The Maintenance of Masculinity Among the Stakeholders of Sport

Abstract

Feminist and hegemony theorizing are used to explicate how sport and its ancillary organizations and occupations have managed to reproduce its masculinized nature despite the gains of second wave feminism that characterizes the broader culture. The author shows that contemporary sporting institutions largely originated as a political enterprise to counter the first wave of feminism, and describe how gender-segregation and self-selection permits sports’ gatekeepers to near-exclusively draw upon a relatively homogenous group of hyper-masculine, over-conforming, failed male athletes to reproduce the institution as an extremely powerful gender-regime. The author suggests that, because orthodox notions of masculinity are institutionally codified within sport, it will take more than affirmative action programs to bring gender equality off the pitch; it will also require gender-integration on the pitch.