Segregated femininities? Creating female fandom through social media in Sweden

The study analyses female fandom in Sweden, focusing on female football supporters` self-presentation on social media. We found social media to function as a forum for empowerment, where the female football fans construct and express solidarity between girls and women and challenge hegemonic notions of femininity. Female football supporters are actively involved in formulating and shaping their own agenda and self-presentation and are drawn to the supporter culture for many of the same reasons as their male peers: group community, thrill and excitement, and the love for their team. The contribution of the study is two-fold: it fills a knowledge gap regarding Swedish female fans, while also making a conceptual intervention in the study of female fandoms more broadly, demonstrating the usefulness of critical theorization on femininities and indicating how social media enables female football supporters to `play` with different conceptions of femininity to create space within the supporter milieu.
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Bibliographic Details
Subjects:
Notations:sport games social sciences
Tagging:Fan soziale Medien
Published in:Soccer & Society
Language:English
Published: 2022
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2022.2037213
Volume:23
Issue:3
Pages:298-313
Document types:article
Level:advanced