Has It Never Been a Better Time to Play? Opportunity, Empowerment and Contested Terrains of Women’s Grassroots Football in Australia

The introduction of the semi-professional Australian Rules Football League for Women (AFLW) in 2017 was indicative of a broader ‘boom’ for women and girls’ sport in Australia. The ‘boom’ promised not only newly created, or enhanced, professional pathways for elite women athletes but also a commensurate change in the community sport landscape, backed by a gender equality framework, that would offer women and girls new, and supported, opportunities to play sport. This paper investigates what happens when these opportunities are taken up by examining the experiences of a senior women’s football team in a community-level Australian Rules football club in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on 11 semi-structured interviews with players, we consider the transformative potential, for these individuals and for gendered power relations, that might be generated from women’s participation in traditionally masculine sporting spaces. The findings reveal contradictory moments of both emancipation and empowerment on one hand with ambivalence and disempowerment on the other. Women’s participation in Australian Rules Football is a contested terrain that is simultaneously embodied, cultural, and social, and we note the experiences and strategies that women utilize to negotiate their engagement with football. We argue that increasing “opportunities” for women to play football is not enough for the transformative promise of the AFLW to be met, and as such, further highlight the ongoing contested terrain of women’s sport.