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A Successful Failure? Troubling the Road to the NWHL and Professional Women's Hockey

The Professionalisation of Women’s Sport

ISBN: 978-1-80043-197-3, eISBN: 978-1-80043-196-6

Publication date: 20 September 2021

Abstract

In recent decades, significant advances have been made at both the grassroots and professional levels of women's ice hockey in North America. Yet, despite recent achievements, such as the establishment of ‘professional’ leagues, and compelling narratives of progress, athletes and league organisers still face significant challenges. The barriers women face, such as reduced access to resources and opportunity, lack of legitimacy, and league instability, and a continued reliance on relationships with men's sporting leagues, such as the National Hockey League, suggest that women's ice hockey is accommodated into the game in ways that reinforce and perpetuate systems of gender, reproducing a neoliberal notion of failure. Using Halberstam's (2011) notion of failure as the place from which reform and transformation can take place, we offer a critical reading of the (re)formation of the National Women's Hockey League and the developments in women's (semi)professional ice hockey in North America.

Keywords

Citation

Leavitt, S. and Adams, C. (2021), "A Successful Failure? Troubling the Road to the NWHL and Professional Women's Hockey", Bowes, A. and Culvin, A. (Ed.) The Professionalisation of Women’s Sport (Emerald Studies in Sport and Gender), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 71-86. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-196-620211005

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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