Chapter 2: The Face of Nationhood: Women in the National We of Sport?

There are many examples of the different ways in which sport intersects with the idea of nations, their related identities and ideologies. The shared sense of belonging to a named national community, the assumed collective experience of sporting triumphs and disasters, and the conflation of sports events with wider social and political ideas, values and myth-histories are some of the ingredients of the complex matrix of nationhood discussed by scholars across a variety of academic disciplines such as sociology, history, politics media studies (Bairner, 2001a; Bruce, 2013, 2014; Hogan, 2003; McGarry, 2005; Reid, 2010, 2013). Macintosh and Whitson (1993, p. 1) explain sport is one of a number of cultural practices which have at least two important roles for nations: (1) they represent the nation to the rest of the world and (2) they mobilise national sentiments amongst the citizens within the nation. In short sports ‘are vehicles and embodiments of meaning, whose status and interpretation is continually open to negotiation and subject to conflict’ (MacClancy, 1996, pp. 7–8).