A woman's place is in the maul: organizing gender in a United States Rugby Club

Abstract

Throughout its history, rugby has remained primarily a male preserve. In an arena that prides itself on violence, toughness, and overt masculinity, what is a woman's place? Previous research in this area has looked at women in the sport of rugby from primarily sociological or cultural perspectives. Rugby as a sport, however, also operates in the overarching context of rugby as an organization. This study presents a critical feminist study of the Houston Athletic Rugby Club (HARC) as an organization. It is presented as an ethnographic description and analysis based on two years of participant observation from January 2000 to January 2002. This observation data was triangulated by 16 formal interviews and a general artifact analysis. HARC is a mixed-gender rugby club, formed from the merger of three (one women's and two men's) existing clubs. The new club, however, has been unable to harness the expected synergies from the merger and many of the disagreements have been drawn as gender lines. This study revealed the organizational dualities faced by the women rugby players in HARC and looked at the ways in which the women managed those dualities. Dualities are bi-polar opposites that are enacted in organizations. These are not simply alternative choices, but different ends of a continuum of actions or ideologies. Because of their polar opposition, they pull against each other, creating tensions. The women were found to experience three major dualities, each of which was comprised of multiple sub-tensions. The ways in which the women rugby players managed these dualities both contributed to the power imbalances in the organization and simultaneously allowed them to resist the patriarchal power structure and carve out small sites for resistance. These areas of resistance gave the women hope for improvement in the organization and for the growth of women's rugby in Houston.