WNBA and Other Women's Basketball News

It’s a smart piece that I thinks balances the sporting side with the romance novel side in an interesting way:

The "WNBA" half of "WNBA romance" is admittedly what brought me to Rooting Interest, but it was easy to see what might bind fans of romance novels and fans of women's basketball, both of whom have long suffered from misogyny's shell shock: There's the same unease with mainstream dissection, a hard-earned wariness of outsiders, a propensity to overexplain ourselves, and a booming cottage industry of TikTok edits. The two can also feel like optimistic projects themselves. In a 2018 essay about romance in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cailey Hall writes that by "depict[ing] relationships that involve negotiation and growth," the genre tends to model "a kind of personal, sexual, and professional fulfillment that does not feel like an unattainable fantasy."

I've been thinking lately about the WNBA in these terms; on a basketball court, that model of fulfillment is close and embodied. Space is meant to be taken up. Where else in women's lives does the winner get to say "too small"? In dozens of cities, you can sling back cocktails called "The Title IX" or "The Ice Princess" while you watch a women's basketball game. The sport's boom has felt a little like the fantasy that once seemed unattainable. Citing the literary critic Northrop Frye, Hall considers that romance might be engaged in a kind of "imaginative opposition" to the literary establishment. The many people who have turned to the WNBA, seeking something they have not found in men’s sports, invite a natural comparison. Being a WNBA fan may represent a similar kind of "opposition."