Female football fans or football fangirls? : A study on how female football fans in Singapore negotiate their identity as women and as fans through their social experiences.

Abstract

This thesis explored how female football fans in Singapore, being marginalized and excluded from the male dominated football arena, negotiated their identity as both a woman and a fan. Based on these women’s experiences, I embarked on a micro-sociological study to unravel and discover the ways in which these women struggled to identify as a woman and a fan, and I suggested framing female football fans in Singapore as a subcultural group and how there is an importance of having a clear identification of the difference between a female football fan and a football fangirl. The social experiences of these women were not isolated experiences, in fact, they later pointed out towards the existing larger social phenomena of gender discrimination in football.