Join us for the first seminar of our Summer series! Dr Katie Taylor (Nottingham Trent) and Dr Lydia Furse (Rugby Union Coach and Referee) will be presenting papers on women’s involvement in sports and sporting history, respectively titled ‘Professionalising Women’s American Football: A Historical Perspective’ and ‘Women’s Rugby World Cups as Media Flashpoints: Femininity, Feminism, and Women’s Sport in the UK in the 1990s’.
Wednesday, 4 May 2022 at 4pm BST/GMT+1
Sign up on Zoom here.
‘Professionalising Women’s American Football: A Historical Perspective’ (Dr Katie Taylor)
The professionalisation of women’s sport is slowly becoming more commonplace in some sports. In American football, the dominant league, the Women’s Football Alliance, refers to itself as professional yet has far to go to match the male professional game. This paper puts the recent attempts to professionalise women’s American football into a historical context that explores the attempts that have been made over time to allow women to be paid to play the hypermasculine and highly violent sport.
About Dr Katie Taylor
Dr Taylor is a Lecturer in Sociology of Sport at Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on the history of women’s involvement in American football and she is also particularly interested in media representations of women in sport. Dr Taylor is also a qualified American football coach and previously managed the Great Britain Men’s Flag Football Team.
‘Women’s Rugby World Cups as Media Flashpoints: Femininity, Feminism, and Women’s Sport in the UK in the 1990s’ (Dr Lydia Furse)
Female participation in a traditionally masculine sport such as rugby union provoked a range of media responses in the UK. The 1991 and the 1994 Women’s Rugby World Cups can be considered media flashpoints which highlighted the conflicting public reactions to feminism, heteronormative patriarchal society, and sport as an arena for social commentary. The responses can be broadly categorised into three types: serious sporting press, novelty, and critical. The inaugural women’s rugby world cup took place in South Wales in 1991 and the second instalment occurred three years later in Scotland, where England won. Critical analysis of the press coverage of these two events provides insight into the social and cultural context of women performing in an elite competition for a traditionally masculine sport during the 1990s.
About Dr Lydia Furse
Dr Lydia Furse (she/her) completed her PhD in 2021, focused on the social and cultural history of women in rugby union between 1880 and 2016. Her research interests involve using sport as a lens to consider gender relations within societies. In 2022 Furse became the Education and Outreach Officer at the World Rugby Museum after co-curating a special exhibition entitled ‘In Her Own Words: The Rugby World Cup’, which explores the amazing stories around the women’s Rugby World Cups from 1991 onwards.
