Josh Packard

In addition to my interest in organizational resistance, I’ve been interested for a while now about how people resist the institutions surrounding their ascribed (rather than achieved) statuses (stati?).  I began research with a women’s full-contact football team during my first year in graduate school and I’m happy to report that now, all these many (5) years later, the first paper from this research is being published by Sociological Spectrum.  The paper is titled “Running Off-Tackle Through the Last Bastion: Women and Professional Football.”  It’s based on over two years of observations and a couple dozen in-depth interviews with the team.  In many ways, this lays a lot of the conceptual groundwork for the concept of institutional resistance that I explore in my dissertation.  Of course resisting institutionalized norms and resisting institutionalization are not one in the same thing, but they are certainly closely related.

The abstract is pasted in below, and the full text can be found in the .  If you’re interested in the full paper can be found here in the May-June 2009 issue of Sociological Spectrum.

Running Off-Tackle Through the Last Bastion: Women and Professional Football

Josh Packard

forthcoming in Sociological Spectrum

This paper discusses the mechanisms that must be in place in order for women to successfully resist institutionalized gender norms.  This research draws on over 200 hours of observations and 20 in-depth interviews of women playing full contact football, a sport traditionally dominated by men and firmly planted in the culture of the U.S. as synonymous with masculinity.  Following the work of recent calls by gender scholars to treat gender as a social institution, this research shows that at least four components must be in place for sustained, successful resistance to a social institution.  First, resistance must be a conscious activity.  Second, any resistance must involve engaging in an abnormal activity.  Third, any deviant or abnormal activity must take place in an otherwise legitimate social context.  Finally, as the creation and maintenance of a social institution is an inherently social enterprise, so too is institutional resistance.  This research contributes to scholarship on gender and social institutions by showing some strategies for increasing possibilities for personal expression.