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Sportsex
Describes how people perform their sexual identities as athletes and spectators.
200 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2002
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19 people want to read
About the author
Toby Miller
82 books8 followersChair of the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at University of California, Riverside. His research interests include film and TV, radio, new media, class, gender, race, sport, cultural theory, citizenship, social theory, cultural studies, political theory, cultural labor, and cultural policy. He is editor of Television & New Media and Social Identities, editor of the book series Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Lang); he has also been chair of the International Communication Association Philosophy of Communication Division; editor of Journal of Sport & Social Issues; and co-editor of Social Text, the Blackwell Cultural Theory Resource Centre, and the book series Sport and Culture (Minnesota) Film Guidebooks (Routledge) and Cultural Politics (Minnesota). Miller has taught media and cultural studies across the humanities and social sciences at the following schools: University of New South Wales, Griffith University, Murdoch University, and NYU.
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December 25, 2011
Sport is closely woven into established gender identities and practices – we need look no further than the amount of media coverage men and women athletes get, the cover-up of sexual abuse by athletes and other sports figures (as exposed recently by the Penn State sexual abuse scandal) or the active denigration of women as well as non-heteronormative male sexualities to see that specific gender identities and forms are validated by normalised sports practice. That this is the case is hardly controversial, but how it is the case is a much more difficult question and the one that Miller sets out to explore in extremely good short book much of which is reworked and repackaged from scholarly papers published elsewhere (and I must confess two of which were co-written with a very dear friend and colleague with whom I am also currently writing).
Three chapters are extremely useful, exploring the articulations of sporting bodies, nations and media, the sense of panic in sports orthodoxies resulting from problematic racialised male bodies and the ways in which dominant sport forms relate to and deal with the challenges to gender orthodoxies resulting from out athlete lesbians. When linked these three chapters along with the conclusion exploring contemporary forms of sporting heteronormativities and its accessible styke, critical and insightful analyses make this a vital text.
What for me makes it really stand out, however, is the chapter exploring the commodification of the male body and the ways that this challenges some of the taken for granted models of gender analyses that have traction in sport studies. As elsewhere in the social sciences, Raewyn (R W) Connell’s notion of a gender order with a form of hegemonic masculinity at its apex is widely accepted and deployed, even if in a modified form, in analyses of sport-gender relations. There is an elegance and clarity about Connell’s model – it is rich, allows the exploration of complexity and intricate social dynamics, is relational so genders and gender changes are defined and explored in relation to each other and not as some fixed thing, and for the most part it helps explore and explain the manufacture and maintenance of gender relations in one of their most important social sites – sport.
Miller’s case against hegemonic masculinity is two-fold: first, that all too often the notion of hegemony derived from Gramsci is used as if it explains everything – I am not sure that this is the case for Connell, her work seems more subtle than that, but in the absence of nuances derived from Gramsci’s notions of wars of movement and wars of position hegemony theory does have a tendency to ‘everythingism’ (in the words of Hobsbawm about rational choice Marxism).
Miller’s more important critique is his second, where he argues convincingly that the commodification of the male body since the mid 1990s – obvious for instance in emergence of meterosexuality – requires several crucial changes in how we understand ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This is not just a change in the terms and forms of masculinities, but in the character of ‘hegemony’ and social power and dominance. He doesn’t reject to model outright, or pose a new notion of hegemonic masculinity, but argues that a form of masculinity emerging in sport seems to rely on both “industrial precision” in sports performance and “gay abandon” in masculine image (with all the multiplicities of ‘gay’) suggesting that the forms and terms of commodification of male bodies challenge taken-for-granted ideas about stereotyping as inevitable and require that we as scholars think and revisit the politics of looking and the gaze (p78). It is this latter issue of the gaze/looking that is, in many ways, the more challenging – so much of our approaches to looking are grounded in psychoanalytic film theory and centre of men’s gaze at women rather than men’s (and women’s) gaze at men. The theoretical and conceptual challenges are enormous – but ones that since the book came out in 2002 have begun, slowly, and have started to move beyond the postmodern obfuscations of early queer theory, where the most productive work on men-looking-at-men emerged.
It is this challenge to hegemonic masculinity (and note – not written with my friend and colleague!) that makes this book so useful and important beyond sports studies, and makes it a productive precursor to David Coad’s 2008 book The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). It is also this challenge that shows us why Miller is one of the most insightful and important analysts we have in the field.
Three chapters are extremely useful, exploring the articulations of sporting bodies, nations and media, the sense of panic in sports orthodoxies resulting from problematic racialised male bodies and the ways in which dominant sport forms relate to and deal with the challenges to gender orthodoxies resulting from out athlete lesbians. When linked these three chapters along with the conclusion exploring contemporary forms of sporting heteronormativities and its accessible styke, critical and insightful analyses make this a vital text.
What for me makes it really stand out, however, is the chapter exploring the commodification of the male body and the ways that this challenges some of the taken for granted models of gender analyses that have traction in sport studies. As elsewhere in the social sciences, Raewyn (R W) Connell’s notion of a gender order with a form of hegemonic masculinity at its apex is widely accepted and deployed, even if in a modified form, in analyses of sport-gender relations. There is an elegance and clarity about Connell’s model – it is rich, allows the exploration of complexity and intricate social dynamics, is relational so genders and gender changes are defined and explored in relation to each other and not as some fixed thing, and for the most part it helps explore and explain the manufacture and maintenance of gender relations in one of their most important social sites – sport.
Miller’s case against hegemonic masculinity is two-fold: first, that all too often the notion of hegemony derived from Gramsci is used as if it explains everything – I am not sure that this is the case for Connell, her work seems more subtle than that, but in the absence of nuances derived from Gramsci’s notions of wars of movement and wars of position hegemony theory does have a tendency to ‘everythingism’ (in the words of Hobsbawm about rational choice Marxism).
Miller’s more important critique is his second, where he argues convincingly that the commodification of the male body since the mid 1990s – obvious for instance in emergence of meterosexuality – requires several crucial changes in how we understand ‘hegemonic masculinity’. This is not just a change in the terms and forms of masculinities, but in the character of ‘hegemony’ and social power and dominance. He doesn’t reject to model outright, or pose a new notion of hegemonic masculinity, but argues that a form of masculinity emerging in sport seems to rely on both “industrial precision” in sports performance and “gay abandon” in masculine image (with all the multiplicities of ‘gay’) suggesting that the forms and terms of commodification of male bodies challenge taken-for-granted ideas about stereotyping as inevitable and require that we as scholars think and revisit the politics of looking and the gaze (p78). It is this latter issue of the gaze/looking that is, in many ways, the more challenging – so much of our approaches to looking are grounded in psychoanalytic film theory and centre of men’s gaze at women rather than men’s (and women’s) gaze at men. The theoretical and conceptual challenges are enormous – but ones that since the book came out in 2002 have begun, slowly, and have started to move beyond the postmodern obfuscations of early queer theory, where the most productive work on men-looking-at-men emerged.
It is this challenge to hegemonic masculinity (and note – not written with my friend and colleague!) that makes this book so useful and important beyond sports studies, and makes it a productive precursor to David Coad’s 2008 book The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...). It is also this challenge that shows us why Miller is one of the most insightful and important analysts we have in the field.
Displaying 1 of 1 review