The Football Wife: Developing a Courtesy Identity

Abstract

Virtually the entire body of scholarly literature on professional sport focuses on athletes themselves, rarely directly considering the impact of sport on the significant others in their lives or the role these significant others play in the career path and decision-making processes of athletes. In recent years, a limited, but growing, body of scholarly literature on athlete’s wives and sport marriages has begun to emerge with respect to American sports. However, little work has been done on the role and experiences of football spouses in the Canadian context. This dissertation focuses on football spouses in the Canadian Football League (CFL). I use an ethnographic approach relying on in-depth interview with football spouses from the CFL to explore how they experience their partners’ football careers, with a focus on their identity construction. I also used participant observation (at training camp and football related events) to gather data and collected and analyzed secondary documents (newspaper articles, blogs, tweets). Working from an interactionist perspective, I offer the empirically grounded concept of a “courtesy identity” to explain how these women confront the challenges of being known through their intimate relationships. I argue that these women are active agents who negotiate how much they are willing to transform themselves to meet the demands of football life. The “football wife” identity is always emerging and changing in response to the messages women receive about being a football wife during their interactions with others (both insiders and outsiders in the social world of the CFL) and as they encounter new situations. I demonstrate this argument by exploring: (a) how these women develop the football wife identity by focusing on their day-to-day private lives; (b) how the spousal subculture helps these women to negotiate the challenges of being a football wife while at the same time creating challenges of its own; and, (c) how football spouses negotiate their husbands’ celebrity status by examining how these women manage their presentation of the football wife identity in public.