Taking the field: women, men, and sports

TLDR

Historically, sport has equated masculinity with athletic power and femininity with weakness, but recent inclusion of girls and women has made exclusion subtler yet still effective. Messner argues that despite profound changes, sport largely retains its conservative role in gender relations and investigates this by examining day‑to‑day practices, institutional rules and hierarchies, and dominant symbols transmitted by major sports media. He analyzes gender construction through a soccer opening ceremony for young children, men’s violence in sport, financial interests sustaining the status quo, and televised sports imagery. Messner exposes how practices and ideas both buttress and disrupt the masculine center of sport, revealing subtle and overt ways men and women construct gender through interactions within institutions and symbols.

Abstract

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 girlsOCO and womenOCOs 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 menOCOs violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial interests and dominant menOCOs 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.aTaking 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.