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Published Version (Advanced Access)CC BY V4.0, Open Access
Journal article
Standing with FC St. Pauli: an examination of a reflexive autoethnographic account of a woman sports fan's experience of German men's professional football
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Vol.Advanced access
2025
Appears in UniSC Supported Open Access Outputs
Abstract
Purpose
The professional German football team Fuβball Club Sankt Pauli of Hamburg (FC St. Pauli) are renowned for their inclusive celebration of community alongside fervent fan-driven social and political activism. The club attract local, national and international interest and relatively frequent academic examination, yet little scrutiny is afforded the woman fan’s experience or the gendered practices that often complicate the position of women as spectators. The purpose of this paper is to offer insight through examination of a woman sports fan’s experience of the FC St. Pauli stadium tour.
Design/methodology/approach
To build on innovative approaches to exploring fandom through mixed method and ethnographical investigations (see Hoeber and Kerwin, 2013; McParland, 2012; Richards, 2015), a reflexive form of autoethnography (Delamont, 2009; Ellis et al., 2010; Holman Jones, 2016) is employed here to frame and to contribute place-based research on women as sports fans (Pope, 2012; Schallhorn et al., 2024; Symons, 2024), within the context of professional football. The paper focuses on a woman sports fan’s experience of the FC St. Pauli fan space, including an attempt to attend a match, her participation in a club tour, and her encounter with club fans.
Findings
This approach explores a woman fan’s experience in visiting FC St. Pauli and enables nuanced consideration of the multi-layered and complex experiences of women as fans in predominantly male professional football club fan spaces, in this case, within the German context. Its place-based (Allison, 2023; Parry and Richards, 2019) and reflexive autoethnographical account (Bakhsh, 2022) highlights some of the ways one German club challenges the treatment of diverse fans. The employment of this method of approach offers new understanding of the gendered experience of participation in sports fandom.
Originality/value
Where it affords analysis of prior knowledge of the famous club’s community and their activities, this reflexive autoethnographic study increases knowledge of the woman sport fan’s experience of professional German football club, FC St. Pauli.
Details
- Title
- Standing with FC St. Pauli: an examination of a reflexive autoethnographic account of a woman sports fan's experience of German men's professional football
- Authors
- Kasey Symons - Swinburne University of TechnologyLee McGowan (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Business and Creative Industries
- Publication details
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Vol.Advanced access
- Publisher
- Emerald Group Publishing
- DOI
- 10.1108/EDI-06-2024-0279
- ISSN
- 2040-7157; 2040-7149
- Copyright note
- © Kasey Symons and Lee McGowan. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at Link to the terms of the CC BY 4.0 licence.
- Grant note
- Supported by Australia–Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme and the 2022/2023 ProjectRelated Personal Exchange (PPP), provided by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service).
- Organisation Unit
- School of Business and Creative Industries; Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991183644202621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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