A Performative Feel for the Game: How Meaningful Sports Shape Gender, Bodies, and Social Life

ISBN-13: 9783030351311 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 209 str.

Trygve B. Broch

Recenzje

"I found it to be a challenging read. ... I would encourage anyone with an interest in sport and gender to read this book, challenging as it might be, primarily for the stories about the lives and interactions of the young handball players." (Alan Bairner, idrottsforum.org, June 18, 2020)

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Sport, Meaning and Gender

The challenge of the critical theorist: gender as perspective

Meaning making and sport: play and game theory

What is Handball? A one-stop shop

A cultural sociology of sport: using culture as perspective

Methodology

Outline of the book

Part I

Chapter 2: Media, sport enchantment and gender

This one's for the record books: Game dynamics and story telling

Entering enchantment: Sensing the myth-making vortex

Transcending time and object: Handball and Viking warriors

Chapter 3: Enchanted fusion: bringing together game play and gender

The generative grammar: cognitive simplifications shaping sport

The Bang: codes generating vocabularies and iconic consciousness

The first sex of Norwegian handball: the Iconic Women Warrior

The second sex of Norwegian handball: playing catchup?

Part II

Chapter 4: Socialization, sport felicity and gender

Throwing like a handball girl part I: performances shaping materiality

Throwing like a handball girl part II: sensations of the meaningful universe

Being snill on the handball court: when the match gets underway

The gendered significance of the smile

Chapter 5: Throwing like a handballboy: enchanted flows of power

Re-immersion in youth: teens and parents in dreaming disarray

Agency and choreography: carving out stages for serious play

The size of a handballboy: corporal materiality and meaning

Moral guardian of his rational actors: individual flows in culture

Chapter 6: By way of conclusion

A cultural sociology of sport

O autorze

Trygve B. Broch is Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health and Sport Sciences, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, USA. 

Blurb

"The meaning of sport is gendered—but not always as we might be imagining. A Performative Feel for the Game goes beyond taken-for-granted gender hierarchies. Through a cultural analysis of Norwegian handball, Trygve Broch teaches us how narratives, historical myths and welfare policies intermingle with processes of democratization, showing how sport is not reducible to power and inequality. A multifaceted social and existential sphere is thereby opened up. This is an exciting and intriguing read that will generate a lively debate among sport sociologists."

—Anna Lund, Associate Professor of Sociology, Stockholm University, Sweden

 

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Trygve B. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance. Sports not only reflect or reverse social realities, but capture and keep our attention when we use and experience them as a means to reflect on social life, injustice, and hierarchy. More specifically, blending approaches from media studies with ethnography, Broch explores the women-dominated sport of handball in Norway, a country that considers gender equality a basis of democracy. As such, the analyses here show how broadly available meanings about sameness and equality are mediated and experienced through a performative feel for the game.