CFP: Game Women, Sport and its Female Fans (book)

Call for Contributors: Game Women, Sport and its Female Fans.
Kim Toffoletti and Peter Mewett, eds.

We invite chapter proposals for an edited book on women fans of sports called Game Women: Sport and its Female Fans. The book seeks to explore why women follow sports and the significance of their contribution. We are interested in what female fandom can tell us about gender relations in sport and the changing nature of sport spectatorship. It aims to provide a comprehensive coverage of the unique aspects of being a sports supporter and being female, and pose new paradigms to approach the study of women in the sporting domain.

We are seeking contributions that explore women fans of any sports from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives. We welcome submissions that consider what it is like to be a female sports fan from a position informed by race, ethnicity, disability and sexuality. Topics may include:
• The impact of women’s support on the construction and performance of gender identity, the maintenance and/or disruption of gender categories, norms, systems and structures;
• The role of media culture – television, radio, print media and the internet – in women’s experiences of sports fandom;
• Commercialisation and consumerism as it pertains to female sport fan experience;
• How women’s support functions in the maintenance and/or disruption of masculine hegemony in sport;
• The negotiation of gendered selfhood in sport fan communities;
• Women’s support of sport as a leisure practice.

The editors are currently engaged in negotiations with a major publisher who has expressed considerable interest in the book. Please submit abstracts of 200-250 words and a brief author bio by 5 August 2009 to either or both editors (and direct any queries to the editors) at:
kim.toffoletti@deakin.edu.au
peter.mewett@deakin.edu.au


Dr Kim Toffoletti, Senior Lecturer in Sociology & Gender Studies
Secretary, Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA)
Chief co-editor, Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture