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Taking the Field- Women- Men- and Sports

5 stars (A feminist man who's both smart and honest) - Here are a few of the many reasons I keep reading everything Mike Messner writes: 1) He seems to take the feminist "personal is political" slogan to heart, revealing much more of himself and his own questions and vulnerabilities than most other male writers. 2) He uses both academic and journalistic techniques to research his topics and support his theses. 3) He lacks the arrogance of many experts, retaining an open mind as he delibertely attempts to look at things in original ways. 4) The topic of this book -- and several of his others -- continues to fascinate me. By looking at how we "do gender" in a sporting context, we come to understand so much about how and why any and all women and men behave as we do. Highly recommended. -- Mariah Burton Nelson 5 stars (Putting Sport into the Center of Gender) - USC Sociologist Michael Messner, who has spent the majority of his academic career studying issues of sport, masculinity, and power has written a truly significant book with Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports. The book finds a place for much of his previous research, as well as the research of other gender and sport scholars, to elicit the mechanisms in which gender is produced, reproduced, and contested in sport. The premise of the book holds that gender is a product of structure, culture, and an individual's interactions within culture. This serves as the launching point for a deft discussion of the affects of sport in America. Messner has a talent for seeing the larger picture in seemingly "normal" events, and in Taking the Field he analyzes the affect that "normal" interactions in sport has on the subjugation of women and gay men, and the real and symbolic violence committed against both women and men by men. Messner's work is important to scholars of both sport and gender, but is particularly important to gender scholars who too frequently fail to recognize the power sport, and sport media, has ...
University of Minnesota Press :: Women's Studies - General :: United States :: Sports & Recreation :: Sports :: Sociology :: Social Science :: Sex discrimination in sports :: Sex differences :: Men's :: Taking the Field- Women- Men- and Sports