Abstract:
This paper draws on data from a case study into a local, suburban women’s Australian Rules football team, investigating the ways players experienced, engaged with, valued, and made sense of the particularities of the sportscape in which they played. Emerging from the dataset was an overwhelming emphasis on discourses of belonging and inclusion, with such assertions as ‘I can just be myself’ and anecdotes that reflected an absence of needing to self-regulate or police themselves in traditionally heteronormative ways. Players expounded on the nuances of this space as somewhere that their variously gendered bodies, sizes, abilities, and selves were not just accommodated, but normalised, and that this was, in some instances, radically divergent to the ways in which they self-regulated and policed themselves and their bodies in other social and cultural contexts.
Through an exploration of hegemony and the ways in which norms and power serve to regulate and legitimise some bodies, abilities and selves while disavowing others, and in concert with an investigation into the ways in which sportscapes are socially and culturally constructed, this paper seeks to ask:
How can a queer lens undermine normalising regimes such as heteronormativity, sexism, ableism, and elitism in a local sportscape, and what are the implications for these players’ experiences and participation?
What role did the cultivation of this sportscape play in affecting players experiences and perceptions of their bodies, their sense of self, and each other?
How could a queer lens – a critical consciousness of and around normalising regimes of power and hegemony - offer us ways for thinking through the cultivation of more inclusive (safer) HPE-scapes?
Investigating the mobility and social construction of hegemony and the ways in which normalising regimes re/produce that which becomes hegemonic within different spaces, this paper considers how we can apply the principles of normalising difference from this football sportscape to HPE-scapes in order to explore how HPE teachers might cultivate safe spaces which foster inclusion, belonging, participation, and engagement through explicitly normalising diversity in relation to gender, sex, bodies, and abilities. Such a discussion has implications for the enactment of the Victorian Government Department of Education’s Safe Schools program, LGBTIQ Support Policy, and Victoria’s LGBTIQ+ strategy 2022-32.
Through an exploration of hegemony and the ways in which norms and power serve to regulate and legitimise some bodies, abilities and selves while disavowing others, and in concert with an investigation into the ways in which sportscapes are socially and culturally constructed, this paper seeks to ask:
How can a queer lens undermine normalising regimes such as heteronormativity, sexism, ableism, and elitism in a local sportscape, and what are the implications for these players’ experiences and participation?
What role did the cultivation of this sportscape play in affecting players experiences and perceptions of their bodies, their sense of self, and each other?
How could a queer lens – a critical consciousness of and around normalising regimes of power and hegemony - offer us ways for thinking through the cultivation of more inclusive (safer) HPE-scapes?
Investigating the mobility and social construction of hegemony and the ways in which normalising regimes re/produce that which becomes hegemonic within different spaces, this paper considers how we can apply the principles of normalising difference from this football sportscape to HPE-scapes in order to explore how HPE teachers might cultivate safe spaces which foster inclusion, belonging, participation, and engagement through explicitly normalising diversity in relation to gender, sex, bodies, and abilities. Such a discussion has implications for the enactment of the Victorian Government Department of Education’s Safe Schools program, LGBTIQ Support Policy, and Victoria’s LGBTIQ+ strategy 2022-32.