Reflective Reading 3: “Barbie Dolls” on the Pitch This reading focuses on how women use four strategies to take part in rugby – a male-defined sport and deal with identity dilemmas. Players that take part experience challenges of conventional notions of passive femininity through tough play, yet encounter sexist and homophobic stigma from outsiders. Rather than resisting and rejecting the power of this stigma, these women engage in: defensive othering – basically distancing themselves from other subordinates and reinforcing the legitimacy of a devalued identity in the process. Specifically; identifying with dominants – identifying with the values associated with dominant group members; engage in normative identification – identifying with the …show more content…
Rugby on the other hand seems to have females act in the opposite way in which they adopt a queer “unapologetic” comprised of “transgressing gender, destabilizing the heterosexual /homosexual binary, and ‘in your face’ confrontations of stigma”. Rugby, it would seem, offers a fertile ground for resistance. Instead of using defensive othering, women rugby players identify themselves with dominants such as male rugby players to push past the identity dilemmas. The rules of women’s rugby supports this as they are exactly the same as men’s rugby unlike Ice hockey in which women are not allowed to perform “intentional efforts to hit, or ‘take out,’ an opposing player”. Because they are following the same rules as men they are identifying with dominants, and reinforcing stereotypes of passive femininity for others and positioning themselves as stronger in contrast. One way for women to engage in normative identification as an attempt to please the dominant group while breaking other gendered norms is to make an appeal to their own “natural” femininity and heterosexuality and when female rugby players come up against expressed and internalised sanctions for their tough and aggressive rugby play, do exactly this. Through normative identification female ruggers tend to position themselves as better than other female ruggers because of a physicality that is normally an advantage that they have over the others such as commitment to fitness while also having a smaller physical size. In order for female rugby players to maintain their reproduction of inequality they must also maintain their boundary between their dominant groups, in this case male rugby players. By doing this they are allowing the boundary to be maintained and the male rugby players to hoard resources, which is not usually