Two balls is too many: stadium performance and queerness among Portland’s Rose City Riveters supporters club

Abstract

Portland, Oregon’s Rose City Riveters is the largest independent organized supporters group for a women’s soccer team in the world. They support Portland Thorns with an organized, expressive and organic performance of songs, musical instruments and displays that envelopes the entire stadium. Utilizing ethnographic subject-centred methods, this empirical study argues that the group’s performance reflects two different performance lineages, organically organized transnational soccer fandom on one hand and disidentifying queer public performance on the other. This paper explores how different elements of these lineages overlap in the Riveters’ performance to disrupt, negotiate and resist the dominant ideologies of hyper-masculinity and heteronormative femininity that shape professional soccer in the United States.