Taking The Field: Women, Men, and Sports

by Michael A. Messner

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 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.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Sociology, Sports, Gender

263 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[becca ferrell milam · Rating 3 out of 5]

class reading very interesting

[Deb Waterhouse-watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it! Messner really gets to the heart of a lot of the off-field issues with elite sports, through the 'triad of men's violence': against the self, against other men, and against women. He shows how it's not really possible to train someone to only cause pain and injury to others in one context (ie: on the sports field). For many people, if they're trained to hurt others on the field, they'll do so off the field as well. Messner also shows how when male athletes sexalise and objectify women in the context of sport, this encourages them to sexually abuse, degrade, and even rape women. A very insightful work from a sports 'insider'.