‘We’re, like, a cute rugby team’: How whiteness and heterosexuality shape women’s sense of belonging in rugby

Abstract

This article considers how race and sexuality mutually inform the ways women experience their sense of belonging in sport. An examination of how white and heterosexual privilege structure belonging for 15 women rugby players in the sport finds that the ways in which some players assert their belonging runs the risk of reifying oppressive norms associated with heterosexual femininity and white privilege. This analysis provides a nuanced understanding of how individual women may rely on certain structures of domination to take up space in sport in ways that rely on and reproduce inequality. Although women rugby players may challenge norms of (white) heterosexual femininity, they experience these norms as mediated through their particular social locations. As a result, how women rugby players take up space in sport may be complicated by their specific relationship to social constructions of gender, sexuality, and race.