Skating Utopia: The Queer, Imaginative Potentialities of Women’s Hockey Literature
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Authors
Ryan, Jamie
Date
2025-07-03
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Women's hockey literature , Women's hockey , Hockey literature , Hockey , Queer Theory , Utopia , Canadian literature
Alternative Title
Abstract
The popularity and visibility of women’s stand-up hockey has grown rapidly in recent years, but the women’s game is rarely the focus of sociological or literary studies of the sport. Drawing from Sports Sociology, Utopian Studies, Gender Studies, and Queer Theory, this dissertation explores the utopian potentialities of women’s stand-up hockey literature. My project begins by examining depictions of girl hockey players and women in men’s stand-up hockey literature, exposing how hockey narratives often misogynistically ignore the feminist demands of women and girl characters in order further to reify the heteropatriarchy of dominant men’s hockey culture. I argue that women’s stand-up hockey literature refuses a present that is hostile and toxic to women and 2SLGBTQIA+ people while also anticipating a queer community that extends into the future, which, in dominant hockey culture and literature, is a realm imagined almost exclusively in white heteropatriarchal terms. This project also complicates the utopianism of the lesbian hockey romance genre, which is the most popular subgenre of women’s stand-up hockey literature, by discussing how these novels often favour homonormativity and neoliberal individualism at the expense queerer, more communal politics. The key goals of this dissertation are (i) to explore how women’s stand-up hockey literature presents alternative visions of the sport that challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions of dominant men’s stand-up hockey culture, and (ii) to encourage a queer fugitive futurity that imagines beyond the here and now and works towards a future where hockey is safer and more accessible, and in which people can “bring their full selves into the dressing room” and the arena (McKegney et al. 32).