Women as Sectarian Agents: Looking Beyond the Football Cliché in Scotland

Abstract

In this article the authors challenge the hegemonic masculinity of the dominant football discourses on intra-Christian sectarianism in Scotland through a pilot study on women’s everyday experiences of sectarianism. The authors argue that dominant constructions of sectarianism often erase the standpoints of different kinds of women by minimising their roles both as agents for change and/or subjects who also reproduce sectarianism in their own right. The findings offer alternative narratives which problematise sectarianism as a white, male-only, working-class issue. This highlights the need to legitimise different gendered manifestations of sectarian bigotry at the micro-social level of family and kinship networks particularly in relation to the seemingly feminised role of policing ethno-religious identities in marriage and the socialisation and upbringing of children.