Safe Spaces: The Upside of the Image Problem for Same Sex Attracted Young Women Playing Australian Rules Football

Abstract

In an article on women’s soccer in the UK entitled The image problem in women’s football, John Harris (2005) explores the impact on heterosexual players of their involvement in a sport which has a strong perceived association with lesbianism. In contrast, in this paper it is argued that the stigma of women’s football (in this case Australian Rules Football) and its association with lesbianism may have an upside by providing a safe space for young women to test gender and sexuality boundaries in relative safety. This is important because same sex attracted young women face many difficult issues in their adolescence including discrimination, homophobic abuse, neglect, loss of social relationships and their associated negative health outcomes. These include higher rates of sexually transmissible infections, homelessness, substance misuse, depression and suicide. Despite this, most same sex attracted young women feel strong and proud of their sexuality, in part, because they are able find and subvert particular spaces in which trusting, supportive relationships can be established and where they are safe to practise sex and gender in their own ways. The data reported in

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.