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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]

Sport team licensed merchandise plays an important role in sport fan experiences. Existing work has explored how consumers perceive these items, motivation and consumption habits, and intent to purchase. Extending upon the performative sport fandom framework, this study explores the marketing messages of sport fan merchandise, and the resulting implied gendered and fan performances. Employing a multimodal critical discourse analysis, we analyzed the top 20 T-shirts for men and women for five National College Athletic Association institutions on their official ecommerce sites. By examining the text descriptions, visual images, and messages perceived when combining text and visuals, we found that the marketing messages of clothing items rely heavily on traditional discourses of femininity and masculinity, placing gender performances as more relevant to fan performances for women. Atypical designs suggest alternative gender and fan performances but continue to indicate that gender identity is central to clothing appearance and messaging to consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport organizations are developing family-friendly spectator initiatives to boost engagement and sales to parents and children. While the number of women sport fans continues to grow, research has yet to explore how women, as mothers and fans, experience fandom. Informed by a maternal geography framework, this study explores women's understanding of what does or does not make game-day experiences family-friendly by presenting the accounts of 15 women from North America and Australia who are sport fans and mothers. Interpretive phenomenological analysis is utilized to investigate how mothering as a spatially informed care practice shapes the perspectives of what constitutes a family-friendly sport spectating experience. Findings identify key components of the physical, structural, and social environments of women's experiences of family-friendly sport fandom, as well as exposing that what is presumed to be family-friendly is not the same as mother-friendly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the sport fan literature suggests that it is common for parents to socialize their children to cheer for specific sports and teams, recent literature proposes that children can socialize their parents into changing the parents' sport fandom in a process sociologists and consumer behavior researchers refer to as reverse socialization. To ascertain whether children can socialize and influence their parents' sport fandom, 20 sport fan parents were interviewed. Evidence of reverse socialization was found in 15 of the participants, manifesting itself in ways that can be categorized as either developing new or additional fandom, or changing one's behaviors or attitudes towards their existing fandom. However, further exploration of the data suggests that future research reexamine the term "reverse socialization," as we do not see this as a directionality of influence, but as children as socializing agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]