Women playing Australian Rules football continue to disrupt heteronormativity as they revel in the joys, pleasures and intensities of this full-contact, dynamic sport. Local women’s Australian Rules football teams offer a microcosm through which to explore the ways in which power, hegemony and norms can be constructed, reconstructed, challenged or transformed.Applying a queer intersectional lens to women’s experiences of playing in local women’s football teams and drawing on personal experiences of playing, this book theorises the politics of gender, sexuality, sociality and sportscapes while offering an intimate portrayal of playing Australian Rules football for women.Drawing on empirical data (including visual methods) with two women’s football teams in suburban Australia, this book explores how gender, sexuality, bodies, abilities and experiences intersect to effect women’s everyday experiences of physicality and sport, and the particularities of affect, homosociality and the values of sportscapes on women’s participation.Culminating in a comprehensive and nuanced insight into the field of local women’s Australian Rules football, this book may be of interest to those working and studying within the fields of gender and sexuality, queer theory, visual methodologies, sociology of sport, sports management and physical education. Additionally, it offers rich insights for those already immersed in or interested in the field – who play, volunteer, work, support or care about women’s football – for making sense of the personal, political, sometimes complex and often passionate experiences of the game for women who play.
