Abstract

Book features 24 selections from various feminist positions that examine the relation between sport and gender. The articles serve as a marker of where feminist sport studies has been as a field for theoretical directions in the future. It is organized into five sections: Part I introduces and provides an overview of feminist theories that have examined gender, women, and sport. Part II addresses the gendered organizational order of sport and explores the practices through which women in institutionalized sport are managed. Part III explores how certain practices associated with sport actively degrate women and how women have alternately appropriated and opposed what they perceive to be oppressive and unjust practices. Part IV examines the role of the media in circulating and legitimizing dominant meanings of sport, women, gendered bodies and sexuality. Part V interrogates heterosexism and homophobia in sport. The book contains the following topics: 1. COLE, Ch. L.: Resisting the canon: feminist cultural studies, sport, and technologies of the body; 2. WILLIS, P.: Women in sport in ideology; 3. BRYSON, L.: Sport and the maintenance of masculine hegemony; 4. MESSNER, M. A.: Sports and male domination: the female athlete as contested ideological terrain; 5. HIMES GISSENDANNER, C.: African-American women and competitve sport, 1920-1960; 6. BOUTILIER, M. A.; SanGIOVANNI, L. F.: Politics, public policy, and the Title IX: some limitations of liberal feminism; 7. ACOSTA, R. V.; CARPENTER, L. J.: The status of women in intercollegiate athletics; 8. KNOPPERS, A.: Gender and the coaching profession; 9. BLINDE, E.: Unequal exchange and exploitation in college sport: the case of the female athlete; 10. DAVIS, L.: A postmodern paradox? cheerleaders at women's sporting events; 11. DUNNING, E.: Sport as a male preserve: notes on the social sources of masculine identity and its transformations; 12. THEBERGE, N.: Toward a feminist alternative to sport as a male preserve; 13. WHEATLEY, E. E.: Subcultural subversions: comparing discourses on sexuality in men's and women's rugby songs; 14. THOMPSON, S. M.: Challenging the hegemony: New Zealand women's opposition to rugby and the reproduction of capitalist patriarchy; 15. BIRELL, S.; RICHTER, D. M.: Is a diamond forever? Feminist transformations of sport; 16. DUNCAN, M. C.; MESSNER, M. A. et al: Gender stereotyping in televised sports; 17. McNEILL, M.: Active women, media representations, and ideology; 18. THEBERGE, N.; CRONK, A.: Work routines in newspaper sports departments and the coverage of women's sports; 19. HOLMLUND, Ch. A.: Visible difference and flex appeal: the body, sex, sexuality, and race in the pumping iron films; 20. WILLIAMS, L.: Personal best: women in love; 21. CAHN, S.: Crushes, competition, and closets: the emergence of homophobia in women's physical education; 22. BALSAMO, A.: Feminist bodybuilding; 23. WHITSON, D.: The embodiment of gender: discipline, domination, and empowerment; 24. BIRELL, S.; COLE, Ch.: Double fault: Renee Richards and the construction and naturalization of difference. Lütkens