Non-player Performances: An Examination of the Roles Non-male Characters are Allocated in Australian Sports Fiction Related to Two Codes of Football

Women have been playing two versions of football – soccer and football by Australian rules – in Australia, almost continually, for over a century (see Syson, Hay and Downes 2015, Hess 2013, Williams 2007). In contrast, their inclusion and representation in fictional narratives related to these sports is relatively recent and limited (See Symons 2018 and McGowan 2019, McGowan and Downes 2018). Where female characters are foregrounded, they are rarely ever players. As participants in the landscape of their respective games, female characters are most often “relegated,” through gendered performances (Butler 1993, 1990), to the role of fan, player partner, or organisational facilitator, such as catering, kit-cleaning and player transportation. Through the use of textual (McKee 2003) and comparative analysis, this paper considers tensions and divergences in the portrayal of female characters in exemplars across the two sports and the ways their under-representations are informed, and arguably defined, by their relationship to the similar roles occupied by their male counterparts in narratives focused on these respective codes of football. The Silent Return of Football: Don DeLillo’s The Silence