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Existing literature provides nascent insights into structural arrangements that shape mothers' experiences of being a sport fan, yet we know little about the social meaning sport fandom holds for mothers. This exploratory study draws on qualitative interviews with 41 mothers from Australia and North America to examine their understandings of sport fandom in the context of their everyday lives and contemporary ideologies about mothering. Findings suggest that sport fandom presents an opportunity for mothers to redefine and transform both fan and mothering practices, thereby challenging popular orthodoxies that fandom becomes less important to women after having children. By foregrounding mothers' efforts to stay engaged with their fandom, we extend research on the experiences of women sport fans and offer alternatives to normative constructs of fandom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars studying team-licensed fan apparel have begun to surface the meanings communicated through fan clothing, particularly focusing on its gendered nature. This study extends upon this previous research by examining children's sport fan apparel via a social semiotics theoretical framework. The authors collected 377 items from 14 teams in seven major leagues in the United States. Merging a feminist lens with multimodal critical discourse analysis methodology, they uncovered how discourses and meanings in the marketing of these materials communicate organizational practices and structures. The study determined that the marketing presented discourses of gender segregation and (false) gender neutrality, as well as discourses of good parenting that legitimized the consumption of merchandise as a reflection of parenting ideologies. Organizations must address internal gendered practices to produce marketing materials and artifacts supporting gender equity and inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While sport fandom can be assumed to be inclusive, a deeper exploration of discourses around fandom exposes alternative perspectives. Using the frameworks of cultural boundaries and critical discourse studies, we explored how sport fans use Twitter to create, maintain, and transform cultural boundaries of sport fandom. We used tweets from a season of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team as a case. Data were collected via Visual Twitter Analytics software focusing on tweets containing #LetsRise and #BlueJays. From the larger data set, we selected 172 tweets to examine using critical discourse analysis and ideological structures of discourse. Findings demonstrate that discourses of loyalty, consumption, and unity have plural meanings and are used to draw boundaries that are simultaneously fluid and rigid. Thus, we argue that fans engage in an active process of determining who is and is not included in fan cultures through Twitter use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]