Abstract
The FIFA Women's World Cup disseminates ideas about gender, women, and sport to a global audience. I report on a short-term ethnography involving participant observation at the 2019 Women's World Cup and in-depth interviews with fan attendees to examine the gender discourses produced through the tournament and fans’ responses to them. Integrating the concept of neoliberal postfeminism with an affective lens, I illustrate how discourses of empowerment and the progress of women's sport circulate positive affects in order to bring fans into neoliberal postfeminist ideas, ultimately presenting tournament organizers as benevolent supporters of women. While fans sometimes produced these discourses themselves, finding them emotionally resonant, they also championed a discourse of inequality that was skeptical about organizations’ true commitments and circulated an affect of frustration to call public attention to gender inequality. Fans’ simultaneous embrace and rejection of empowerment and progress discourses reveal both their reflexive agency and the powerful emotional pull that these discourses present.
Introduction
The 2019 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) Women's World Cup was held in France between early June and early July. Featuring 24 teams, the tournament culminated in a 2-0 U.S. win over the Netherlands in front of 57,900 spectators (FIFA Women's World Cup France 2019 Match Report). A record 1.12 billion people watched this tournament on television, double the viewership from 2015 (FIFA The Vision, 2020–2023). In its reach through media, the FIFA Women's World Cup thus ranks highly among women's sport mega-events, these defined as “large-scale cultural (including commercial and sporting) events, which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal and international significance” (Roche, 2000, p. 1). Despite its foundation in gender differentiation and hierarchy, then, this competition is significant as an occasion where women's athleticism alone is in the global spotlight. This attention is important in ushering new people into women's soccer [football] fandom, demonstrating the interest that sparks financial investment in the sport, and shaping ideas about gender, women, and sport (Allison & Pope, 2021; Darvin & Pegoraro, 2022; Krasnoff, 2019).
Scholars have noted nations’ strategic and political use of sport mega-events to influence external perceptions and manage their image (Black, 2007; Cornelissen & Maeninnig, 2010). Such is also the case for the sport organizations that host such events and related entities, such as corporate sponsors; FIFA uses men's and Women's World Cup tournaments to cultivate an image of its status and priorities and to manage public perceptions (Beissel et al., 2022; Dashper, 2022). These efforts have taken on new weight given a slew of recent scandals tarnishing FIFA's reputation, from corruption charges to human rights abuses to unequal treatment of men's and women's tournaments. Persistent criticisms of FIFA's treatment of women, from the “grass ceiling” of women's games alone scheduled on turf fields to the lack of women in leadership roles, have pushed this organization toward change, including public pronouncements of a renewed focus on and commitment to the development of women's soccer (Dunn, 2016; Haldane, 2021). Several recent analyses of bids to host future Women's World Cups have shown how FIFA's management of negative publicity is accomplished through preferred gender discourse, notably through ideas about the “empowerment” of girls and women and FIFA's role in growing the sport (Beissel et al., 2022; Desjardins, 2021). These gender discourses position the entities that organize and support women's soccer as progressive supporters of women and champions of gender equality while simultaneously advancing a neoliberal postfeminism that denies structural inequalities and engages individual women as entrepreneurial change makers (Brice & Andrews, 2019; Thorpe et al., 2017).
In this analysis, I build on these important textual analyses by using ethnographic methods to capture both the production of and reception to gender discourse on the part of highly identified fans. I report on a study of the 2019 Women's World Cup involving participant observation in a variety of fan spaces and interviews with 70 attendees, most of whom were American. A focus on gender discourse is important given the visibility and influence of the ideas and stories disseminated through sport mega-events, as well as persistent gender inequality in professional sport and efforts to combat it. In addition, fans’ critical responses to sport organizations’ narratives have found powerful public expression, especially through social media, marking fans as important agents of change in the status of women's sport (Cleland, 2010; Numerato, 2018; Pavlidis et al., 2022). Yet fan (or consumer) responses to gender discourse on the part of sport organizations have been understudied relative to production (Brice & Andrews, 2019; Posbergh et al., 2023). Theoretically, I integrate a focus on neoliberal postfeminism with the concepts of affect and emotion to illustrate how gender discourses circulate particular affects, or collective emotional responses, as a way of deepening connections to neoliberal postfeminist positions (Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2012; Pavlidis et al., 2022). I show fans’ complex engagements with postfeminist tournament discourses of empowerment and progress and their associated emotive states, from adoption and celebration to their own discourse of inequality that circulates frustration to highlight the perceived hypocrisy of FIFA and related entities. Relative to previous work (see Beissel et al., 2022; Brice & Andrews, 2019; Desjardins, 2021; Toffoletti, 2017), the contributions of this study lie in examining continuities from the 2015 tournament, illustrating fan negotiations of tournament gender discourse, and in using participant observation to show how discourses circulate, including through emotional responses.
Gender, Sport Mega-Events, and the Women's World Cup
Sport mega-events are politically, culturally, and economically significant, and their reach to an enormous audience presents opportunities for what Black (2007) terms “symbolic politics” which construct and disseminate narratives about the identity, purpose, and values of entities such as nations, corporations, or sport organizations. These entities use such events to mobilize support, manage their public image, and communicate a desired vision and set of meanings, often through emotional appeals (Cornelissen & Maeninnig, 2010; Desjardins, 2021; Rowe & Baker, 2012). Presuming sport to be pure and good, common themes presented through sport mega-events include unity, diversity, transcendence, and cosmopolitanism (Black, 2007; Cornelissen & Maeninnig, 2010).
Gender is also a central part of the organization of sport mega-events and the meanings communicated through them. As a social institution, sport is “a prime site for the production and reproduction of gendered identities, discourses, and practices that can both constrain and empower groups and individuals” (Dashper, 2022, p. 1).The potential of sport to variously restrict or enable gender in its multilevel iterations is magnified during mega-events given their social importance and wide media reach; in fact, women athletes receive mainstream mass media attention that rivals that received by men during mega-events (Darvin & Pegoraro, 2022). While by no means only contributing positively to hosts, notably given the displacements, labor exploitation, budget overruns, and heightened nationalism that accompany mega-event hosting, sporting events such as the Olympic Games or Women's World Cups are important in building awareness of and interest in women's sports, including soccer, and may enhance appreciation of women's athleticism (Allison & Pope, 2021; Brice & Andrews, 2019; Krasnoff, 2019).
Women's sporting events, including sport mega-events, are commonly framed through a discourse of the empowerment of girls and women (Bob & Swart, 2010; Brice & Andrews, 2019; McLachlan, 2019; Pavlidis et al., 2022). The elastic concept of “empowerment” is often defined through a neoliberal postfeminist lens that emphasizes equality achieved and women's personal responsibility for navigating systemic sexism, especially though assertiveness and competitiveness on a supposedly level playing field (Brice & Andrews, 2019; Dashper, 2022; Desjardins, 2021; Posbergh et al., 2023). For example, Toffoletti (2017) finds in images of supporters attending the 2015 Women's World Cup a focus on the empowered “can-do” girl “who is capable, competent and embodies the potential and capacity of young women everywhere” with no recognition of systemic obstacles to success (p. 124). Toffoletti (2017) further documents how tournament images promote ideas of “global sisterhood” that ignore how complex relations of colonialism, racism, classism, and homophobia make so-called “empowerment” more available to some girls and women than others. And in research analyzing bids to host the 2023 Women's World Cup, Beissel et al. (2022) and Desjardins (2021) find that campaigns emphasized “…preferred FIFA narratives about women's football, women's empowerment, and the potential of the FWWC to grow participation among women and young girls” (Beissel et al., 2022, p. 769). These narratives of empowerment reflected neoliberal feminism in minimizing the extent of complex social inequalities and organizations’ own culpability for them, instead imagining the future growth of women's participation in soccer through the motivation to action the Women's World Cup presumably provided to individual women. In downplaying and individualizing structural inequalities, promoting “empowerment” frequently serves to depoliticize and sustain unequal gender relations, rather than challenge them (Posbergh et al., 2023; Thorpe et al., 2017). Vague emphases on empowerment are often expected rhetorics and commercial strategies, rather than contributions toward change.
While promoting discourses of women's empowerment, FIFA has also long exhibited a “strange ambivalence” (Dunn, 2016, p. 17) toward women's soccer, treating it as a second-class, “historical stepchild” (Bob & Swart, 2010, p. 87) to men's soccer while also presenting themselves as champions of gender equality. For instance, FIFA's 2018 Women's Football Strategy notes that, “Years of institutional neglect and a lack of investment have prevented girls and women from playing the game and from assuming roles in technical, administrative and governance functions” (p. 4), yet fails to recognize FIFA's own complicity in this neglect (Bowes & Culvin, 2021). The very organization of World Cup tournaments is founded in systemic sexism, both drawing from and reinforcing ideologies of women's difference from and inferiority to men. For instance, FIFA organizes a separate, smaller, “gender marked” women's tournament that gives out less in prize money and that has historically scheduled only women's games on turf, and not grass (Dashper, 2022; Haldane, 2021; Williams, 2019). Recent years have seen changes, like improved field conditions, increases in the number of competing women's teams, and implementation of Video Assisted Replay, already present in men's soccer, though inequities of tournament size and prize money persist (Haldane, 2021).
Crucial as the context for understanding these incremental improvements is that FIFA had been embroiled in a number of fraud, corruption, and money laundering scandals, as well as battles with elite women players over inequalities of pay, resources, and treatment that have generated negative publicity (Dashper, 2022; Desjardins, 2021). In addition, professional women's soccer has been experiencing its own #MeToo moment that involves allegations of harassment, sexual assault, and abuse of women in multiple countries (Velija & Silvani, 2020; Williams, 2019). In working to enter a “new era of accountability and transparency” (Desjardins, 2021, p. 189), FIFA has more explicitly devoted attention and resources to women's soccer. This renewed commitment is in part a branding exercise meant to improve the organization's public image, not least in the eyes of fans.
Active(ist) Women's Soccer Fans
Sports fans are not passive spectators or mere consumers, but active participants in a player, team, league, or tournament's events (Cleland, 2010). Digital and social media, in particular, have opened opportunities for fans to participate in the social life of teams and leagues, enabling fans to quickly connect to and communicate with players, team accounts, and other fans (Pavlidis et al., 2022). As a result, sport organizations have become more responsive to fan perspectives; for instance, the U.S. Soccer Federation removed a tweeted apparel promotion for girls featuring highly feminized esthetics following immediate social media critique (Sveinson & Allison, 2022). In many cases, sport and media organizations have also cultivated and enhanced fan involvement (Dunn, 2016). FIFA's Fan Movement initiative involves an application process through which selected fans produce social media content, attend live and virtual events, and participate in group discussions to provide feedback to FIFA. This initiative is promoted as “a way to give football fans a voice and ensure their input is shared directly with football's world governing body” (fanmovement.com).
Fans’ active engagements with teams, leagues, and tournaments also take place during live events. Live sporting events provide opportunities for the construction of community, especially as a primary motivation for fandom is a sense of connectedness to others based in common cause, heightened emotion, and collective expressions (Allison & Pope, 2021; Bagley & Taylor, 2021; Numerato, 2018). The 2019 Women's World Cup was also notable in being the first time that FIFA established “live sites” or “fan parks” in all host cities, after beginning these for the men's World Cup in 2006 (Rowe & Baker, 2012). These public spaces, which feature food, games, sponsor presence, and free viewings of tournament games, “extend the ‘festival atmosphere’ of the World Cup and other FIFA-endorsed tournaments in time and space beyond the geographical boundaries of the sporting arenas in which the physical events take place” (Rowe & Baker, 2012, p. 301).
Fan social interactions at live events also provide an opportunity to express shared values and political commitments. Recent research has found that women's soccer fans are motivated by commitments to gender equality, diversity, and inclusivity, and champion these in a number of ways, including through public criticism of perceived transgressions (Allison & Pope, 2021; Bagley & Taylor, 2021; Brice & Andrews, 2019; Haldane, 2021). Dunn's (2016) research on those attending the 2015 Women's World Cup shows that these value commitments extend into fans responses to the organization of this tournament. Many of Dunn's (2016) interview participants made sense of their positive and negative experiences at the Women's World Cup in relation to their real or imagined experiences at a men's World Cup, suspecting that the women's event was being treated as inferior. What Dunn (2016) illustrates is fans’ capacity for and exercise of reflexivity, which “refers to the continuous critical revision of the social world in light of new knowledge and experiences about the world” (Numerato, 2018, p. 3). As Numerato (2018) describes, “an active minority of football fans” (p. 1) draw on their reflexive agency to engage in activism, looking to change their sport and its culture. Nowhere was this activist orientation more evident than immediately following the U.S. victory in the 2019 Women's World Cup, when those attending the game broke into spontaneous chants of “Equal pay!” (Krasnoff, 2019).
An Affective Lens
In understanding both production of and reception to gender discourse during the Women's World Cup, I also incorporate recent theorizing in sport studies on affect and emotion. While affect has been conceptualized in varied ways, especially in its relation to emotion, I understand affect as an experience within the body generated relative to “social, political, and cultural bodies of thought, organization, and action” (Pavlidis et al., 2022, p. 105). Attention to affect is intended to bring embodiment and the agentic human actor into discursive approaches, emphasizing the interconnectedness of ideas and feelings within broader contexts of power (Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2012). As affect is not a property of individuals, but is relational and networked, its circulation may open opportunities for new social connections and both individual and collective action (McDonald, 2020). Pavlidis ’et al. (2022) analysis of Australian Football League Women's amended rules found that fans’ mobilized disappointment via social media and that their collective expressions of emotion were a source of knowledge and demands for change. Affect thus not only exists but has a capacity to do; “affective forces function to simultaneously normalize, contest, and reinforce gender norms in sport” (Pavlidis et al., 2022, p. 105).
In connecting affect and sport, Andrews and Silk (2018) describe “neoliberal structures of feeling” (p. 512) through which the emotions produced through sporting events bring people into neoliberal modes of thinking and acting. Through the organization of space and presentation of images, videos, and music, mass sporting events connect positive emotions with teams and leagues, sport organizations, and the state, using affective connections to bring people into neoliberal modes of individualized self-governance (see also Cornelissen & Maennig, 2010). At the same time, however, emotions are complex, negotiated and contested, as organized programming and marketing efforts are understood variably by those who consume them (McDonald, 2020). An affective lens thus prompts consideration of the emotive states suggested through the organization of the Women's World Cup, linkages between affect and gender discourse, and the myriad ways these are experienced and made sense of by fans. Specifically, in this analysis I address two research questions: First, what gender discourses are produced during the Women's World Cup by sport organizing bodies, corporate sponsors, and related organizations, and what ideas and affects do they circulate? And second, how do fans respond to gender discourses produced through the organization of the Women's World Cup, and what ideas and affects do these responses circulate?
Methods
To answer my research questions, I conducted what Pink and Morgan (2013) term “short-term ethnography.” Ethnography is immersion into an ongoing social world, with the researcher engaging in “dialogue (conversation and listening), followed by witness (observation and participation)” (Sugden et al., 2019, p. 4). Typically, ethnographers spend long periods of time “in the field.” Yet many researchers face temporal boundaries to research based on factors such as funding limitations or teaching schedules. In the case of this research, the short (5-month) duration of data collection was due to the scheduling of the event under study. The quality of short-term ethnography is based on the depth of immersion and the appropriateness of data to answer a study's research questions. Further, field methods such as ethnography are ideal for capturing the “live” and “processual” rhetoric such as that occurring in and around live sporting events” (Bagley & Taylor, 2021, p. 133).
In April 2019, I began to recruit for semistructured, in-depth interviews with fans. I recruited participants who were at least 18 years of age, who were conversational or fluent in English, and who planned to attend at least one game of the 2019 Women's World Cup. I posted my recruitment materials to Twitter and Facebook and sent them to journalists and those I knew who worked in women's soccer. I also asked existing participants for referrals, interviewing six people connected to me by existing participants. It is undoubtedly the case that my own social networks, my reliance on the English language, and my time zone resulted in a predominately U.S. sample.
Forty-five interviews took place prior to the tournament's kick off in June 2019 and 25 took place afterwards, with data collection concluding in August 2019. Interviews lasted between 40 and 88 min, with an average duration of 62 min. Thirty-five took place over the phone, while 33 took place over video applications such as Skype, WhatsApp, or Google Duo and two took place in person. After the tournament's end I emailed the first 45 interview participants to ask about their experiences in France. I did two short follow-up interviews and 22 other early participants emailed me back to describe what the Women's World Cup had been like for them. I relied on an interview guide organized around childhood and adulthood experiences playing and following sport, with a particular focus on women's football. A section of questions on the Women's World Cup asked about participants’ motives for attending, how they organized their trip, expectations for the tournament, and experiences attending the tournament, with many probes for detail about sites such as gameday spaces, Fan Experience areas, football exhibits, or social events organized by or for fans, for instance in bars or restaurants.
All of the names of participants are pseudonyms and limited identifiers are presented in order to protect the confidentiality of responses. Three-quarters of interview participants were from the United States, with the remaining quarter from eight other countries (Argentina, Australia, Brunei, England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden). The overwhelming majority (just under 86%) of participants were cisgender women. About a third of participants were between 20 and 29 years of age and another third were 30 to 39, with the final third between 40 and 69 years of age. Fifty-five out of 70 participants described their race as “white.” And 40%, or 57% of participants, identified as heterosexual, while 27% identified as gay or lesbian and 11 participants were unsure of their sexual orientation or preferred not to disclose it.
Participants were asked about their educational attainment and current occupation as indicators of socioeconomic status. The sample is highly educated and affluent, on average, a perhaps unsurprising fact given the financial resources required to travel to France for many. Fifty-seven participants, or 81%, had earned a 4-year college or university degree, and 19 of these participants had also earned a graduate or professional degree. Seven participants were current undergraduate students at the time of their interview. Two participants reported a 2-year Associate's degree, while four had no college or university degree. Nearly all participants were employed in jobs that located them within the middle or upper-middle classes, such as lawyer, business consultant, or product manager.
While participants were recruited for this study based on their attendance at Women's World Cup games, they were very clearly more than mere spectators; they were fans with emotional connections and often longstanding attachments to women's soccer. Participants reported a wide range of behaviors that indicated knowledge of and deep investment in women's soccer. For instance, all participants reported watching and following women's soccer beyond their attendance at the 2019 Women's World Cup. All but two participants reported watching previous Women's World Cup tournaments online or on television and 31 participants had attended at least one game of a previous tournament.
In addition to interviews, I also completed 75 h of participant observation while in France for the month of the Women's World Cup. Most of my observation took place in Paris during the early and middle stages of the tournament (June 7–28), while 24 h of observation took place in Lyon during the later stages of the tournament (June 29–July 3). I observed multiple types of spaces where spectators and fans congregated with the goal of gaining the broadest possible view of fan experiences.
First, I attended eight games of the tournament, six in Paris and two in Lyon. I watched women's teams from Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, England, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Scotland, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, and the United States compete in the tournament. Second, I observed at FIFA Fan Experience areas in both Paris and Lyon. Third, I attended three parties organized by the American Outlaws, an organization for fans of U.S. soccer, that I saw advertised on social media. Again, my social networks and reliance on English shaped where I observed and, consequently, what I saw, as events advertised in languages other than English would not have been as visible to me. Fourth, I observed at Diversity House, a space hosting exhibits and talks related to issues of diversity and equality in women's soccer organized by the Fare Network, which describes itself as “an umbrella organization that brings together individuals, informal groups, and organisations driven to combat inequality in football and use the sport as a means for social change” (farenet.org). Fifth, I observed at Wallace Bar in Lyon, a bar and restaurant that advertised its showing of Women's World Cup games on its website. Finally, I observed at an event held in Lyon by Equal Playing Field, “a grassroots, non-profit initiative to challenge gender inequality in sport and to promote sports development for girls and women globally, especially in marginalised country contexts” (equalplayingfield.com). At the site, I watched a documentary short about women coaches, saw a prominent women's soccer journalist interviewed, played soccer in an attempt to break several Guinness World Records, and watched several former professional women's players introduced, photographed, and interviewed.
While observing (and often also participating), I carried a small notebook with me in order take “jottings,” or shorthand notes about what I heard and saw. These were written up as fieldnotes as soon as possible after my observation period; I produced 93 single-spaced pages of fieldnotes. In addition to my notes, I also took several hundred photos and several dozen videos during my observations. While I do not reproduce these given ethical concerns regarding privacy and consent, they have informed my analysis, helping me to recall the details of events and their emotional resonance. Collectively, I draw on interview, observational, and visual data to explore the production of and reception to discourses of gender at the Women's World Cup, including attention to their affective circulations.
Following a close initial reading, all study data were entered into MAXQDA2020 software for analysis. A first-round coding was organizational, categorizing larger chunks of data according to their content; for interview transcripts, these categories included both planned and emergent topics of conversation (for more information, see Allison & Pope, 2021). Following a feminist discourse analytic approach (Sveinson & Allison, 2022; Beissel et al., 2022; Desjardins, 2021; Lazar, 2007), further rounds of analysis involved close readings of data identified in first-round coding as related to gender, with the application of analytic codes to smaller amounts of data to name discourses and the ideas and affects they circulated. This coding was accompanied by written memos that connected types of data, incorporated insights from visual data, reflected on how power operates within discourse, how affect and emotion were mobilized and circulated, and considered processes of both production and reception.
Findings
Through music, video, hashtags, slogans, exhibits, and interviews, among other means, the 2019 Women's World Cup produced gender discourses of empowerment and progress. These discourses circulated positive feelings such as excitement, confidence, and hope as a vehicle for communicating neoliberal postfeminist ideas of gender inequality past and girls’ and women's ability to self-motivate toward achievement in sport and the workplace. While discourses of empowerment and progress often co-existed, I present them separately to tease out nuance in the affects and ideas entangled with them.
Watch the Power of Women's Football! The Discourse of Empowerment
The 2019 Women's World Cup was organized by FIFA, tournament sponsors, other corporations, and nonprofit organizations to emphasize the empowerment of girls and women. The term “empowerment” was not written or spoken aloud but was invoked indirectly through an emphasis placed on girls and women, their heightened and positive emotions watching this tournament, and the presumed motivation these feelings provided to work toward sporting and workplace successes.
Within the discourse of empowerment, the focus was almost entirely on girls, often within progress narratives of their growing into high-achieving women (McLachlan, 2019).
A spotlight on girls was evident as early as the tournament's first game in Paris on June 7. The opening ceremony within the stadium featured a racially diverse group of adolescent girls wearing bright soccer uniforms representing the colors and designs of participating nations’ flags and dancing to upbeat music. Following the ceremony, these girls exited the stadium and clustered tightly together, jumping in tandem, clapping overhead, and cheering loudly, “Wohoo!” as several people filmed them with handheld cameras or cell phones. The use of loud, up-tempo music, bright colors, and the collective motions of jumping and chanting communicated a feeling of excitement and symbolically connected this emotive state to girls.
Inspiration, too, was a central affect circulated through the organization of the Women's World Cup, and one that was a core component of empowerment discourse. The purportedly inspirational nature of women's football for girls was evident in corporate sponsor videos that played on jumbo screens inside stadiums; I watched these before every game that I attended. For instance, following an announcement to “Now, watch the power of women's football!” a longer video presented images of a racially diverse group of girls playing soccer seemingly in countries around the world, including on grass fields, in mud, in a courtyard, and with or without shoes. Set to stirring string music that slowly increased in tempo, these images gave way to clips of women on the teams playing in the tournament, passing, scoring, and heading, with fans cheering. The ad concluded by showing the U.S. women's team lifting the World Cup trophy triumphantly in 2015. Through the juxtaposition of text, imagery, and music, those in attendance were invited not only to watch, but to feel, and specifically to take up affects of excitement and inspiration tied to ideas of football's uniquely motivational character for girls.
Interestingly, the several nonprofit and change-focused organizations that leveraged the tournament to gain visibility and offer programming also took up empowerment discourse and its affects of excitement and inspiration, though this was sometimes accompanied by a focus on unequal structural conditions. At the Diversity House space, for instance, one entire wall was covered in quotations from famous players that spoke to the inspiration of girls. For example, U.S. great Mia Hamm was quoted as saying, “My coach said I ran like a girl. I said if he could run a little faster, he could, too.” And Equal Playing Field events in Lyon featured the hashtag #anygirlanywhere on a large backdrop alongside sponsor logos and the blue Twitter bird. Speakers interviewed in front of this backdrop called the Women's World Cup “energy building” and “inspirational,” with one interviewee arguing, “We need more women who are visible to little girls!”
As Brice and Andrews (2019) have observed, empowerment is often about “encouraging increased girls’ enthusiasm for, and participation, in sport” (p. 128). Beyond sport, however, the imagined “empowered woman” was also accomplished in the workplace. For example, one commercial advertisement by Arkana included the text “affirmer les rêves” [affirm your dreams], along with images of girls who become women; for instance, a girl playing soccer becomes a woman in a white lab coat working at a desk. Empowerment discourse thus relied on key features of neoliberal postfeminism, notably the idea that girls and women are responsible for pursuing their own successes and the simultaneous neglect of social structural inequalities that present barriers to achievement (Posbergh et al., 2023). Affect and discourse were entwined, as feelings of excitement and inspiration were imagined as helping girls to work for their desired outcomes as adults.
Like the Arkana ad, one side of a tall building just outside the FIFA Fan Experience in Lyon held an enormous banner featuring an image of French player Amandine Henry kneeling in celebration, her arms held out in front of her in fists, her biceps prominent as a gesture of strength. Text read, “Ne change pas ton rêve. Change le monde [Don't change your dream. Change the world]” with a large Nike logo. The repeated invocation of “dreams” referenced both aspirations and a future orientation; presumably, and in line with neoliberal postfeminism, the Women's World Cup enabled girls’ future achievements through affecting their feelings and actions, rather than attending to the structural conditions in which these actions take place (Beissel et al., 2022; Desjardins, 2021; Toffoletti, 2017).
What was also notable about empowerment discourse was its co-existence with racial and cultural diversity. As in the examples of girls during the tournament's opening ceremony or in commercial advertisements, visible racial and cultural difference failed to also give attention to power. As Toffoletti (2017) has argued, presentations of diversity alongside narratives of women's empowerment flatten differences of race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and nation among women that meaningfully differentiate opportunities, resources, and experiences in soccer. For example, a fence demarcating the Paris FIFA Fan Experience was lined with a series of hard board posters. Each had the name of a different country across the top and included text (in French) and photos of women in football in those countries that was positive and celebratory in tone.
This series of posters championed a politically vacant, acutely postfeminist sense of women's empowerment without acknowledging power and inequality within and across these national contexts.
A Turning Point for Women's Football: The Discourse of Progress
The Women's World Cup was also organized through a discourse of progress. In contrast to the future orientation that characterized empowerment discourse, progress narratives included both past and future orientations, celebrating present improvements over past conditions and envisioning future change. And while empowerment discourse applied within and outside of sport, for instance by linking girls’ spectatorship of the Women's World Cup with later achievements in the workplace, the discourse of forward progress pertained exclusively to the world of women's soccer.
Progress discourse was acutely evident in chronologies of the women's game presented by FIFA at multiple tournament sites. These chronologies typically included an ordering of “important” events in the sport, as well as a framing of this history that stressed growing participation, rights, visibility, and rewards. Progress discourse thus communicated neoliberal postfeminist notions of inequality as largely a thing of the past (Brice & Andrews, 2019; McLachlan, 2019; Toffoletti, 2017). For example, at the entrance to one blue tent set up within the Paris FIFA Fan Experience was a large board about 6 feet tall reading “De l’accès à la practique à la performance: Une histoire de football féminin” [From access to practice to performance: a history of women's football]. This title alone communicated an ethos of progress, from an era of formal and informal restrictions on women's participation in soccer to a present characterized not only by widespread participation, but excellence in elite competition. Below this title were dates listed in order from 1881 to 2019, each time point commemorating a moment in women's soccer history deemed important, like women's international tournaments in the 1970s that predated official Women's World Cups (Williams, 2019). Following the bubble for 2019 was a black arrow leading to the right but pointing only at empty space, hinting at a future of continued forward momentum; anything was possible!
Through visual displays like chronologies, text that interpreted these displays, expert interviews, and bright lighting, progress discourse invited attendees into affects of happiness and optimism. Change to the status of women in football was expected to be an emotional experience, with evidence of processes of inclusion and respect generating pleasure, as well as hope for continued progress. For instance, at an Equal Playing Field event on June 30, a prominent woman who had been a part of FIFA leadership was interviewed. Importantly, the interviewer's question presumed change to be a deeply emotional experience; he asked, “Pushing for change from grassroots to the elites, why is that important and how does that pull individually at your heartstrings?” The woman's reply in a thoughtful, but emphatic tone constructed a story of the slow, incremental progress of women in soccer. She said, “Well, I think we all know that historically football has been a game for men. And, ah, as women were allowed to take the field slowly, they were often pushed back and they tried again. So it's been a game of backwards and forwards for us for decades. To make progress and keep it without going backwards is the critical thing now.”
Just outside of the FIFA Fan Experience in Paris was a small square building housing a traveling exhibit on women's football that was part of the FIFA World Football Museum in Zurich. The museum was a single room, with the Women's World Cup trophy at eye level in a glass case in the center, glistening gold in a spotlight. One side of the room was taken up by a large painting mostly in red of figures of women playing football. When I visited on June 15, the woman artist of this striking painting was being interviewed about her work. She explained that, “to bring it [women's soccer] into a human rights theme is incredibly powerful. And I know that it's really going to work to let people know what's possible for the future.” With these comments, the artist made sport an issue of human rights, but also located the expansion of such rights in the future, indicating a process of change over time, and one that was clearly intended to communicate a feeling of optimism to those who saw the painting or heard her speak about it.
Other walls in the exhibit contained a timeline of events in women's soccer and memorabilia such as jerseys, boots [cleats], or balls used in tournaments past. One written segment on women's soccer events in the 1970s was captioned, “Changing Perspectives,” and read, “The early 1970s were a turning point for women's football. International tournaments in Italy and Mexico showed that marginalization did not prevent women from playing on a large scale…In 1988, FIFA held an invitational tournament, which led to the creation of the Women's World Cup in 1991.”
This “turning point” referred to a moment of change and forward progress, distinguishing between a past characterized by negative attitudes toward women's football and a present where women were accepted, even welcomed onto the sport's largest stage.
The discourse of progress was selective, however, in the events presented to the public and in the meanings attributed to them. The past struggles of women for access to opportunity and cultural acceptance in soccer were a common starting point for these chronologies, and yet FIFA's culpability in the “marginalization” of women's football, for instance in failing to organize a tournament for women for decades, was never addressed. In fact, at times FIFA's responsibility for barriers that women faced in soccer was made invisible, the organization presented instead as a benevolent supporter of women (Desjardins, 2021). For instance, the women's tournament FIFA organized in 1991 was called the “First World Championship for Women's Football for the M&M's Cup,” with FIFA declining to give official World Cup sanctioning to the event (Bowen, 2019). Yet in the exhibition in Paris, FIFA was lauded for its creation of the Women's World Cup with no mention of this historical reluctance.
“I Was a Part of What is Moving Forward in Soccer”: Fan Embrace
Discourses of empowerment and progress circulated positive emotions and neoliberal postfeminist ideas, the collection of entangled emotions and ideas inviting spectators to a view of the organizations hosting and supporting the Women's World Cup as enlightened and progressive champions of women. Fan reception to tournament discourses was complex, however, involving elements of endorsement, but also rejection and critique at the same time.
One common fan response to the discourses of empowerment and progress advanced by tournament organizers, sponsors, and other organizations was embrace. In interactions during the Women's World Cup, fans worked to construct and share ideas of empowerment and progress with others; they actively took up and enacted these discourses as their own. For instance, on multiple game days, I witnessed girls and women pose for photographs by flexing one or both biceps to symbolize strength, mirroring the exact pose in a Nike ad described above. At the June 16 game between Chile and the United States, I watched two young women pose for a picture inside the stadium with the field behind them. One woman, wearing a USA tank top and red mini skirt, laughed and flexed both biceps for the shot, the letters “GRL” written on one bicep in black marker. These and other similarly visible illustrations of “power” led fan Saria (25F) to comment that, “I think this was the World Cup of empowerment.” In context of the distinct lack of attention to structural inequality in the organization of the Women's World Cup, the symbolic enactment of power drew from and even reproduced neoliberal postfeminist's focus on the individual entrepreneurial woman taking charge of her own destiny (Dashper, 2022; Desjardins, 2021).
Progress, too, was invoked in and through fan interactions, and in ways that illustrated buy in to neoliberal postfeminist ideas. At Diversity House on June 9, I heard a woman with blonde hair say to the two staff people present that she had attended the FIFA Convention that took place prior to the tournament. She explained that while all the attention to inequality in women's soccer was “good,” it was also sometimes “too much” and that “this time we were talking about all the great things that have changed.” A short time later, this woman was formally interviewed by a journalist, introducing herself as, “the first [nation] woman's player to—.” In this conversation, a woman who understood herself as having broken boundaries for women in soccer endorsed a neoliberal postfeminist focus on progress achieved over persistent inequality (Beissel et al., 2022).
Additionally, at one American Outlaw fan party in Paris, representatives for the company LunaBar handed out blue shoelaces and coupons for their product. The cardboard containing the laces read, “Someday a woman's goal will be worth as much as a man's. That moment is now! Wear these laces as an expression of equality. #SomedayisNow.” In April 2019, LunaBar had unveiled a campaign to support the U.S. Women's National Team's legal efforts to receive equal pay to the men's team. While the company's efforts departed from tournament discourses in calling attention to gendered pay disparities, they certainly invoked a postfeminist conception of progress by envisioning a soon-to-be world where women were paid equally to men. The couple sitting next to me at a picnic table wrapped the laces around their wrists like bracelets, and many others wore the laces around their heads or necks.
In interviews, fans noted the deep emotional appeal of these discourses, remarking on the inspiration of girls and the forward progress in women's soccer that they felt a part of as fans. The affects made available through the tournament were highly resonant and frequently taken up as fans took part in collective experiences, with many referring to moments where they cried or felt “overcome” by emotion. Watching others view the tournament with excitement and joy was meaningful for many fans, particularly in how these feelings among girls were thought to connect with aspirations for the future. For instance, Ana (35F) noted, “So many little girls like seeing themselves and what they now think that they’ll be able to accomplish. Like that Rose Lavelle goal was amazing. I feel like I almost cried after that.” And Rochelle (30F) described the FIFA World Football Museum as “really cool” and “the best part of the FIFA fan zone.” Walking through the exhibition with its images, videos, and objects from women's soccer past and present, she thought, “…about how representation matters and how young girls being able to see themselves in these women and see them being successful, and happy, and loved, and accepted. And how that's a big deal for kids to be able to see that and to know that I can have that in my life as well.”
In emphasizing girls’ presumed feelings watching the tournament and connecting these to their aspirations, both Ana and Rochelle's comments embody the perspective that the Women's World Cup inspires and motivates girls to pursue future success, reproducing neoliberal postfeminism's decontextualized, entrepreneurial subject (Brice & Andrews, 2019). In addition, belief in the forward momentum of women's sport through growing participation, visibility, and resources was also meaningful to fans, with others, like Ana, also moved to tears over ideas of progress. Callie (42F) explained of her trip to the Women's World Cup, “To me there were a few times where I got emotional and I almost started crying. And I was like, ‘This is ridiculous. I am crying over a sport. That's ridiculous.’ But that's how emotionally invested that I felt at the time. I think that the hope is that this continues to grow women's soccer and that there's going to continue to be even more parity as we go forward.”
And Hanna (36F) felt that her presence as a fan was part of the growth of women's soccer. She expressed the sense of optimism promoted within progress discourse when she said, “I’m most looking forward to being a part of something that I can go back in five- or ten-years’ time and say, ‘Hey I was there. I was a part of what is moving forward in soccer.’”
“They’re Not Doing Enough for the Women's Game:” Fan Critique
Fan criticisms of the Women's World Cup took the form of a discourse of inequality that called attention to gender inequality within soccer through circulating affects of anger and frustration. Fans made their counter-discourse and its associated emotions available through symbols, text, public discussions, and collective chants (such as “Equal pay!”). Rather than denying empowerment and progress altogether, however, this fan discourse illustrated the limitations of the narratives disseminated through the Women's World Cup. Even when fans took up the positive affects and (neoliberal postfeminist) ideas that were a part of tournament discourses, they rarely extended their embrace of this messaging to their perceptions of FIFA and other entities, such as corporate sponsors. These organizations were not supporters of women's sport but the source of gender inequality in soccer that prevented the full realization of progress and empowerment.
The discourse of inequality was frequently presented visually through apparel and signs, with messages supporting “equal pay” predominant. The presence of equal pay slogans in this data, which reflect the U.S. team's campaign for pay equality, is the likely result of my attendance at events for American fans, the presence of many Americans at the tournament, and my own nationality. Walking through the Paris Metro in June, for example, I walked past a group wearing matching white t-shirts reading, “Not Going to the Fucking White House,” a reference to the words of U.S. player Megan Rapinoe in an interview released partway through the tournament. Fans’ use of profanity here and at other moments emphasized a feeling of frustration. On June 9, I arranged to meet Francie (32F) to watch the England-Scotland game at the Paris FIFA Fan Experience area. As we passed through the security lines, Francie led me to a set of foosball tables. Pointing to the figures on the table, she noted in a tone of annoyance that they were made female by the presence of large breasts. “I mean, it's 2019!” she said in a tone of mock outrage, seeing these “gender marked” figures as sexist and using profanity to communicate her feelings about them to me.
At American Outlaw pre-game parties, I saw multiple fans wearing jerseys with #EqualPlayEqualPay on the back, some of whom recognized others with similar shirts through high fives or fist bumps in passing. At the June 16 event, one woman held up a large poster board that read “13 Goals Are Cool Equal Pay is Cooler,” and other fans took photos of her or engaged her in discussion. George (44M) said that one of the leaders of his tour wore a shirt to the championship game that read “Equal pay for equal work,” “…and then she had a line through the second equal and put ‘superior’ above it, which I thought was pretty brilliant.” Similarly, Brandon (30M) said that he had met women from Sweden who were part of a group “supporting equality in soccer, I think in terms of like attention and pay and stuff like that.” As he continued, “I got a shirt from them. I’ve been wearing it around in Europe.”
On June 28, the American Outlaws event featured long white banners on the ground that fans could sign underneath the words, “This is what equality in football means to me.” Amid bland messages of empowerment like “Girl Power!” and “Play like a girl!” were those giving attention to inequality such as “Equal pay for equal work!” and “The ability to be called a ‘pro’ without having to have another job.” Similarly, a soccer ball was passed around at a July 2 pre-game party in Lyon to be signed by fans; messages included “Cut the check!” and “U.S. women over men!” Exclamation points in many of these messages communicated their emotional framing in frustration and urgency; the “check” should be “cut” now.
Like Dunn (2016), I found that perceived deficiencies in tournament organization were interpreted as evidence of FIFA's neglect of women's soccer, notwithstanding that organization was also the responsibility of French soccer. Ana, for instance, said of public advertising that she had seen, “Literally nothing in Paris until we were right at the stadium. I don't think you would even know there was a World Cup here unless you came here specifically.” To Ana, the paucity of advertisement signaled a lack of commitment to women's soccer on the part of FIFA, a fact that she felt frustrated by. As she explained, “There never seems to be that outreach to potential fans… I still don't think they’re doing enough for the women's game.” And Nicolette (24F) described feeling disappointed in FIFA's organization of the Women's World Cup, saying, “They have the opportunity, but it just depends on how hesitant they are. I guess asking about the management of the games…my experience with FIFA has not been the best and I’m really disappointed in terms of the organization how much they really missed the ball on this.”
Like others, Anthony (32M) concluded that FIFA's public pronouncements of new supports for women's soccer were hypocritical, more a public relations maneuver than a genuine investment. He argued of an announcement that the 2023 Women's World Cup would expand to 32 teams, “It looks like they kind of did it ham handedly…the fact of the matter is they really want it to look like the current administration in FIFA really wants to beef up the women's game.”
While results thus far have presented fan embrace and critique responses separately, these were often simultaneous in fan experience and reflection. Responses to tournament gender discourses were complex and often emotionally conflicted, as fans were enticed by tournament gender discourses but also saw them as marketing efforts that obscured the extent of existing inequality. Breanne (28F), for instance, wrote of her travels in France, “My favorite part was an area near one of the entrances that had a sign for each team in the World Cup and a sentence or two about something their country has done to promote women's equality (if only FIFA would do the same themselves).”
Breanne was referring to a series of posters at the Lyon FIFA Fan Experience set up under the title “Planet Football Women's Rights.” A written introduction to the exhibition proclaimed, “This unique exhibition, created for the FIFA Women's World Cup, offers you a trip across the 24 participating countries: a world tour of exemplary initiatives in favour of women's emancipation in society… Let's get inspired in our respective countries!” Breanne was not alone among participants in finding these to be meaningful. Aryani (30sF) spoke with intensity about these same posters, saying, “The women empowerment posters, did you get to see that? That one really moved me to be honest with you. I took a picture of every poster that was displayed that day. I loved that part.” At the same time, Breanne felt that FIFA, the very organization presenting these posters, was not living up to its promise of advancing equality, and she felt angry at FIFA while still embracing the excitement of the tournament. Former collegiate player Madison (28F), too, expressed a sense of internal conflict between supporting and rejecting FIFA and the Women's World Cup, noting that, “It's tough cause you want to celebrate the thing, but then the organization that's running it is also not protecting the thing in some ways.”
Discussion
This short-term ethnography (Pink & Morgan, 2013) of the 2019 Women's World Cup considers the gender discourses presented by FIFA, corporate sponsors, and other organizations, as well as their reception by fans in attendance. The Women's World Cup was founded in an ideology of women's difference from and athletic inferiority to men (Bob & Swart, 2010). At the same time, as a mass mediated competition that allows a global audience to see women's athletic talents, the Women's World Cup holds some potential to challenge dominant gender ideology by displaying women's athletic excellence (Beissel et al., 2022; Darvin & Pegoraro, 2022; Krasnoff, 2019). As attendance at and viewership of the Women's World Cup have risen, the salience of this tournament to popular ideas about women and sport has grown, matched in recent years by activist efforts by women players to combat abuse, a lack of resources, poor training and playing conditions, and pay inequalities (Desjardins, 2021; Haldane, 2021; Velija & Silvani, 2020; Williams, 2019). Many of these activist efforts have been supported and advanced by fans, who are sophisticated and involved consumers of sport with some measure of sway in team, league, and sport organization decision making (Cleland, 2010; Dashper, 2022; Dunn, 2016).
I find that girls’ and women's empowerment and the progress of women's soccer were the predominant gender discourses apparent in the organization of this tournament. These have been noted previously in textual analyses of bids to host the Women's World Cup as efforts to communicate the set of ideas preferred by FIFA that will lead to selection (Beissel et al., 2022; Desjardins, 2021). Using interview and participation observation methods, this analysis confirms that these are the discourses promoted by FIFA and related organizations, worked into the fabric of the Women's World Cup through verbal, textual, and visual messages. This analysis suggests the value of integrating discourse analysis with a focus on affect and emotion given that tournament discourses were intended to produce collective emotional responses among spectators and frequently did so. As Pavlidis et al. (2022) argue, “This [focus on affect] is not to turn away from discourse analysis and other perspectives, but offers an extension of these approaches as a way of considering those visceral, felt, intensities that exceed textual signification” (p. 104).
Specifically, empowerment was communicated as emotions of confidence and excitement believed to generate elevated aspirations and later achievements among women in both sport and the workplace, while progress was understood as hope and optimism for slowly growing opportunity, visibility, and resources in women's sport. These discourses were intended to be experienced affectively and positively among fans, aligning with their values and producing a “feel-good effect” (Cornelissen & Maeninnig, 2010; Haldane, 2021) that would extend into fans’ perceptions of FIFA, sponsors, and other organizations (Desjardins, 2021; Rowe & Baker, 2012; Toffoletti, 2017). At the Women's World Cup, gender discourses operated as a form of “symbolic politics” (Black, 2007) representing crisis management and commercial strategies, with the ultimate goals of shoring up FIFA's reputation and preserving its power and control through presenting this organization as a progressive, enlightened leader for the future of the sport. As suggested by an affective lens, these discourses also represent an interconnection of feelings with ideas, notably the using of emotional appeals to advance ideas of inequality past and women's own responsibility for their life trajectories and outcomes.
Like research by Toffoletti (2017) on images of the 2015 Women's World Cup and Brice and Andrews’ (2019) group interviews with women who watched this tournament, this analysis finds that empowerment and progress discourses are a veneer of progressive gender politics that conceal the (affective) operations of neoliberal postfeminism. Empowerment discourse, for example, presents a world in which girls’ and women's feelings and choices transcend barriers, marking individuals as responsible for their own outcomes while denying the importance of social and structural conditions (Desjardins, 2021; Thorpe, Toffoletti & Bruce, 2017). The “aspirational and transformative event legacies” (Beissel et al., 2022, p. 787) believed to result from the Women's World Cup are not a recognition of or dismantling of systemic sexism but a group of women who dream bigger and aim higher. Progress narratives, too, frequently emphasize gains made over continuing inequalities (McLachlan, 2019). Further, as Desjardins (2021) notes, discourses promoted within women's soccer ignore the roles that organizations like corporate sponsors and FIFA itself have played in hindering the women's game. Ultimately, then, the potential of the Women's World Cup to challenge gender ideologies that justify patterns of inequality in sport is blunted by its presentation through thoroughly depoliticized and individualized discourses.
I find fan receptions of these discourses to be complex, involving both endorsement and embrace but also skepticism and critique. Similarly, Brice and Andrews’ (2019) interviews with young White women who watched the 2015 Women's World Cup found “a disconnect between the women's personal views and their political ideologies” (p. 140). While these women aligned themselves with individualized empowerment discourse and supported the U.S. players’ fight for equal pay, they also distanced themselves from the label of feminism, often embracing a postfeminist perspective that equality had been achieved. I, too, find similarly complicated responses. On the one hand, many fans found empowerment and progress to be meaningful and emotionally resonant ideas. On the other hand, however, they were aware of the battles women players and teams had been fighting for resources and fair treatment and wanted to see change. Fans embraced empowerment and progress discourses and yet felt that FIFA (and to a lesser extent, other organizations) failed to live up; they wanted FIFA to put their money (and other resources) where their mouth was, as the saying goes, and acknowledged FIFA's role in the marginalization of women's soccer to men's. Fans circulated frustration within a discourse of inequality that countered the dominant presentation of the Women's World Cup, at times interrupting empowerment and progress discourses through making inequality visible and unacceptable. The visibility of this fan discourse of inequality and its affect of frustration as it circulated both in France and in mass media illustrates the power of fans and their perspectives (Cleland, 2010; Numerato, 2018).
Importantly, this study includes fans living in multiple national contexts, although most are from the United States and the predominance of U.S. fans is both a feature and a limitation to this study. Nevertheless, previous scholars have called for cross-national research given that the cultural and economic status of football, and of women's football, varies across countries (Williams, 2019). Such a focus should be a priority for future scholarship.
The 2023 Women's World Cup has recently taken place. With the hosts committed to the discourse of empowerment (Beissel et al., 2022; Desjardins, 2021), this event presents opportunities to examine both production of and reception to discourse over time. In 2019, dominant narratives of the Women's World Cup were only partially embraced by fans, with limited effectiveness in countering negative publicity and improving FIFA's image. At the same time, some fans’ activist focus on inequality failed to hamper the commercial successes of the event. Despite fan critique, then, the growing economic standing of the Women's World Cup makes substantial change in official discourse unlikely; fans criticisms may threaten legitimacy, but seemingly not the bottom line. A tournament where officially sanctioned discourse both recognizes structural inequalities and publicly acknowledges culpability for them remains almost unthinkable.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) (grant number FIFA Research Scholarship).
