‘Which player do you fancy then?’ : locating the female ethnographer in the field of the sociology of sport

This article examines the gendered nature of sport fan ethnographies and addresses the often-overlooked relationship between a researcher’s gender identity and their research environment. It seeks to critically explore the debates that surround female researchers in masculine settings, and argues that the position of a female researcher is both enabling and limiting within the scope of data collection on football fans. Drawing on a qualitative data-set that examines football fans of Everton Football Club, observational data collected over the 2012–2013 Premier League seasons are used to illustrate how the researcher reflexively celebrated, negotiated, subverted and at times froze her femininity. The silencing of the female ethnographer in sport research is attributed to the prominent position that both male sports fans and male scholars occupy in the field. This paper advocates for an alternative approach to the study of sports fans that encourages more reflexively on behalf of the researcher.