Research on women and sports tend to focus on structural issues such as how women in sports, throughout history and continuously, have been and are being discriminated, sexualized, objectified, trivialized, and perceived as lesbians, “butch” and so forth. When it comes to an individual level researchers often identify and explore women’s strategies and negotiations, in different times, contexts and sports and in relation to different racial, socio economical, sexual dimensions etcetera with issues exemplified above. But do we know anything about what is happening in the women’s locker rooms? Is this space unproblematic or just unproblematized?

In my thesis I would like to explore how women construct gender as well as sport identity – are these separate or intertwined? - in relation to other women in team sports with special attention given to a very enclosed space: the locker room. What are women athletes in women only spaces talking about and how are they acting? What is considered normal and respectively abnormal in a female sports team? Which kinds of femininities are constructed in women only spaces in sports? Which kinds of femininities are dominating and respectively subordinated in this type of space? 

Ethnographic method will be used to study one or two female sports teams. Theoretically I would like to try if Connell’s usage of hegemony theory (commonly used in critical studies on men and masculinities) is possible to apply, and perhaps even possible to develop, on women’s gender constructions in women only spaces. Could one identify “hegemonic femininities” and accordingly “complicit femininities” or maybe other types of femininities within a women only group? Or is Connell’s “emphasized femininity” - used in describing women’s gender identities in relation to men  - the ultimate concept regarding accepted femininity regardless if men are present or not?