Clubhouses and locker rooms: sexuality, gender and the growing participation of women and gender diverse people in Australian football

ABSTRACT The launch of the Australian Football League Women’s (AFLW) combined with the introduction of grassroots women’s Australian football across the country have challenged the landscape of Australian sport and sport media in recent years. Many young women and gender diverse people have had the opportunity to participate in contact sports such as Australian football for the first time. With this, has come exposure to off-field spaces and cultures that they have previously been excluded from, such as post-sport pub culture and locker rooms. Through qualitative interviews with grassroots players in the Hunter Region, this paper explores how spaces can encourage and provide the opportunity for women to challenge binary expectations through comradery and acceptance of masculine bodily displays in conjunction with the normalization of non-heterosexuality. We conceptualize the ‘sport-sexuality-assemblage’ as a way of accounting for the relations of desire for women and gender diverse people in a range of sport spaces.