ABSTRACT
The significance of sport as a key site for the study of gender and gendered practices is widely acknowledged (e.g., Creedon, 2014; Griffin, 2011). Sport is a highly ideological site that remains strongly connected to men and particular forms of masculinity in historical and contemporary U.S. culture, making gender an important component of sport’s ideological focus and impact. Sport is also pervasive; the proliferation of sport as media (i.e., sport-media) over the last 30 years has only increased the centrality and significance of sport as a powerful site for the construction of mainstreamed, hegemonic gender, gendered understandings, values, and identities that impact wider culture. A powerful communicator of gender and gendered values and understandings, sport-media is also particularly acknowledged to be a pivotal site of communicative action (e.g., Creedon, 2014; Wenner, 2014) with newer digital forms contributing to sport as “a global media microcosm communicating gender values” (Creedon, 2014, p. 714). Whannel (2000, p. 293) notes the ideological impact of sport-media as the naturalization of “competitive individualism, local regional and national identities and male superiority.” Nonetheless, while sport-media comprises a substantive site for the study of sport and gender, sport is more widely explored as a multi-level site that has long been associated with men, male identities, masculinity, hypermasculinity, and heroic (male) formations (e.g., Dworkin & Messner, 1999).
