ABSTRACT
Michael Messner’s prolific scholarship has most extensively articulated commercial sport as a dangerous gender construction site. For example, he argues football has played a significant role in gender ideology in the context of historically powerful feminist movements challenging male power. Messner also highlights how commercial sports culture produces gender norms that are designed for the dominance of the (cis) male body. As a contrasting example, top women historically have several times broken men’s swimming records crossing the English channel, a sport where a different ratio of body fat and muscle is an advantage. As arguably “the most popular and powerful programming of any kind”, football spectatorship registers the psychic complexity and ambivalence of US mass culture, as it operates within the political, social, and economic systems. A cultural studies reading of football spectatorship needs to account for the white gaze, even as the diverse meanings of football spectatorship cannot be collapsed or owned by the white gaze.
