Gender Equality and Collective Action

Despite substantial recent activism on the part of U.S. women soccer players and their fans, little scholarly attention has focused on fan activism in women’s soccer. Drawing on an ethnographic study of U.S. fans at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, this analysis considers fan activism as the construction of group identity. In the acutely politicized context of this tournament, activist messages displayed by fans sparked both in-person and mediated social interactions that solidified constructions of fans as politically liberal and committed to gender equality and communicated individuals’ alignments with these constructions. Ultimately, fans drew on liberal feminist conceptions of equality as women’s sameness to men to call for change and to build and signal their own belonging as legitimate members of the women’s soccer community.