Action, Impact and Beauty: The Lingerie Football League and the Pornography of Sport

• In Event: 483 - Section on Sex and Gender Paper Session. The Politics of Bodies and Embodiment: Gender and Sports (co-sponsored with the Section on Body and Embodiment)

Abstract

The Lingerie Football League, now the Legends Football League (LFL), has been named one of the fastest growing sports leagues in the United States. A women’s indoor/arena football league, the LFL has faced criticism from feminists and sports enthusiasts alike on a variety of fronts—most noticeably the skimpy, lingerie-inspired uniforms the players wear—yet the League continues to grow and expand with affiliate Leagues opening in Australia, Canada, and soon, Europe in the five years since its inception in 2009. One of the cornerstones of the vilification of the LFL has been the overt comparison to pornography. In this paper I argue that all professional sports, particularly women’s sports, function in similar ways as porn in our culture—not just the Lingerie Football League. As such, I argue for the transgressive potential of the Lingerie Football League as that which makes the connection between sport and porn overt, thereby opening up the similar possibilities as pornography to disrupt and complicate and challenge notions of hegemonic femininity even while it appears to reproduce these tropes.

Author

• Andrew Young, Temple University