NOTES ON UNIT 1 INTRODUCTION:
-In America, sport is a pervasive phenomena that represents cultural ideas of success and teamwork. Within the greater concept of American sports, there lies individual sports which have more specific groups of fans, criteria for acceptance, all of which are often ever changing yet lie within a traditional narrative of the the American dream.
-Individual sports and teams often encourage the idea of collective thinking in order to successfully accomplish goals or win games. This group thinking of sorts fosters more general ideas of gender expectations.
-The popularity of sports in mainstream American culture is due to mass media promotion, winning being rewarded, popularity being valued, entertainment, an escape from daily life, the ability to live vicariously through other people, and being a representation of physical excellence and ideals.
-Sports teams in theory appear to foster sportsmanship, self confidence, definition and understanding of authority, and the ability to work well with others.
-Sports are highly connected to American social interactions in that many people plan parties around games, participate in fantasy games with friends, people feel connected to others through supporting a team based on player's, location, symbols, costumes, colors, and casual conversation between people in day to day lives about scores and various sports related subjects.
-Although there are close to 7 million high school athletes, the chance of becoming a professional athlete are extremely slim with around 800 people involved in the Olympics.
Sports often foster unrealistic ideas and expectations of star players who are valued as unflawed heros.
-Sports provide heteronormative concepts of life and life goals that ultimately affect ideas of “norms”, treatment of women, and overall social construction and understanding of gender, sex, and identity.
-Women in sports are often stereotyped as emotional and weak and are often perceived as participating in certain more “feminine sports” where they are judged on appearance over ability and exploited through objectification. This idea is furthered by overarching ideas of gender roles in American society.
-Consumer culture is a gigantic part of the pervasiveness of sports culture in America and it is important for us to be able to disassemble the gender roles, messages, and dominant social construction we are fed through advertising.
-Sports media and mainstream sports culture provide an emphasis on the important and dominance of male athletes and help to perpetuate the idea that men are overall more physically capable that women. It is important to challenge the greater accepted ideas of gender abilities that reproduce discrimination against non male assigned genders in order to expand sport ideas of success.
Scholarly Research Analysis Protocol
Instructions: While reading the assigned text, answer the questions below in the space provided.
Please use direct excerpts from the text whenever possible in your responses.
What structural features define this text as falling within the genre of scholarly/ academic writing? (Create a bulleted list.)
-the title of the piece emphasizes that gender and cheerleading were studied in order to bring about answers to scholarly questions
-the entire first paragraph outlines the intentions of the piece
-the information in the article is based upon interviews and five years of field work on cheerleaders sites
-the piece examines the historical gender developments of cheerleading to fully understand the gender politics and state of cheerleading today
What is the argument statement of this text? (Write one sentence.)
“This paper draws upon ethnographic data to argue that cheerleading, particularly coed
college cheerleading, provides a powerful lens through which to examine the relational construction of gender and sexuality in both sport and in society at large”. (501)
Identify the jargon of this text. [Jargon is specialized terminology characteristic of a particular discipline or area of theory.] (Use bullets.)
- gender
-sport
-hegemonic masculinity
-emphasized femininity
-performance
-gender regime
What are five statements that the author uses to support the argument statement? Use only direct excerpts; frame them with quotation marks, and note the page number.
1) “If sport is an arena in which men express and sustain hegemonic masculinity, cheerleading
is said to embody the qualities associated with “emphasized femininity” (Connell 1987), notably supportiveness, enthusiasm, and sexual attractiveness (see Kurman 1986)”. (500)
2) “Likewise, people do not simply
import their gendered selves into neutral institutions; rather, institutions are themselves gendered (Acker 1990; Connell 1987; Lorber 1994; Messner 2002). Sport has been one of the most
masculine of institutions, and despite recent gains by women, it is still largely organized by and
for men”. (501)
3)“Feminine” sports mesh neatly with taken for-granted assumptions that women are “naturally” smaller, slower, and weaker than men but
more graceful, flexible, and inclined toward aestheticized or sexualized bodily display—
assumptions that work to suppress the actual gender diversity that exists in sport (see Cahn
1994; Kane 1995; Lenskyj 1986). However, sport is far from coterminous with hetero-masculinity
and the “female athlete” is no longer an oxymoron but an increasingly visible cultural icon (see
Heywood and Dworkin 2003)”. (501)
4) “The richness of cheerleading for sociological analysis stems less from the way cheerleading “fixes” gendered
meanings once and for all than for the way it negotiates contested terrain and transgresses a
series of gendered boundaries, notably those between sport and performance, athletics and
aesthetics, and competitiveness and supportiveness”. (501)
5) “Rather, it is an activity
where the very terms of femininity and masculinity are constructed and worked through
side-by-side, and the question of what is “emphasized” (or hegemonic) along the way is a
matter of empirical investigation”. (501)
6) “For cheerleaders themselves, the question of whether college cheerleading is a sport, or
ought to be classified as a sport, is a complicated one because of the diverse ways that people
define sport, the diversity of school cheer squads that exist (coed versus all-girl, competitive
versus sideline), the disparate ways that individual schools classify and treat cheerleading,
13 and the difference between believing cheerleading to be a sport and wanting it to be “officially”
recognized as such by the NCAA”. (505)
What values or views were represented in the message? (Write no more than three sentences.)
By researching and evaluating hegemonic masculinity in sport institutions and culture alongside emphasized femininity in cheerleading, we are able to understand the gender dynamics that have led to the discriminatory idea that cheerleading to not be considered a sport by mainstream culture.
Learning Module for Unit 1
What are the Social Intersections of Gender and Sport?
Through historical analysis of the history of men and sports, it could be suggested that sports have developed in a way that allowed men to group together and dominate women. Because of this, women's participation in sports in could be seen by men as a challenge to the male domination they are use to having throughout society.
In What Ways Do Dominant Definitions of Gender Influence our Enjoyment of Professional Sports?
Gender construction and deep seated misogyny in media coverage of sports tends to perpetuate the idea that men are better, faster, and more interesting athletes than women. Media tends to cover more “female” related sports like figure skating and gymnastic, “sports” that often show women in form fitting outfits where they are judged on their appearance along with their performance.
How can Sports be a Mechanism to Improve Society around Gender Issues?
When considering social change in relation to sports, it is important that we are able to understand the social construction of gender which has now become a norm and keep in mind that as individuals, our critical thinking skills can help us to challenge oppressive practices and the status quo.
How can Scholarly Research Inform our Meaning-Making around Gender and Sport?
Scholarly research digs deep into the perpetuates gender inequalities of sport in order to achieve a fuller understanding of the issues through tools like statistical analysis and reading through primary source documents.
What are the Dominant Cultural Constructions of Sporting Masculinity?
The dominant cultural constructions of sporting masculinity include physical strength, ability to dominate competition in games (and often times women as well), “manliness”, being tough, and being genetically male.
