‘Lesbian community’ in Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) spaces

Abstract

This paper explores the investment in the discursive and spatial construct of ‘lesbian community’. This ‘community’ is identifiable through the social spaces of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), where sport and community are connected descriptively and interpretively. To do so, this paper discursively examines fan comments that define WNBA spaces as sites of community. This conversation is situated within the material and discursive context of these spaces, which are continuously remapped as heteronormative by the WNBA. Consequently, this paper concludes that uses of ‘lesbian community’ discourse within heteronormatively coded spaces points to a key strategy of creating safe spaces in an oppressive social climate. Moreover, ‘community’ discourse can be read as an assertion of empowerment in a time and place when lesbian spaces have been integrated and sometimes dissolved into the urban landscape, and when there is no clearly identifiable ‘lesbian space’.