Out of Play

Michael A. Messner

Description

2008 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

From beer ads in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue to four-year-old boys and girls playing soccer; from male athletes' sexual violence against women to homophobia and racism in sport, Out of Play analyzes connections between gender and sport from the 1980s to the present. The book illuminates a wide range of contemporary issues in popular culture, children's sports, and women's and men's college and professional sports. Each chapter is preceded by a short introduction that lays out the context in which the piece was written. Drawing on his own memories as a former athlete, informal observations of his children's sports activities, and more formal research such as life-history interviews with athletes and content analyses of sports media, Michael A. Messner presents a multifaceted picture of gender constructed through an array of personalities, institutions, cultural symbols, and everyday interactions.
Foreword by Raewyn Connell
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Gender and Sports

Part I. Sport as a Gender Construction Site

1. Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender

2. Sports and Male Domination: The Female Athlete as Contested Ideological Terrain

Part II. Masculinities: Class, Race, Sexualities

3. Masculinities and Athletic Careers

4. White Men Misbehaving: Feminism, Afrocentrism, and the Promise of a Critical Standpoint

5. Studying Up on Sex

Part III. Bodies and Violence

6. When Bodies Are Weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport

7. Scoring without Consent: Confronting Male Athletes’ Sexual Violence against Women (with Mark Stevens)

Part IV. Gendered Imagery

8. Outside the Frame: Newspaper Coverage of the Sugar Ray Leonard Wife Abuse Story (with William S. Solomon)

9. The Televised Sports Manhood Formula (with Michele Dunbar and Darnell Hunt)

10. This Revolution Is Not Being Televised (with Margaret Carlisle Duncan and Nicole Willms)

11. The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events (with Jeffrey Montez de Oca)

Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791479780
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

out of play

Critical Essays on Gender and Sport

M I C H A E L A . M E S S N E R  Foreword by Raewyn Connell

Out of Play

SUNY series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations CL Cole and Michael A. Messner, editors

Out of Play

Critical Essays on Gender and Sport



Michael A. Messner

Foreword by Raewyn Connell

S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P r e s s

Cover illustration courtesy of Kayann Legg/iStock.photo.com

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2007 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise with out the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu

Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Messner, Michael A. Out of play : critical essays on gender and sport / Michael A. Messner; foreword by Raewyn Connell. p. cm. — (SUNY series in sport, culture, and social relations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–7914–7171–5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978–0–7914–7172–2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sports—Social aspects. 2. Sex role. 3. Masculinity in sports. 4. Sex discrimination in sports. 5. Athletes in mass media. 6. Television and sports. I. Title

GV706.5M46 2007 306.483—dc22

2006101101

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Since this page cannot accommodate all the copyright notices the page that follows constitutes an extensionof the copyright page.

Michael Messner (1988) “Sports and Male Domination: The Female Athlete as Contested Ideological Terrain,”Sociology of Sport Journal5 (3): 197–211. ©1998 by Human Kinetics. Reprinted with Permission from Human Kinetics (Champaign, IL). Michael A. Messner (1989) “Masculinities and Athletic Carrers,”Gender & Society3: 71–88. Reprinted with permission from Sage Publications. Michael A. Messner (1990) “When Bodies Are Weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport,”International Review for the Sociology of Sport25 (3): 203–220. Reprinted with permission from Sage Publications.

Michael A. Messner (1993) “White Men Misbehaving: Feminism, Afrocentrism, and the Promise of a Critical Standpoint,”Journal of Sport and Social Issues16: 136–144. Reprinted with permission from Sage Publications.

Michael A. Messner and William S. Solomon (1993) “Outside the Frame: Newspaper Coverage of the Sugar Ray Leonard Wife Abuse Story,”Sociology of Sport Journal10: 119–134. ©1993 by Human Kinetics. Reprinted with Permission from Human Kinetics (Champaign, IL). Michael A. Messner (1996) “Studying Up On Sex,”Sociology of Sport Journal13: 221–237. Reprinted with Permission from Human Kinetics (Champaign, IL). Michael A. Messner (2000) “Barbie Girls vs. Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender,” Gender & Society 14: 765–784. Reprinted with permission from Sage Publications.

Michael A. Messner, Michele Dunbar and Darnell Hunt (2000) “The Televised Sports Manhood Formula,”Journal of Sport and Social Issues24: 380–394. Reprinted with per mission from Sage Publications.

Michael A. Messner and Jeffrey Montez de Oca (2005) “The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events,”Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society30: 1879–1909. ©2005 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from University of Chicago Press.

Michael A. Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Nicole Willms (2006) “This Revolution Is Not Being Televised,”Contexts: Understanding People in Their Social Worlds.Summer, 2006. Reprinted with permission from the University of California Press.

For Pierrette

Contents

Foreword by Raewyn Connell Acknowledgments Introduction: Gender and Sports Part I. Sport as a Gender Construction Site 1. Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender 2. Sports and Male Domination: The Female Athlete as Contested Ideological Terrain Part II. Masculinities: Class, Race, Sexualities 3. Masculinities and Athletic Careers 4. White Men Misbehaving: Feminism, Afrocentrism, and the Promise of a Critical Standpoint 5. Studying Up on Sex Part III. Bodies and Violence 6. When Bodies Are Weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport 7. Scoring without Consent: Confronting Male Athletes’ Sexual Violence against Women (with Mark Stevens) Part IV. Gendered Imagery 8. Outside the Frame: Newspaper Coverage of the Sugar Ray Leonard Wife Abuse Story (with William S. Solomon) 9. The Televised Sports Manhood Formula (with Michele Dunbar and Darnell Hunt) 10. This Revolution Is Not Being Televised (with Margaret Carlisle Duncan and Nicole Willms) 11. The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events (with Jeffrey Montez de Oca) Bibliography Index List of titles in the SUNY series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations

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ix xiii 1

11

31

47

61 71

91

107

123

139

155

167 197 221

226–227

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Foreword

t’s not often that one author makes fundamental contributions to the I understanding of three major problems that are usually thought about sep arately. Yet that’s what Michael Messner has done in this book. It is a splen did collection of pathbreaking, profound, and passionate research. The first problem is the nature of masculinity. Messner’s early essays on this issue came as something of a bombshell. There wasn’t even a proper research field of “men’s studies” at the time, though the idea had occurred to a few people. There was a good deal of pop psychology in the manasmam mothhunter vein, and a vague discussion of problems about the even vaguer “male role,” but there was very little actual research. Messner practically created the genre of precise, sophisticated lifehis tory research on the construction of masculinity. His pioneering study of the lives of professional athletes, as we see in “Masculinities and Athletic Careers,” negated the idea of a “natural” masculinity. These menworkat making their masculinity, often suffering serious physical damage to do so. Equally important, they don’t do it alone. The kind of masculinity they dis play isn’t just an individual character trait; it’s embedded in the institution they work in. For instance, the competitiveness they display is inherent in the fierce selection pressures that youngsters face as they move from local amateur sport to professional leagues. The violence that many of them dis play is structured into the bodycontact sports, in Messner’s memorable phrase, “When Bodies Are Weapons.” Messner has continued to do important work on the construction of gender, as we see in the charming essay on children and their images. We also see it in the subtle discussion of constructions of masculinity in beer advertising, and in the much blunter account of “televised sports manhood” in the editorial content of sports programming. The contrast between these two cases is extremely interesting, and suggests some of the tensions in repre sentations of manhood that rely, as both advertising and sports commentary do, on public fantasies about gender. Messner’s thinking thus leads to a second major problem, the nature of modern sport and its relationship to other institutions, particularly the media.

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