Women, Sport and Culture - Hardcover

This is the most comprehensive collection of articles available on women, sport, and culture. The book contains 24 selections from various feminist positions that examine sport and its relation to gender issues. Women, Sport and Culture is an excellent reference for anyone interested in gender relations, including sport sociologists, women's studies scholars, and cultural studies specialists. It's also an excellent text for students in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses. Readers will find that the articles in the collection serve as a marker of where feminist sport studies has been as a field and a guidepost for what may be the most promising theoretical directions in the future. Part I introduces and provides an overview of feminist theory as it relates to the study of sport. The articles in the section discuss the complexity of the relations among sport, gender, ideology, bodies, and technology. Part II addresses the gendered organisational order of sport and explores the practices through which women in institutionalised sport are managed. The articles in Part III respond to Kenneth Sheard and Eric Dunning's idea that sport is a "male preserve" - site for the production and reproduction of gendered power relations. The section explores how certain practices associated with sport actively degrade 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 legitimising dominant meanings of sport, women, gendered bodies, and sexuality. Part V looks at heterosexism and homophobia in sport.