No Fear Comes: Adolescent Girls, Ice Hockey, and the Embodiment of Gender

This article examines the relationship between gender, physicality, and embodiment among a group of adolescent girls. The analysis is based on interviews with 24 girls who play ice hockey. In their accounts of the practice of hockey, respondents emphasize the importance of being aggressive, which they define as being powerful and sometimes fearless in use of the body. Whereas aggressiveness is a feature of both men's and women's hockey, the men's game is generally understood to be more physical and aggressive. Players understand that contrasts between men's and women's hockey arise out of both the material advantages that boys and men enjoy and the gendered ideologies that underlie the practice of sport. The article concludes with a consideration of the potential of hockey and other confrontational sports to challenge contemporary gender constructions and the limitations and possibilities of sport as an arena for change in gender ideologies and relations.