Skating on Thin White Ice: Imagining a Queer Futurity in Hockey

Abstract

(Queer) women’s hockey and (men’s) hockey culture often exist in a recursive relationship whereby (queer) women’s hockey is complicit with the problematic associations of hockey and its culture in the present, while also producing an alternate vision of hockey that is feminist, communal, loving, and egalitarian, and extends into a future that is becoming. In this article, the term hockeynormativity communicates how hockey normalizes a white, heterosexual nationalism, and I also posit that Judith Alguire’s overlooked 1995 women’s hockey novel, Iced, is a work of queer futurity that envisions queer women’s hockey as a potentiality that reaches beyond the here and now (of hockey and nationhood) and towards utopia. This article ultimately proposes that thinking through queer (women’s) hockey as a utopian process, rather than simply a variation of men’s hockey, could allow for queerness rather than hockey culture to construct new possibilities for the (women’s) game in the here and now that extend into potential futures.