Gender and sexuality at play: Women professional athletes and the people who watch them

This dissertation explores multiple constructions of gender and sexuality within the context of women's professional team sports in the United States. Women's team sports have been undergoing an unprecedented growth spurt in popularity and professionalization in the 1990s. This work is an anthropological study of the responses to these new sports teams, of what is being said and thought about women in this new role as professional team athletes. My findings emerged from two seasons of ethnographic fieldwork conducting participant observation, in-depth interviews, life stories and surveys. I present four public evaluations of female athletes as constructed by the people watching them. I examine how these evaluations confirm and contest cultural themes on gender. One of these evaluations---that women are better athletes than men are---is explored in depth. Sports spectating is also examined through the lens of sexual identity. I discuss how two elements of spectatorship---the process of spectator identification and the links between community and spectatorship---take on different shapes in the case of lesbian fans of women's sports. This dissertation engages several on-going theoretical conversations about sports, spectators, gender and sexuality, and builds interdisciplinary bridges between feminist theory, popular culture studies on fans, and research on sports spectators. It joins a growing body of multi-sited ethnographic work that challenges and rethinks the field and location of anthropological research. This dissertation also provides an ethnographic account of women's sports fans, a relatively unstudied group. Along with recording a present-day cultural phenomenon and its place in the lives of athletes and fans, I use women's professional sports as a site through which to examine the public forging of gender and sexuality within contemporary US popular culture.