Gender Equality and Economic Entanglements in Male-Dominated Sport Organizations: The Disruptive Value of Australian Rules Football Women

Abstract

Focusing on the Australian Football League and its development of a national competition for women, this article contributes toward broader debates around the inclusion and incorporation of women in professional sport. It traces the particular logics and desires (such as corporate expansion) that drove the Australian Football League to develop a women’s competition in the name of equality. We map the organizational tensions and affects that produce (the doing of) gender equality through different desires. Drawing on feminist new materialist conceptions of assemblage, we work to identify the material (numbers of women and girls participating, revenue, and expenses) and discursive (attitudes toward girls and women, meanings attached to sport, and gender) entanglements that contribute to the (de)valuing of women in male-dominated sporting organizations and how this might be disrupted both now and in the future.