Kampen mot kjønnsstereotypiene: En komparativ studie av kvinnelige fotballspilleres oppfattelse av maskulinitet og feminitet

Abstract

Kari Fasting, Gertrud Pfister & Sheila Scraton: Disrupting gender? A cross-national study of female soccer players’ perceptions of masculinity and femininity Traditionally football has been a masculine sport, even though there has been a dramatic increase in the number of female footballers in many countries since the beginning of the 1970s. Through qualitative, in-depth interviews with female football players in England, Germany, Norway and Sweden (N= 40), the article explores how far women, who are engaged at a highly competitive level in a “male“ sport like football, actively construct alternative femininities, subvert traditional meanings of femininity and/or respond to the cultural ideals of “acceptable“ femininity. The results indicate that the football players do all these.They actively construct alternative femininities while responding to cultural ideals of acceptable femininity at the same time. The data also revealed that sport is a social field that not only produces gender, but that it is also an arena where gender can be bent, shifted and changed. The most striking result of the study, however, was that the results were much the same across the national borders.