"Pass it to your girlfriend!": A collaborative autoethnography of a friendship through women's sports fandom

Abstract

Like broader transformative fandom, women's sports spaces are constructed as queer and feminist despite structural anti-Black racism and reinforcement of neoliberal consumerism. Being queer women's sports fans involves embracing the love of the game and many of the players while grappling with troubling politics in both the sports and their fandoms. We use collaborative autoethnography to examine our friendship as a critical feminist sports scholar and a transformative fandom member who have formed a fandom of two around our love of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) and Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the United States, while feeling alienation from many other women's sports fans, including at live games and in women's sports real person fiction (RPF) spaces. Drawing on the works of Sara Ahmed and Rukmini Pande, a feminist/fandom killjoy approach is useful for negotiating such contradictions as fans, for cocreating fan practices together, and for articulating hopes for the future of women's sports.