Fairness or Possibilities - Equal opportunities in Swedish sports

Sammanfattning: In this thesis I will study and analyze official policy documents from the Swedish Sports Confederation(RF). I will be performing a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) on these documents from a gender theory perspective, also influenced by queer theory. Sports remain one of the most gendered institutions in society. It is the purpose of this study to ascertain the way RF treats gender in its official policy documents. This is important because RF has a very powerful position within Swedish sports, in comparison to other countries, with the power to directly influence and coerce lower level sports organizations to adopt their philosophies. I find in my study that RF hold very naturalist views of gender, that are not in phase with current research being done in the area of gender constructions in sports. That RF is not accepting responsibility in constructing gender and adding to the sexualization of our public spaces. There is a great deal of work put into gender equality within RF, however this work is so far only being done on a very formal level focusing on fairness between groups rather than questioning the construction of these groups. I also try to provide ideas for how RF could try to weaken the strong gender structure of sports.