“It Was a Combination of Feeling Super Badass and...Super Inept”: Exploring Girls’ Experiences Playing on Boys’ Tackle Football Teams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores girls’ experiences playing tackle football on boys’ teams to understand how girls experience a highly masculine sport space. Tackle football is largely a space reserved for men and boys. Girls’ opportunities to play football are limited and often involve playing on teams intended for and dominated by boys. The purpose of this research was to begin to understand girls’ experiences in tackle football to highlight girls’ ongoing oppression in patriarchal societies and to consider whether football can be empowering for girls. The idea for this research originated from my own experiences playing tackle football on boys’ teams for four years. I present my experiences alongside data I collected in interviews with 12 women from Canada, the United States, and Poland who have played on boys’ tackle football teams. These interviews, paired with my personal experiences, allowed me to identify aspects of toxic youth football cultures and, maybe surprisingly, the opportunity football presents for embodied feminist empowerment for girls. I identify some girls’ experiences as taking place in toxic football cultures based on their experiences with microaggressions and violence. These cultures work to retain boys’ and men’s control over football spaces by plaguing girls’ abilities to play football and hindering girls’ enjoyment of the sport. Discouraging girls’ football involvement is a powerful tool of oppression, because football could, in better circumstances, be empowering for girls. Playing football against boys allows some girls to confront embodied forms of patriarchy and challenge discourses about girls’ physical inferiority. This research highlights girls’ continued oppression in patriarchal societies and the embodied nature of patriarchal norms. It also shows how girls’ physicality could be used as a tool to challenge oppressive gender structures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".