Explore the vast range of titles available.

Leslie Heywood and Shari L. Dworkin examine the role of empowered female athletes in American popular culture through interviews with girls and boys; readings of ad campaigns by Nike, Reebok, and others; discussions of movies like Fight Club and Girlfight; and explorations of their own sports experiences. Important, refreshing, and engrossing, Built to Win examines sport in all its complexity.

Michael Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations. Sport and Culture Series, volume 4 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Outstanding Book Award winner

Although the impact of the bicycle craze of the late nineteenth century on women’s lives has been well documented, rarely have writers considered the role of women’s rhetorical agency in the transformation of bicycle culture and the bicycle itself. In Claiming the Bicycle , Sarah Hallenbeck argues that through their collective rhetorical activities, women who were widely dispersed in space, genre, and intention negotiated what were considered socially acceptable uses of the bicycle, destabilizing cultural assumptions about femininity and gender differences.   Hallenbeck describes the masculine culture of the “Ordinary” bicycle of the 1880s and the ways women helped bring about changes in this culture; asserts that women contributed to bicycle design, helping to produce the more gender-neutral “Safety” bicycle in response to discourse about their needs; and analyzes women writers’ uses of the new venue of popular magazines to shape a “bicycle girl” ethos that prompted new identities for women. The author considers not only how technical documents written by women bicyclists encouraged new riders to understand their activity as transforming gender definitions but also how women used bicycling as a rhetorical resource to influence medical discourse about their bodies.   Making a significant contribution to studies of feminist rhetorical historiography, rhetorical agency, and technical communication, Claiming the Bicycle asserts the utility of a distributed model of rhetorical agency and accounts for the efforts of widely dispersed actors to harness technology in promoting social change. 

When sports fans turn on the television or radio today, they undoubtedly find more women on the air than ever before. Nevertheless, women sportscasters are still subjected to gendered and racialized mistreatment in the workplace and online and are largely confined to anchor and sideline reporter positions in coverage of high-profile men's sports. In On the Sidelines Guy Harrison weaves in-depth interviews with women sportscasters, focus groups with sports fans, and a collection of media products to argue that gendered neoliberalism-a cluster of exclusionary twenty-first-century feminisms-maintains this status quo. Spinning a cohesive narrative, Harrison shows how sportscasting's dependence on gendered neoliberalism broadly places the onus on women for their own success despite systemic sexism and racism. As a result, women in the industry are left to their own devices to navigate double standards, bias in hiring and development for certain on-air positions, harassment, and emotional labor. Through the lens of gendered neoliberalism, On the Sidelines examines each of these challenges and analyzes how they have been reshaped and maintained to construct a narrow portrait of the ideal neoliberal female sportscaster. Consequently, these challenges are taken for granted as \"natural,\" sustaining women's marginalization in the sportscasting industry.

Drawing on the works of postcolonial critical feminist and Arab Muslim feminist scholars, we discuss in this paper how 4 muslim girls (ages 14-17 years) negotiated their participation in opportunities for physical activity. Data collection methods included self-mapping questionnaires, digital photos, private journal entries, and recordings of informal conversations. We discuss (a) how three discursive challenges emerged in veiling-off opportunities for physical activity, and (b) how the girls uncovered alternative ways of being physically active. To promote active life practices with muslim girls, we need to (a) navigate the diversity of young muslims within the intersecting discourses in their lives that potentially challenge their participation in physical activities, and (b) honor young muslims' choices while negotiating their chances of maintaining physical activities.

This study used hegemonic masculinity theory to examine the intersection of masculinities and school physical education from the perspectives of boys who embodied masculinities that were marginalized. Over a 13-week period using present-focused, student-centered, qualitative methodological approaches, the authors observed, interviewed, and worked in small groups with 5 middle school boys from two schools. The authors identified three significant themes that merge the stories and experiences of masculinity hierarchies in sport-based physical education. First, the authors found that four social practices (content, pedagogies, teacher-student relationships, and peer cultures) in these physical education settings privileged some masculinities over others. Second, the authors examined the role that embodiment played, both in how the boys wore their oppression and in how their bodies resisted marginalizing situations. Third, the authors describe the contrasts these boys drew between physical activities experienced in sport-based physical education and physical activity experiences in other areas of their lives. The authors used Connell and Messerschmidt's (2005) reconceptualization of the theory of hegemonic masculinity for understanding how competitive sport-based physical education functioned to oppress boys with masculinities that were deemed abnormal. Additionally, the authors introduce feminist poststructuralism as a possible theoretical lens for interpreting boys' bodies as also being active agents in social practices rather than being only passive objects who are oppressed and dominated. Verf.-Referat (geändert).

The typical female sports fan remains very different from her male counterparts. In their insightful and engaging book,Sportista, Andrei S. Markovits and Emily Albertson examine the significant ways many women have become fully conversant with sports-acquiring a knowledge of and passion for them as a way of forging identities that until recently were quite alien to women. Sportista chronicles the relationship that women have developed with sports in the wake of the second wave of feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The changes women athletes have achieved have been nothing short of revolutionary. But, as Markovits and Albertson argue, women's identities as sports fans, though also changed in recent decades, remain notably different from that of men.Sportista highlights the impediments to these changes that women have faced and the reality that, even as bona fide fans, they \"speak\" sports differently from and remain largely unaccepted by men. In the series Politics, History and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey

Drawing on feminist, critical, and poststructural theories, the purpose of this research was: (a) to understand fifth-grade mestizas self-identified barriers to physical activity, and (b) to work with them to develop strategies for challenging these barriers. Data were collected over the 2005-06 school year. Our interpretations are divided into three sections: (a) the barriers the girls identified to their physical activity participation; (b) how we worked with them to study their primary self-identified barrier to physical activity-\"the boy's won't let us play;\" and (c) how we refocused our research to help the girls publicize their barrier to challenge the inequities in physical activity at their school.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the experiences of former female coaches and their decision to terminate their careers. A feminist perspective and mixed-methods (surveys and interviews) were used to allow for a richer understanding of their experiences. The survey findings, which included 121 former female coaches, suggest that time and family commitments were the main reasons they left coaching. Also, a small number (18%) left coaching for reasons such as opportunity for promotion. Six women from the survey sample were individually interviewed. Through a descriptive analytic strategy and indexing process (Creswell, 1998), three general themes emerged: (a) gender disparities in women's work, (b) technical demands of coaching, and (c) college coaching and normalized sexualities. Overall, the interview findings confirmed the open-ended responses on the survey and described gender discrimination, the centrality of male coaches, and rampant homophobia in U.S. collegiate coaching. In addition, some female coaches discussed perceptions of conflict between working as a coach and motherhood, or women with children as being \"distracted\" by motherhood. Collectively, the survey and interview results revealed that women have multiple, complex, and overlapping reasons for leaving collegiate coaching.