‘We’re,like,a cute rugby team’: How whiteness and heterosexuality shape women’s sense of belonging in rugby

Abstract

This article considers how race and sexuality mutually inform the ways women experience their sense of belonging in sport. An examination of how white and heterosexual privilege structure belonging for 15 women rugby players in the sport finds that the ways in which some players assert their belonging runs the risk of reifying oppressive norms associated with heterosexual femininity and white privilege. This analysis provides a nuanced understanding of how individual women may rely on certain structures of domination to take up space in sport in ways that rely on and reproduce inequality. Although women rugby players may challenge norms of (white) heterosexual femininity, they experience these norms as mediated through their particular social locations. As a result, how women rugby players take up space in sport may be complicated by their specific relationship to social constructions of gender, sexuality, and race.

Keywords

gender rugby sexuality sport whiteness

Sportswriter Jay Caspian King (2012) dubbed the 2012 Summer Olympic Games ‘the summer of the female athlete,’ arguing with others (Brown, 2012; Shergold, 2012; Williams, 2012) that these games highlighted a shift in women’s access to sport and their representation in popular media. However, Cooky and colleagues (Cooky et al., 2013) found that although more women are participating in sports, coverage is the lowest it has ever been. Often, when media covers women’s sports, sexualized representations and diminutive narratives reassert sport as a masculine terrain. Furthermore, sportswomen who adhere to normative gender and sexuality may receive more coverage, but through a racialized framework that normalizes whiteness (Bernstein, 2002; McDonald, 2002; Withycombe, 2011) and reproduces the marginalization of women’s sports. As Patricia Hill Collins (2005) argues, politics of normative gender and sexuality rely on logics that construct white people as carriers of normative gender. Given the ways in which norms of white heterosexual femininity continue to construct women’s sport, how do women who play non-professionally experience their participation? In what ways do these women challenge sports as a masculine space?

In this paper I will argue that although women athletes have the potential to challenge the masculinity of the sporting terrain, their ability to do so relies on the ‘cash value’ (Lipsitz, 2006) of their particular social locations. I begin with a discussion of how access to heterosexual and white privilege may make possible particular challenges to gendered inequality in sport. My case study considers how women rugby players in the United States assert their belonging in a sport characterized by aggressive and violent masculinity (Pringle and Markula, 2005; Schacht, 1996) within a broader context of racism, sexism and heterosexism (Caudwell, 2002; Cooky and McDonald, 2005). In considering how these (predominantly white) women lay claim to their place on the rugby pitch, I discuss the ways in which their privileged positions as white and sometimes heterosexual women shape their sense of belonging in the sport. Additionally, I examine how investments in norms of white heterosexuality may lead to the further marginalization of women’s sport.

Channeling privilege to challenge social inequality in sport

Scholars (Markula, 2003; Mennesson, 2000) have questioned the extent to which women playing sport can challenge male dominance in sport and in the broader society. Others (Bernstein, 2002; Vincent, 2004) have asked whether patriarchal investments that marginalize and sexualize coverage of women’s sports strengthen gender inequality and homophobia. Despite a general ambivalence about the potential for women’s sports as a vanguard of gender equality, researchers such as Leslie Heywood and Shari Dworkin (2003) have posited the female athlete as a cultural institution that simultaneously challenges the construction of femininity as passive and reifies women’s objectification through sport. Although not explicitly noted, the iconicity of the female athlete challenges the construction of middle-class white women’s sexuality as passive. This means that claims about how ‘the [female] body, when coded as athletic, can redeem female sexuality’ (Heywood and Dworkin, 2003: 83) are actually referring to a specific culturally accepted perception of white women’s sexuality and sport’s potential to challenge this perception.

The unstated whiteness of the hetero-sexy female athlete, who can lay claim to cultural iconicity, stands in contrast to the ways in which black sportswomen take up space as simultaneously belonging and not belonging (Adjepong and Carrington, 2014; Cooky et al., 2010; Vertinsky and Captain, 1998). For example, Delia Douglas (2005, 2011) has examined the ways in which media representations and coverage of tennis players Venus and Serena Williams rely on dominant cultural understandings that render black women’s gender and sexuality pathological and irresponsible. Noting the intersecting ways in which race and sexuality are co-constructed is important for offering a more nuanced sense of how sportswomen may challenge male dominance and homophobia in sports. Scholars such as Anne McClintock (1995) and Vron Ware (1992) have discussed how normative female sexuality relies on logics of white heterosexual middle-class women as symbols of respectability and civilization. Likewise, Ruth Frankenberg (1993) has shown how these same logics shape white women’s sexuality. The varying ways in which women of color and white women navigate the sporting terrain highlight just one aspect of the complexities of women’s involvement in sport. These differences call attention to the ways in which racism shapes understandings of sportswomen’s sexuality and belonging.

An important lesson from these analyses is that when women play sport, they do not automatically challenge normative gender. Because gender and sexuality are racialized (Collins, 2005; Ferguson, 2004), sportswomen’s capacity to call attention to gender inequality is refracted through normative perceptions associated with their race and sexuality. Sociologists have long argued that the intersections of these categories have the potential to reproduce and/or challenge the normative investments of society by exposing the instability of unequal social relations (Ferguson, 2004; McClintock, 1995). Sport as a politically motivated site is one arena in which this challenge can take place. But as Markula (2003) has argued, although sport may serve as a Foucauldian technology of the self that free (certain) women from the constraints of normative gender, sportswomen must develop a critical collective consciousness in order to attain sport’s transformative potential. Furthermore in a social context where whiteness, normative gender and sexuality, and (at least) middle-class status constitute the proper, respectable citizen, challenging gender inequality through sport can largely depend on one’s access to the very categories that protect against discrimination thereby reifying the value of those categories.

In the case of sports, whiteness becomes an important mode through which sportswomen can take up space in the predominantly male establishment. Long and Hylton (2002) have called whiteness the silent other in sports because of the ways in which the privilege of whiteness is unmarked on the sporting field. White privilege constructs whiteness as ‘a privileged signifier’ that believes in a ‘universal subjectivity’ while at the same time producing a racialized other (hooks, 2009: 92). As such, whiteness is ‘the unmarked category against which difference is constructed’ (Lipsitz, 2006: 1) and it is often invisible to the people who benefit most from it. The inability to see the benefits of whiteness is a result of the racial contract, which according to Charles Mills (1997) encourages an epistemology of ignorance that makes white people oblivious to the racialized world they have created. This racialized world imposes on constructions of normative gender, sexuality, respectability, and belonging. As Nirmal Puwar (2004) has shown, the concept of the somatic norm constructs the white body as belonging in most institutional spaces, rendering people of color as matter out of place. Furthermore, heterosexuality is indexed as normative white sexuality (Collins, 2005; Ferguson, 2004).

The ways in which a privileged social standing shapes the ability to challenge normative social investments can reproduce that privilege. Consequently, it is important to remain mindful of how we interpret different challenges against social inequality. Although sportswomen may individually and collectively challenge popular conceptions of white heterosexual femininity as passive (Heywood and Dworkin, 2003), the extent to which doing so marginalizes other women must be interrogated. Specifically, it is important to better understand how some sportswomen may be complicit in oppressing other women when they ‘race to innocence’ (Fellows and Razack, 1998) by attempting to distance themselves from oppression through emphasizing their own marginalization or asserting their investments in normative categories.

Women’s rugby and challenges to normative gender

Rugby is a violent and physically aggressive contact sport sometimes referred to as a ‘white man’s game’ (Collins, 2009; Spracklen, 2001). Unlike other contact sports, men and women play by the same rules, making it a productive site for examining how gender norms inform women’s experiences of the sport. In recent years, the sport has gained popularity among women in the United States. According to a recent study (SGMA Research, 2011) for USA Rugby, the administrative body of rugby in the US, women constitute 32% of all rugby participants, and 20% of those who have played for longer than eight years. Although USA Rugby does not provide information on the race of rugby players, studies of the sport often remark on the fact that the majority of players in the US are white (Broad, 2001; Chase, 2006; Ezzell, 2009). Scholars such as Spracklen (2001), Spracklen and Spracklen (2008), and Long et al. (1997) have examined the ways in which rugby’s popularity contributed to an imagined community demarcated by notions of white hegemonic masculinity to the exclusion of women and people of color.

Although women have been playing rugby since at least the 1920s, sport historian Tony Collins (2009: 95) has argued that ‘women’s rugby has offered no challenge to the fundamental masculine nature of the game.’ Whether played by men or women, the game maintains all the characteristics associated with masculinity – bawdy songs, excessive drinking, and sporting violence. For the most part, scholars who study women’s rugby agree with Collins, noting that although women rugby players may fashion themselves as tough and unapologetic, they also reproduce norms of rugby by developing disciplined rugby bodies and participating in rugby culture, including its bawdy songs and excessive drinking (Broad, 2001; Chase, 2006). At the same time, by playing rugby and (sometimes) refusing to apologize for doing so, these women challenge dominant ideas of what it means to be a respectable heterosexual woman. K.L. Broad’s (2001: 89) study characterized women’s rugby as a form of queer resistance against ‘standards of passivity associated with (typically white, middle-class, heterosexual) femininity.’ But others (Ezzell, 2009; Hardy, 2015) have also shown the ways in which women rugby players may rely on homophobia to distance themselves from the lesbian stereotype associated with the sport.

Previous studies that have examined the ways in which women’s rugby is a site for challenging normative gender provide a solid basis for making sense of how women experience this sport characterized by white heterosexual masculinity. However, few of these studies have paid particular attention to how women may experience this sport at the intersections of race, specifically whiteness, and heterosexuality. For example, although Ezzell (2009), Broad (2001) and Chase (2006) call attention to the fact that their research participants are white and adhere to or challenge norms of white middle-class respectability, these scholars posit whiteness as mere coincidence. When sports studies have examined whiteness, these studies have often considered men’s experiences. For example, Karl Spracklen (2001) and others (Spracklen et al., 2010; Spracklen and Spracklen, 2008) have examined the boundaries of white working class masculinities associated with rugby league. Likewise, scholars have examined stock car racing (Kusz, 2007; Newman and Giardina, 2011) and long distance running (Walton and Butryn, 2006) as a site for constructing particular kinds of white heterosexual masculinity in opposition to a racialized, non-heterosexual other. Missing from these studies is an examination of how white women take up space in sport. Jennifer Bruening’s (2012) work offers a critical overview of how the implicit assumptions of whiteness that characterize studies of women’s sport marginalize women of color’s sporting experiences. In this article, I offer an analysis of how whiteness shapes women rugby players’ experiences and sense of belonging in the sport.

The following research question guides this article: how do women navigate the gendered terrain of a sport characterized by masculinity? Although researchers have asked and answered this question in several ways, my analysis focuses specifically on how sportswomen might emphasize their normative identities to mitigate some of the inequalities they experience on the playing field. Specifically, I try to make sense of how women rugby players’ race and sexuality are implicated in their experiences of the sport. Scholars have made the case that a critical analysis of sport should recognize the intersections of gender, race, and class without exempting whiteness from such an analysis (Maynard, 2002; McDonald, 2014; Scraton and Flintoff, 2013; Watson and Scraton, 2013). However, studies that examine race and sexuality in women’s sport often focus on the experiences of racialized minorities and queer or lesbian sexualities (see, for example, Caudwell, 1999, 2002; Scraton et al., 2005). By considering how the intersections of whiteness and heterosexuality shape women’s experiences of rugby, this article addresses a critical omission when it comes to understanding how women navigate the gendered terrain of masculine sports. Additionally, my analysis encourages rethinking how white women take up space in sport by providing a way to think through the question: whose oppression or subordination allows them to take up this space?

Methods

This project is primarily based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with a convenience sample of 15 women rugby players who play at the club level in the southwestern United States. Interviews provide a lens into how people understand their social world. As Allison Pugh (2013: 50) has argued, in-depth interviews allow researchers to access the different levels at which people understand their motivations, beliefs, and practices. An intersectional framework guides my analysis. This epistemological framework considers how categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are co-constructed, bringing into relief the social hierarchies that create and maintain these categories (MacKinnon, 2013: 1024). Furthermore, intersectionality offers a framework through which to examine how the social construction of gender, race, and sexuality shape people’s identities and experiences.

For this project, I combined my interviews with ethnographic observations at three rugby tournaments and one post-match social. Ethnographic observations provided me with a first hand account of interactions between men and women rugby players, coaches, and fans. This project received approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of Texas-Austin and all interview respondents were informed about their right to withdraw consent at any time during the interview. To recruit respondents, I attended three tournaments in central Texas and southern California, which I learned about by contacting different teams either through Facebook or email. I also attended one game during the regular spring season in central Texas. During the game and tournaments, I conducted participant observations by volunteering to play with teams that needed additional players. I took this opportunity to build rapport with players and request interviews. At tournaments there were, on average, three men’s teams for every woman’s team and most players (who also often served as spectators) were white with a few visible Pacific Islanders, Latino/as and black players. Of the 15 women I interviewed, 12 responded as white, one black, and two Latina. They ranged in age from 18 to 36, with the median age being 28. All respondents had at least a bachelor’s degree, with the exception of my youngest respondent, who was enrolled in university at the time of our interview. None of my respondents played for the same rugby team and all were still playing at the time of interview.

I chose not to ask my respondents whether they identified as lesbian, bisexual, gay, or straight because I wanted to give them the flexibility to describe their sexuality in their own language. This question refused ‘the notion of sexual identity per se’ and instead focused on sexuality as a practice rather than an identity (Sykes, 2007: 13). Seven of the 15 women I interviewed reported that they dated men. Those who dated men exclusively (four respondents) remarked that they were different from other women rugby players because they date men. Three of my respondents reported that they dated both men and women; of these three, one was single and the other two were in a relationship with men. Eight respondents reported dating women exclusively. Despite an almost equal number of queer and straight respondents, the assertion of heterosexuality was a dominant theme in my interviews.

As a former rugby player, I have an intimate understanding of the sport, which further helps me make sense of the cultural frameworks within which women’s rugby players negotiate their identities. I entered the field as a former women’s rugby player, having played on-and-off for seven years both as a university undergraduate and in club teams in different cities. Oftentimes I was one of a small number of people of color either on the pitch or sidelines. My familiarity with women’s rugby culture offered me insider knowledge on the sport and facilitated my research. At the same time, I was an interloper on the pitch, being both a black (former) rugby player and a researcher. My position resisted a static notion of insider/outsider status and instead highlighted the situational construction of this positionality (Carrington, 2008).

I audio-recorded and transcribed all interviews. For analysis I used the software program Atlas.ti. I used a grounded method of analysis (Charmaz, 2006) to identify the main themes that respondents discussed and coded themes associated with gender, sexuality, race, and racialized others. My analysis was attentive to moments in which respondents talked about challenging or agreeing with stereotypes associated with these categories. After identifying recurring themes, I considered moments of convergence and similarities among interview transcripts and created subthemes for how respondents discussed challenging normative gender, heterosexuality, and the idea of rugby as a ‘white man’s game.’ I wrote memos for each broad category as a way of analyzing their components and nuances. Below I discuss how my respondents simultaneously challenged and were invested in normative ideas about gender, heterosexuality, and the whiteness of rugby.

Findings

Interview responses highlighted the ways in which whiteness and heterosexuality shape women’s sense of their belonging in rugby. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2014) has shown, in a context where talking about race is discouraged and considered in itself to be racist, white people employ rhetorical strategies to express their racial sentiments while sustaining color-blindness. Guided by an epistemology of ignorance (Mills, 1997) and employing color-blind rhetoric (Bonilla-Silva, 2014), most of the white rugby players I interviewed were not explicit about how whiteness contributed to their experiences of the sport. In discussing my findings below, I explicate on this unstated aspect of my respondents’ experiences.

The women in my study simultaneously challenged and reproduced essentialist and racialized ideas about women, sexuality, and rugby. Although players sometimes contested the idea that rugby is a man’s game, they also agreed with aspects of this construction, a concession I argue is a result of the ways in which the sport culture relies on heterosexuality as an organizing principle. Heterosexual players pushed back against the idea that women rugby players are all lesbians by asserting their teams’ collective heterosexual identity (Ezzell, 2009); and all players were ambivalent about the ways in which the sport is racialized. Below, I consider how the white heterosexual space of rugby informs my respondents’ sense of belonging in the sport. I follow this discussion with an examination of how whiteness contributed to a sense of racial belonging that mitigated white players’ alienation on the pitch.

‘Notoriously straight’: navigating the white heterosexual space of the rugby pitch

During the summer months, seven-a-side rugby tournaments happen all around the country. As part of my project, I attended three of these tournaments. My observations highlight the ways in which rugby is constructed as a white heterosexual space. The first tournament I attended was in a large park with six playing fields in Central Texas. There were 35 men’s teams and 11 women’s teams at the tournament. Upon arrival, I saw a group of women sitting under a tent in their jerseys, drinking water and Gatorade while preparing for their game. I learned from this team that all the women’s games would be on the same field. Walking along the left bank of the fields I observed several groups of mostly white shirtless men. There were also a few Pacific Islanders and one or two black men. On the sidelines of a women’s match, I overheard a white man say to his friends, two tan white women and a black man, that the women’s game seemed so dainty compared to the men’s game. Looking at the game in question, I found the women’s teams to be more inexperienced than dainty. The two men were similarly dressed, in white rugby shorts that came up to their mid-thighs, exposing their muscular quadriceps muscles, and plain tank tops. The women wore short shorts and t-shirts. The men appeared to be trying to impress the women with their knowledge of the game and the women sounded impressed. The white man mentioned that there will be a pub-crawl after the tournament and the players will be dirty. One of the women offered her place for him to take a shower and he responded, ‘No thanks. Stink and drink, baby.’ The women cooed in admiration.

Looking around I realized that with the exception of one shirtless woman who wore just a sports bra, most of the other women kept their clothes on at all times, surrounded by mostly shirtless white men. On the other side of the fields in the tents where players were lounging, I heard loud chanting and walked over to see why. A white male player had just completed a Zulu-warrior, a naked jog required of a player who has just scored his or her first try. When he returned to the tents, a group from one of the women’s teams called out, ‘Do it again!’ The player’s team chanted, ‘Shoot the boot,’ asking the ‘Zulu-warrior’ to chug beer from a sweaty boot and the women’s teams cheered them on.

The scenes described above are not unlike the other tournaments I attended during my research or as a rugby player for seven years. Within the context of rugby, men and women support one another by cheering at matches, flirting, drinking together and generally being part of rugby culture. Here rugby culture is constructed as ribald, white, and heterosexual. Logics of heterosexuality and normative gender organize the space through the display of naked white male torsos, rhetorical production of women’s games as ‘dainty’ compared to supposedly more aggressive men’s games, and attractive athletic white women who challenge the stereotype of the butch women’s rugby player. Whiteness is central to heterosexuality as an organizing principle within this context. White heterosexuality is safe and as Mary McDonald (2002: 382) has argued, when ascribed to sportswomen it serves as an antidote to the transgression that their athleticism presents to the gender order. Scholars (Cooky and McDonald, 2005; McDonald, 2002) have also noted how the invocation of white heterosexual femininity creates space for sportswomen in different sporting contexts. Furthermore, the ribaldry of rugby culture – chugging beer from sweaty boots, running around naked, and swinging raunchy songs – is made safe by the white heterosexuality of the space. In this context, there is nothing gay about taking pleasure in a naked teammate’s body as he or she runs up and down the length of the rugby pitch.

Although rugby culture is characterized by white heterosexuality, the stereotype of the lesbian rugby player remains a salient aspect of the sport for women. For many of my respondents, even those who dated women, they responded to this stereotype by ‘heterosexing’ the rugby field. Jayne Caudwell (2002) uses the term ‘heterosexing’ to refer to players’ efforts to destabilize the lesbian stereotype that characterizes women’s sports. For those women who dated men (and women occasionally), they called attention to their heterosexuality in reaction to the stereotype of the lesbian athlete by affirming that they were different from ‘those women.’ My respondents who dated women exclusively did not highlight their sexuality except to note that they felt rugby was a welcoming space for them. I identified three main strategies the women I interviewed who dated men exclusively or both men and women employed to distance themselves from the lesbian stereotype. Respondents: (a) suggested that their team was different from those other lesbian rugby teams; (b) outright rejected the idea that women’s rugby was a ‘lesbian sport’; or (c) highlighted the idea that the stereotype was just that, a stereotype.

Respondents challenged the lesbian label by invoking the respectability of white heterosexual femininity. As one respondent, an 18-year-old white college student who dated men exclusively told me, her team described itself as ‘notoriously straight’ because ‘we’re, like, a cute rugby team.’ For this player’s team, the description ‘notoriously straight’ served to distance them from the lesbian stereotype. Likewise, the use of the word ‘cute’ to describe her rugby team suggests that she sees her team as hetero-sexy. Not only does the hetero-sexy sportswoman not threaten male dominance (Ezzell, 2009; Griffin, 1998), although rarely explicitly noted, she is also often white (De Oca, 2012; Douglas, 2011; Vincent, 2004) and thus acceptable to the sporting hegemony. Although this player called her team notorious for its heterosexuality, she also noted that other teams are just like hers, suggesting that the notoriety her squad asserts as a rugby team of white heterosexual women might be over-emphasized. Several other respondents made mention of the possibility that their teams were unique because most players claimed to be heterosexual. By making claims to the predominant heterosexuality of their rugby teams, my respondents perform the anxieties around rhetorically reproducing women’s rugby players as heterosexual and thus conforming to the logics of white heterosexuality that organize rugby in particular and sports in general.

For those women who dated men exclusively or men and women, they called attention to the fact that being a ‘dyke’ is not a sufficient condition to be a rugby player. As one white player who reported dating both men and women explained, ‘We’ll get a lot of girls come out to practice just to try it out that had never played before, and they’ll think “just because I’m gay and just because I’m dyke-y, I’m going to be good at rugby.” And they’re not. They’re not athletes and they never come back.’ This player challenged the idea that rugby is a sport for lesbians by refusing to equate women’s athleticism with lesbian sexuality. By doing this, she created space for herself as a rugby player who is not a lesbian. Several respondents repeated this sentiment that being a lesbian was not enough to be a rugby player. For some of my straight respondents, identifying as a woman rugby player was complicated by the stereotype that women rugby players were lesbians. Like the women in Ezzell’s (2009) study, some of my respondents’ relied on their heterosexuality to navigate away from this stereotype. Although these sportswomen did not vilify lesbian rugby players, by defensively constructing themselves as other than the stereotype, they reinforce the glass closet (Griffin, 1998) that queer women rugby players occupy. The strategies these women use to assert their belonging may appear to be individual strategies that focus only on how each player is different from the stereotype. However, I argue that these strategies rely on and reproduce the institutionalization of white heterosexuality in rugby.

‘Good rugby stock’: asserting racial belonging on the rugby pitch

Rugby’s reputation as a white man’s game (Collins, 2009; Spracklen, 2001) created a space within which my white respondents could assert some sense of belonging on the pitch regardless of their sexuality. In interviews, I told all my respondents that I was interested in race. White respondents assumed that by race, I did not mean them. Although all respondents insisted on the racial diversity of their teams, non-white respondents remarked on the perception of rugby as a ‘white game.’ The only black respondent challenged this perception by calling it a ‘myth,’ adding: ‘It’s not hockey. Damn! There’s whole continents and countries of black people that play rugby.’ In a similar vein, when asked to discuss the racial makeup of their teams, some white players said things like, ‘There’s black [or Asian] players on every team [I’ve played on],’ who are ‘awesome,’ emphasizing that they were fine with having ‘others’ on their teams. As Sara Ahmed (2012) has argued, the language of diversity can serve to pat institutionalized whiteness on the back for being inclusive and progressive, at the same time that it affirms that whiteness. When my white respondents affirm how awesome players of color are, they mark these players as different from the norm and, as white women, assert their belonging in the space.

At the same time that white players asserted their belonging, they also naturalized some racialized bodies as more suited for the game while marking the pitch as off limits to others (Long et al., 1997). For example, one white respondent disclosed that she’s ‘a little bit jealous’ of the ‘Samoan girls’ who are ‘just really good rugby stock.’ This player was not the only one to mention Samoans as particularly well suited for rugby. Whereas Samoans were identified as ‘good rugby stock,’ other people of color were constructed as not belonging on the rugby pitch. When telling me about an injury she caused another player during a match, another white player described her opponent as ‘really, really little. She was like, Hispanic or maybe Indian or something.’ By calling attention to her opponent’s non-whiteness – ‘she was…something’ – this player may be indicating that certain racialized people do not have the appropriate physiology to be rugby players. The notion that some non-white racial and ethnic groups are better suited for rugby than others engages in the kinds of processes that produce the ‘fantasy of the “normal white body”’ (Azzarito and Harrison, 2008: 354). Similarly, the Zulu-warrior rugby tradition mentioned in the fieldnote excerpted above is one way in which the predominantly white bodies that comprise rugby culture can affirm their whiteness at the same time that they construct blackness as athletically superior, yet socially powerless. As Ben Carrington (2010) has argued, one part of the racial project of sports is to construct ‘the black athlete’ as a body reduced to physicality and sexuality. The reproduction of this project is seen in the racial bonding over the Zulu-warrior tradition. White athletes put on the mask of animalistic black masculinity in celebration of their prowess on the field, all the while sustaining the normativity of the white body. The ways in which whiteness is privileged on the rugby field are illustrated in how my respondents discussed people of color in the sport.

Conclusion

Like other scholars (Chase, 2006; Collins, 2009), my findings are ambivalent about the extent to which, when women play rugby, they challenge the inherent aggressive masculinity of the sport. Instead, this research highlights the ways in which women’s participation in rugby relies on the reproduction of the white heterosexuality of the sport. The normalization of whiteness and the heterosexism that characterizes sports in general means that without a critical self-awareness, players reify the value of these categories in their efforts to assert belonging. Of course this is not to say that white women’s inclusion into rugby (and other sports) are not without inequalities including being sexualized and marginalized as athletes (Cooky et al., 2010). Instead, my research highlights the ways in which white women can claim this sporting space by invoking the racial contract, which maintains the white body as the somatic norm (Mills, 1997; Puwar, 2004) on the rugby pitch. This research further demonstrates the ways in which liberal feminism and white privilege (Cooky and McDonald, 2005) characterize the inclusion of white women into a so-called ‘white man’s game’ by showing how the racial topography of the sport is demarcated as white. The rhetorical reproduction of the sport in this way allows women players to employ their whiteness as a means of justifying their belonging on the rugby pitch.

Although women may be increasingly welcomed to play stereotypically masculine sports, their acceptance into this terrain is circumscribed by the extent to which they adhere to the rules of a heterosexual (Cahn, 1993; Griffin, 1998; Wright and Clarke, 1999) and racialized (Azzarito and Harrison, 2008; Long and Hylton, 2002; Walton and Butryn, 2006) social hierarchy. Fellows and Razack (1998) have noted the ways in which feminist solidarity politics fail when women refuse to acknowledge their complicity in marginalizing or oppressing others. In the context of women’s rugby, heterosexual white women may cash in on their investments in white heterosexuality as a way to affirm how ‘safe’ they are because they do not challenge the white heteropatriarchal hierarchy. By employing competing narratives of how (white) women (lesbian and heterosexual) are marginalized in sport, white women rugby players use their dominant positions to create an imagined community (Cohen, 1985 [2013]) within whose boundaries they can lay claim to the identity of safe (normative, feminine, heterosexual) sportswomen – the kind that can be cultural icons.

Although I find that sportswomen relied on their difference from ‘other women,’ their race, and/or their heterosexuality to make sense of the ways in which they took up space on the rugby pitch, rugby, like other sports understood as white, is not only played by white, heterosexual women. This research is limited in that it does not address how women of color make sense of their involvement in rugby. Are they also complicit in reproducing different forms of inequality? There is reason to believe that (queer) women of color may be uniquely positioned to challenge some of the ways in which certain sports reproduce themselves as masculine, white, and heterosexual spaces. In her research on British-Asian football (soccer) players, Aarti Ratna (2010) found that sportswomen of color engage in collective strategies of resistance to racism when they make up the majority of a team. However, when in the minority, these sportswomen lacked the kind of social capital needed to challenge racism and instead strategically distanced themselves from other marginalized players, thereby sustaining racial hierarchies. Collective consciousness and critical self-awareness thus stand out as important tools in bringing about sport’s transformative potential in ways that do not reify structures of domination.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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