Description
Female athletes have made visible strides in competitive, high-profile sports like international soccer, but these impacts have often been overshadowed by an emphasis on appearance, sexuality, and their success relative to their male counterparts. This leads one to question how much gender equality has actually been achieved in the sports arena. While Title IX has done much to “level the playing field,” such institutional regulations sometimes gloss over the ways gendered notions of sport are communicatively co-constructed in interaction on and off the playing field. Taking as its cue the predominance of females in organized soccer, this research works toward a greater understanding of the way competitive female recreational soccer players negotiate contested spaces, construct their identities, and the ways in which the organizational culture at the North Park Water Tower resists and reinforces traditional masculine values and practices. Through observation, semi-structured interviews, and by taking an autoethnographic approach, the author studies the ways in which adult Division 1 - Division 4 athletes and referees at the San Diego Indoor Soccer Arena in North Park, communicate with one another in the sporting environment of competitive co-ed soccer. Through analysis of these communicative performances between one another, this research can better understand the ways in which female soccer players are assimilated into the sport and the ways their identity is constructed. Keywords: Gender, sport, aggression, masculinity, femininity, organized sport, co-ed recreational soccer, stereotypes
