players has been passed over.

Deleted: But this paper has shown how

Deleted: offers girls and women the power to objectify football players, to

Deleted: demand that they put their

Deleted: on the line

Deleted: It’s

21

share the remarkable carnal joy of the deed, whereas a costly fumble provokes

intense frustration. The players, in other words, deliver ecstasy and agony to those

who follow them. And perhaps the notion of women watching rather than being

watched, and thus sharing in these mysterious, ludicrous pleasures is disconcerting

enough to trigger repressive jokes.

What is clear is that while Australian Rules football has been in many ways a

“man’s game” (to quote Poynton and Hartley again), it has also provided a notable

agency and site for female fans to publicly experience and express counter-‐cultural

passions, while still limiting their involvement (and associated dreams) as players.

Although the engagement of this paper with these emotions has been necessarily

exploratory, it highlights the need for feminist histories of sport to examine the

subjectivities of female sports supporters as well as female athletes, in order to

analyse the layered intersections of gender with the emotions, desires and dreams

provoked by spectator sports. The gaze that these female supporters focus on male

(as well as female) players seems an especially rich avenue for further study.63

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper, along with Joy

Damousi, Esther Faye, Louis Magee, Rob Hess, Alex McDermott, Ciannon Cazaly, and especially Holly

Thorpe, Rebecca Olive, Gary Osmond, and Fiona Kerr for their comments, suggestions and support.

1 Beverley Poynton and John Hartley, “Male-‐Gazing: Australian Rules Football, Gender and

Television”, in Television and Women's Culture: The Politics of the Popular, ed. Mary Ellen Brown

(Sydney: Currency, 1990): 144-‐182, 144. The important precursor to this piece which was not cited by

Poynton and Hartley and has been neglected is Mary Brady’s appendix “Miss and Mrs Football, But

No Ms Football”, in Up Where Cazaly? The Great Australian Game, Leonie Sandercock and Ian Turner

(Sydney: Granada, 1981), 249-‐256.




Faculty of Education� 18/3/12 10:54 PM


Deleted: power (the players are not bound by it, and do not have to recognise it), and I’m not sure how much we should celebrate it. Nevertheless, it gives these fans a sense of ownership and connection to the game and the players who seem to perform for them. Moreover, it is an entry point into the intense agonies, frustration and ecstasy which drive popular spectator sports like Australian Rules football.

Deleted: – believing they too can hold these athletic players to account, benefit from the players acts of courage and skill and berate their clangers –

Deleted: also

Comment: Maybe you could add one or two more sentences here that connects back to the special issue, and reiterates the contribution this paper makes to feminist sport history.

Deleted: about their sexual gaze

22

2 Australian Rules Football, is generally referred to as ‘football’, ‘footy’ and ‘Aussie Rules’ by those

who follow the game. I employ these terms throughout this paper. The “trench warfare” quote is

from William Baker, Sports in the Western World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 130.

3 See for example Rob Hess, ‘“Ladies are Specially Invited’: Women in the Culture of Australian Rules

Football”, International Journal of the History of Sport 17.2 (2000), 111 – 141; and Stephen Alomes,

“On the Margins of the Good Oval: Women and Australian Football”, in Behind the Play: Football in

Australia, Peter Burke and June Senyard (Melbourne: Maribyrnong Press, 2008), 125-‐46.

4 Poynton and Hartley, “Male-‐Gazing”, 144.

5 We are told at the start of “Male-‐Gazing” that the use of the first person pertains solely to Poynton.


7 Poynton and Hartley, “Male-‐Gazing”, 238, 149.


9 Emphasis in original.


11 Poynton and Hartley, “Male-‐Gazing”, 150-‐1.


13 See for example, Toni Bruce, “Audience Resistance: Women Fans Confront Televised Women's

Basketball”, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 22.4 (1998): 373-‐397.

14 For examples from different football codes see Stacey Pope and John Williams, “Beyond

Irrationality and the Ultras: Some Notes on Female English Rugby Union Fans and the ‘Feminised’

Sports Crowd”, Leisure Studies 30.3 (2011): 293-‐308; and Toko Tanaka, “The Position and Practices of

the ‘Feminized Fan’ in Japanese Soccer Culture through the FIFA World Cup Japan/Korea 2002”, Inter-‐

Asia Cultural Studies 5.1 (2004): 52-‐62.

15 See for example Matthew Klugman, Passion Play: Love, Hope and Heartbreak at the Footy

(Melbourne: Hunter Publishers, 2009); John Cash and Joy Damousi, Footy Passions (Sydney: University

of New South Wales Press, 2009); Peter Mewett and Kim Toffoletti “Finding Footy: Female Fan

Socialization and Australian Rules Football”, Sport in Society 14.5 (2011): 670-‐684; and Deborah

23

Hindley, In the Outer, Not on the Outer: The Importance of Women to Australian Rules Football

(Saarbrücken, Germany: Vdm Verlag, 2008). For a detailed bibliography of writings on Australian

Football fans see Tim Hogan, ‘Football and Fans: An Annotated Bibliography’, in Fanfare: Spectator

Culture and Australian Rules Football, ed. Matthew Nicholson (Melbourne: Australian Society for

Sports History, 2005), 125-‐40.

16 See for example, Toby Miller, Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim McKay, and David Rowe eds, Globalization

and Sport: Playing the World (London: Sage, 2001); and Wladimir Andreff and Stefan Szymanski eds,

Handbook on the Economics of Sport (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009). For more on the excessive

devotion of Australian Rules football fans see Matthew Klugman, “Loves, Suffering and Identification:

The Passions of Australian Football League Fans”, International Journal of the History of Sport 26.1

(2009): 21–44.

17 Terms such as passions, affects and emotions have their own specific histories and can be used to

distinguish quite different things. Their meanings however, are contested and given the exploratory

nature of this paper I use these terms somewhat interchangeably in order to evoke something of the

manifold elements of the feelings and experiences of female fans. For a critical feminist engagement

with these terms see Kristyn Gorton, “Theorizing Emotion and Affect: Feminist Engagements”,

Feminist Theory 8.3 (2007): 333–348.

18 All participants were interviewed between 2005 and 2008 and resided in the Australian state of

Victoria at the time of the interviews, with most living in Melbourne. In this paper I refer to interview

participants by the first name of the pseudonym they chose. I refer to everyone else by their full

name in the first instance, and then by their surname.

19 All quotes and details pertaining to Helena are drawn from my interviews with her in October 2005,

and April 2007.

20 This and the following comments are taken from Marieke Hardy, You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

(Sydney: Allen and Unwin): 79-‐80.

21 Vivian de Klerk, “The role of expletives in the construction of masculinity”, in Language and

Masculinity, eds. Sally Johnson and Ulrike Meinhof (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 144-‐158.


24

22 Karyn Stapleton, “Gender and Swearing: A Community Practice”, Women and Language 26.2

(2003): 22-‐33, 32, 29. See also, Karyn Stapleton, Swearing, in Interpersonal Pragmatics, eds. Miriam

Locher, and Sage Graham (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2010), 289-‐306; and Jennifer Coates Women,

Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Sex Differences in Language (London: Longman,

2003).

23 For more on this see Klugman, Passion Play, 6-‐10.

24 See Rob Hess, “The Victorian Football league Takes Over, 1897–1914” in More Than a Game: An

Unauthorised History of Australian Rules Football, eds. Rob Hess and Bob Stewart (Melbourne

University Press, Melbourne, 1998), 99-‐ 105; and June Senyard, “The Barracker and the Spectator”,

“The Barracker and the Spectator: Constructing Class and Gender Identities Through the Football

Crowd at the Turn of the Century”, Journal of Australian Studies 23.62 (1999): 46-‐55.

25 “A Football Row”, Argus, July 27, 1896, 5.

26 “The Woman Barracker”, Argus, August 11, 1934, 23.

27 Rob Kingston, “Football and Women in Melbourne in the 1930s”, in Fanfare: Spectator Culture and

Australian Rules Football, ed. Matthew Nicholson (Melbourne: Australian Society for Sports History,

2005), 53-‐61, 59.

28 ‘Roman Holiday’, “Letter to the Editor”, Sun-‐News Pictorial, March 30, 1964, 15.

29 Kingston, “Football and Women in Melbourne in the 1930s”, 57.

30 Mewett and Toffoletti observe that many of their “respondents abhorred bad language”, especially

in front of children. Yet there are many other accounts of women swearing at football matches, with

Hindley for example, detailing women enjoying screaming and hurling abuse at the footy in

contemporary times. What is at issue however, is not how many women (and men) swear at

Australian Rules football matches, but that both women and men do it without gendered censure.

See Peter Mewett and Kim Toffoletti, “Voices From the Margins? Women at the Footy”, Intergraph:

Journal of Dialogic Anthropology 3.1 (2010), accessed September 27, 2011, http://intergraph-‐

journal.com/enhanced/vol3issue1/4.html; and Hindley, In the Outer, Not on the Outer.

25

31 See Matthew Klugman, “The Premiership is Everything: Visceral Agony and Ecstasy in September”,

Sporting Traditions 30.2 (2010), 127–139.

32 All quotes and details pertaining to Sienna are drawn from my interview with her in March 2007.

33 All quotes and details pertaining to Deirdre are drawn from my interview with her in April 2008.

34 This quote is taken from the transcript when Lindley was interviewed by Amanda Smith on the

“Sports Factor”, Radio National, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 27/06/1997.

35 For more on the place of frustration in the culture of Australian Rules football fandom see Klugman,

Passion Play, 60-‐63.

36 Interview with Helena, October 2005.

37 It is worth noting that opportunities for girls and women to play Australian Rules football have

increased markedly in recent years. The beginner “Auskick” programs are now co-‐ed and junior and

senior competitions are expanding rapidly, however these competitions still receive very little media

coverage and the footy ‘stars’ that many kids would like to emulate are still male. Studies of women

playing Australian football include: Rob Hess, “Playing With ‘Patriotic Fire’: Women and Football in

the Antipodes during the Great War”, International Journal of the History of Sport 28.10 (2011): 1388–

1408; Rob Hess, “‘For the Love of Sensation’: Case Studies in the Early Development of Women’s

Football in Victoria, 1921-‐1981”, Football Studies, 8, 2 (2005): 20-‐30; Nikki Wedgwood, “Doin’ It for

Themselves! A Case Study of the Development of a Women's Australian Rules Football Competition”,

International Journal of the History of Sport 22.3 (2005): 396 – 414; Nikki Wedgwood, “Kicking it Like a

Boy: Schoolgirl Australian Rules Football and Bi-‐Gendered Female Embodiment”, Sociology of Sport

Journal 21 (2004): 140-‐162; and also Peter Burke, “Women’s Football During the First World War in

Australia”, Football Studies, 8, 2 (2005): 2-‐19.

38 All quotes and details pertaining to Rachel are drawn from my interview with her in April 2006.

39 See for example, Klugman, Passion Play, 77-‐78. On war-‐play see Graham Dawson’s impressive,

Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge,

1995).

26

40 All quotes and details pertaining to Nadia are drawn from my interviews with her in October 2006,

February and June 2007, and March 2008.

41 For more on misogyny within the culture of Australian Rules football see Deborah Waterhouse-‐

Watson, “All Women are Sluts: Australian Rules Football and Representations of the Feminine”,

Australian Feminist Law Journal 27 (2007): 155-‐162. For a nuanced analysis of the interplay of

heterosexual desire, misogyny, homosocial desire and homophobia in this culture see Karen Brooks,

“More Than a Game: The Footy Show, Fandom and the Construction of Football Celebrities”, Football

Studies 3.1 (2000): 27-‐48.

42 For an exploratory on the relationship of female fans to this culture more generally, see Kim

Toffoletti and Peter Mewett, “Gender Relations in Football: Female Football Fans Discuss Player

Misconduct”, Alternative Law Journal 34.2 (2009): 126-‐127.

43 This paragraph is drawn from my interview with Veronica, May 2006.

44 Interviews with Sienna, March 2007; and Nadia, September 2005.

45 See for example Ramona Koval, “Whispers and Thighs”, in The Greatest Game, eds Ross Fitzgerald

and Ken Spillman (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1988), 89-‐94.

46 Nikki Wedgwood, “For the Love of Football: Australian Rules Football and Heterosexual Desire”,

Journal of Sport & Social Issues 32.3 (2008): 311-‐317.

48 I’m thinking primarily of the studies by Cash and Damousi, Mewett and Toffoletti, and Hindley.

49 For a more general consideration of the way sports followers relate to prominent athletes see Gill

Lines, “The Sports Star in the Media: The Gendered Construction and Youthful Consumption of Sports

Personalities”, in Power Games: A Critical Sociology of Sport, eds John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson

(London: Routledge, 2002).

50 This and the following quotes are from my interview with Charlotte, December 2006.

51 See Klugman, Passion Play, 80-‐82.

52 For more on these often difficult carnal pleasures see Matthew Klugman, “‘It’s That Feeling Sick in

My Guts That I Think I Like the Most’: Sport, Pleasure, and Embodied Suffering”, in Critical Sport

Histories: Paradigms, Power and the Postmodern Turn, eds. Richard Pringle and Murray Phillips Matthew Klugman� 19/3/12 11:50 PMDeleted: Sport History and Postmodernism as Social Theory

27

(Morgantown, WV : Fitness Information Technology, forthcoming 2012); and Matthew Klugman,

“‘The Premiership is Everything’: Visceral Agony and Ecstasy on the Last Saturday in September”,

Sporting Traditions 28.2 (2010): 127–139.

53 Margaret Lindley, “Taking a Joke Too Far and Footballer’s Shorts”, in Gender, Sexuality and Sport: A

Dangerous Mix, eds. Dennis Hempill and Caroline Symons (Petersham, NSW: Walla Walla Press,

2002), 61-‐7, 62.

54 Ian Turner, “The Greatest Game: The Barassi Memorial Lecture”, in the collection of his pieces,

Room for Manoeuvre: Writings on History, Politics, Ideas and Play, edited by Leonie Sandercock &

Stephen Murray-‐Smith (Melbourne: Drummond Publishing, 1982), 309-‐25. Turner does allow for a

“female-‐oriented liberationist interpretation” but returns soon to rather chauvinistic puns, p.324. The

Australian social commentator Phillip Adams gave a less sophisticated version in 2007 which is

notable mainly for its almost complete elision of women. See Phillip Adams, “At last, the truth about

Aussie Rules”, Australian, 06/01/2007.

55 For it was Sandercock who asked Mary Brady, her research assistant (who happened to be married

to a league footballer), to write the appendix on women for Up Where Cazaly? See Hindley, In the

Outer, Not on the Outer, 58.

56 Smith, “Sports Factor”.


58 Allen Guttmann, “Spartan Girls, French Postcards, and the Male Gaze: Another Go at Eros and

Sports”, Journal of Sport History, 29.3 (2002): 379-‐85. Guttmann attempted to stimulate debate

primarily through his book on The Erotic in Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). For a

summary of the response to Lindley’s oration see her paper “Taking a Joke Too Far and Footballer’s

Shorts”.


60 Patricia Vertinsky, for instance, provided a compelling critique of Guttmann in “The Erotic Gaze,

Violence and ‘Booters with Hooters’”, Journal of Sport History 29.3 (2002): 387-‐94. For a nuanced


28

analysis of an intersection of sex and sport see Thierry Terret, “Sports and Erotica: Erotic Postcards of

Sportswomen during France's Années Folles”, Journal of Sport History 29.2 (2002): 271-‐87.

61 See for example, Merrill Melnick and Daniel Wann, “An Examination of Sport Fandom in Australia:

Socialization, Team Identification, and Fan Behavior”, International Review for the Sociology of Sport

46.4 (2011): 1–15, 11-‐12; and Barbara O’Connor and Raymond Boyle, “Dallas with Balls: Televized

Sport, Soap Opera and Male and Female pleasures”, Leisure Studies, 12 (1993): 107-‐119, 116-‐117.

62 On the homophobic homoerotic subtext of modern sports see for example, Brian Pronger, “Outta

My Endzone : Sport and the Territorial Anus”, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 23.4 (1999): 373-‐389.

63 Further studies could fruitfully compare the way women consume male bodies in other contexts,

and also the tensions between watching and being watched. See for example: Beth Montemurro,

Colleen Bloom and Kelly Madell, “Ladies Night Out: A Typology of Women Patrons of a Male Strip

Club”, Deviant Behavior 24.4 (2003): 333-‐352; and Alexandra Murphy, “The Dialectical Gaze: Exploring

the Subject-‐Object Tension in the Performances of Women Who Strip”, Journal of Contemporary

Ethnography 32.3 (2003): 305-‐335.

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