Fashion and Football: Exploring the Performance of Gender in College Football

Within the Southeast Conference (SEC), the presentation of social pleasantries and gender norms intersect with the pageantry of college football and provides a platform for a traditional gender norms to prosper. In a sport of brutal nature associated with masculinity, it is contradictory to see those in attendance donning formal wear. Extending upon research of fandom and the feminization of fandom, this research explores the performance of gender at SEC football games as shared on social media. The frameworks used and explored to contextualize the behaviors of wearing formal clothes to football games were hegemonic masculinity, the female apologetic, and gender performativity. Employing a directed content analysis of all 16 SEC team’s football Instagram accounts, I analyzed the fans pictured on these accounts and how their appearances aligned with the definition of The Southern Lady. By examining over 11,000 posts from the 2024 football season, I found that a majority of the fans posted were men, but of the times women were posted 68% of the time they were performing gender concurrent with the definition of The Southern Lady. Along with women who showed overt signs of hyperfeminity, there were a group of women present in the data set who mixed femininity with masculinity in their appearances, thus a new type of Southern Lady, the Post-Feminist Southern Lady was discovered. The overall adherence to stringent gender norms is being reproduced by the media as it is the content that is cultivated and shared among the SEC football Instagram accounts.