Sport Men And The Gender Order

This reference uses a relational concept of gender that critically examines and debunks traditional assumptions about men, women, and sport.

The papers in this collection consider how the study of masculinities in sport can be integrated with critical feminist studies, how to deal with the tendency to over-emphasize negative outcomes and the increasing trend to violence in sport.

Based on interviews with a diverse group of former high school, college, and professional athletes, Power at Play examines the important role sports play in defining masculinity for American men.

With contributions from many of the world's leading experts on the sociology of sport, this volume brings together influential articles that confront and illuminate issues of gender and sexuality in sport.

This thoroughly revised collection examines a wide range of gender related issues, all of which contribute to a larger body of knowledge about how gender operates as a key factor in the way sport is played, organized, and funded in Canada.

This is an exciting new edition of R.W. Connell's ground-breaking text, which has become a classic work on the nature and construction of masculine identity. Connell argues that there is not one masculinity, but many different masculinities, each associated with different positions of power. In a world gender order that continues to privilege men over women, but also raises difficult issues for men and boys, his account is more pertinent than ever before. In a substantial new introduction and conclusion, Connell discusses the development of masculinity studies in the ten years since the book's initial publication. He explores global gender relations, new theories, and practical uses of mascunlinity research. Looking to the future, his new concluding chapter addresses the politics of masculinities, and the implications of masculinity research for understanding current world issues. Against the backdrop of an increasingly divided world, dominated by neo-conservative politics, Connell's account highlights a series of compelling questions about the future of human society. This second edition of Connell's classic book will be essential reading for students taking courses on masculinities and gender studies, and will be of interest to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls’ and women’s dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated-and yet, as Michael Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations.To explore the current paradoxes of gender in sport, Messner identifies and investigates three levels at which the "center" of sport is constructed: the day-to-day practices of sport participants, the structured rules and hierarchies of sport institutions, and the dominant symbols and belief systems transmitted by the major sports media. Using these insights, he analyzes a moment of gender construction in the lives of four- and five-year-old children at a soccer opening ceremony, the way men’s violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial interests and dominant men’s investment in maintaining the status quo in the face of recent challenges, and the cultural imagery at the core of sport, particularly televised sports. Through these examinations Messner lays bare the practices and ideas that buttress-as well as those that seek to disrupt-the masculine center of sport. Taking the Field exposes the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which men and women collectively construct gender through their interactions-interactions contextualized in the institutions and symbols of sport.