Contemporary gendered identity." --Book Jacket.

2008 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title From beer ads in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue to four-year-old boys and girls playing soccer; from male athletes' sexual violence against women to homophobia and racism in sport, Out of Play analyzes connections between gender and sport from the 1980s to the present. The book illuminates a wide range of contemporary issues in popular culture, children's sports, and women's and men's college and professional sports. Each chapter is preceded by a short introduction that lays out the context in which the piece was written. Drawing on his own memories as a former athlete, informal observations of his children's sports activities, and more formal research such as life-history interviews with athletes and content analyses of sports media, Michael A. Messner presents a multifaceted picture of gender constructed through an array of personalities, institutions, cultural symbols, and everyday interactions.

Beer, Babes, and Balls explores the increasingly popular genre of sports talk radio and how it relates to contemporary ideas of masculinity. Popular culture plays a significant role in fashioning identities, and sports talk radio both reflects and inspires cultural shifts in masculinity. Through analysis of the content of sports talk radio as well as interviews with radio production staff and audience members, scholar and avid sports talk radio listener David Nylund sheds light on certain aspects of contemporary masculinity and recent shifts in gender and sexual politics. He finds that although sports talk radio reproduces many aspects of traditional masculinity, sexism, racism, and heterosexism, there are exceptions in these discourses. For instance, the most popular national host, Jim Rome, is against homophobia and racism in sport, which indicates that the medium may be a place for male sports fans to discuss gender, race, and sexuality in consequential ways. Nylund concludes that sports talk radio creates a male bonding community that has genuine moments of intimacy and connection, signifying the potential for new forms of masculinity to emerge, while simultaneously reproducing traditional forms of masculinity.

The Professionalisation of Women’s Sport draws upon the expertise of a range of scholars from the fields of sport sociology, sport history, sport economics to critically discuss the complex and often fragmented histories of women’s involvement in professional sport.

This book approaches the study of mental illness in sport cultures from a variety of social scientific perspectives. Contributions focus on the multiple manifestations of mental illness within sport cultures, and the degree to which sport may be utilized as a means of helping people who struggle with mental illness.

This volume is a collection of works from both expert and emerging scholars with an empirical focus on case studies and ‘real-world’ examples in the sociological study of sport and alcohol that would appeal to a global audience. Implications drawn from the chapters in the book will offer new insights and critiques on the sport-alcohol nexus.

Citizenship has become a widely significant and hotly contested academic concept. Though the term may seem obvious, citizenship carries a range of subtle social and political meanings. This volume explores citizenship as it relates to sport, on the micro and macro level of analysis and in a variety of geo-political contexts. Citizenship is a central organizing principle of international competition such as the Olympic Games. Furthermore, sport is used to teach, symbolize and perform citizenship. While related to national identity, citizenship pertains more precisely to how citizens are legally and politically recognized by the state and how citizens engage within the nation state. This volume traces the roots of discourses on citizenship before illustrating a variety of ways in which citizenship and sport impinge upon each other in contemporary contexts. This bookw as published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Looking toward a future with increasingly hybridized media offerings, Sports Media: Transformation, Integration, Consumption examines sports media scholarship and its role in facilitating understanding of the increasingly complex world of sports media. Acknowledging that consumer demand for sports media content has influenced nearly every major technology innovation of the past several decades, chapters included herein assess existing scholarship while positing important future questions about the role sports media will play in the daily lives of sports fans worldwide. Contributions from well-known scholars are supplemented by work from younger researchers doing new work in this area. Developed for the Broadcast Education Association's Electronic Media Research series, this volume will be required reading for graduate and undergraduate students in media, communication, sociology, marketing, and sports management, and will serve as a valuable reference for future research in sports media.

This volume unpicks mega-events as gendered entities and showcases how they both position athletes in relation to one of two binary sex positions and also push the boundaries of what we see and accept as a recognisably gendered male or female body.

Rethinking Drinking and Sport examines the complex nature of sport-related drinking. With close attention to the contradictory nature of sport-related drinking, this book considers both 'the problem' of drinking in sport, as well as some of the issues for treatment and recovery that sports-related drinking presents. Bringing together a range of methodological and theoretical debates that address the relationships between alcohol and sport, Rethinking Drinking and Sport draws on rich new interview material with fans and both drinking and non-drinking sportsmen and women, as well as documentary and media sources. Based on research across a variety of sports in the UK and Australia, Rethinking Drinking and Sport explores not only the relationship between alcohol, fans, participants and industry, but also questions of gender and identity to provide fresh insights into the complex relationships between drinking and sport. Examining possible directions for health and public policy in relation to sport-related drinking, this book will appeal to social scientists and policy makers with interests in consumption, leisure, sport, drinking, and health.