No Taste for Rough-and-Tumble Play

Abstract

This article explores the role of sport in the regulation of boys' gender nonconformity. More specifically, it looks at the way sport contributes to producing the pronounced anti-effeminacy that pervades North American culture. Sport is a huge conceptual category that captures activities as diverse as NFL football, minor league co-ed softball, and recreational jogging. Sport is something people do, and it is something people watch. It produces intense physical pleasures, yet also pain, leading to, for example, three hundred thousand concussions a year in the United States. 1 Sport is promoted as a health-giving leisure-time activity and as a big-money venture with the power to bolster urban economies and foster national pride. It has its own educational institutions, its own media, its own multinational corporations. It takes up a tremendous amount of cultural space, helping to produce and keep in circulation ideas about human physical potential, about what counts as normality, about the relation of the body to gender, race, class, and nation. For this article, the version of sport that concerns me is the mainstream commonsense ideal of sport as a taken-for-granted feature of masculine childhoods. Analytically, I take up this version of sport as not just a form of physical activity but as an ideological discursive formation that helps sustain narrow normative understandings of gender.In popular and professional discourses about effeminacy or sissyness, boys' feelings about sport (and about gym class) and their actual athletic abilities have been represented as both symptoms of abnormality and possible targets of intervention. The assumption has been that knowing something about a boy's feelings for sports tells us considerably more than that about him. Would we say the same of his feelings for math, for solving spatial puzzles, for playing chess, for

‘Everything is said with a smile’: Homonegative speech acts in sport

“…19The injurious nature of these speech acts flowed from the accumulative force over time of dominant discourses about sexuality and gender including heteronormativity and served as resources for the meanings attached to these words. Briefly, these speech acts resonate, especially in sport contexts, because they are embedded in a history in which modern sport was constructed to emphasize specific desirable practices of embodied heteromasculinity (Adams, 2013). Practices associated with weakness such as those attributed to gay men/homosexuality and women/femininity were and continue to be devalued and often form the base for injurious speech acts (e.g.…”

“…The devaluing of what is associated with 'feminine' served as a subtext of many of the homonegative speech acts in this study and supports Pascoe's (2007Pascoe's ( , 2013 contention that research on these speech acts has neglected its gendered content, or rather its femmephobia. Femmephobia, sometimes called effeminephobia, is a disdain for or a systematic devaluation of femininity and reflects misogyny (Adams, 2013;Annes and Redlin, 2012;Hoskin, 2019;Richardson, 2009). If gender equality would be a current dominant discourse in sport then a gay aesthetic that associates specific and bodily enactments with femininity would not be constructed as an insult.…”

“…This gendered subtext of femmephobia and misogyny is strongly embedded in the wider context of sport and its discourses. The norm for valued behaviour continues to be practices associated with desirable sporting heteromasculinities (Adams, 2013). Although those researching these speech acts have described the anti-feminine nature of their content, this normalization of misogyny and how it may be reproduced and embedded in other discourses about sport, such as those about leadership and women in sport, has received relatively little scholarly attention in research.…”

An Alternative Account of Anti-Effeminacy Bias: Reputation Concerns and Lack of Coalitional Value Explain Honor-Oriented Men’s Reluctance to Befriend Feminine Men

“…Many contextual and individual difference factors may magnify men’s bias against feminine men. Several studies showed that anti-effeminacy bias is stronger among men who belong to masculine coalitions or subcultures (e.g., contact sports teams, military, street gangs; Adams, 2013 ; Herek, 1993 ; Lingiardi et al, 2005 ) and who adhere to traditional norms of masculinity (e.g., Keiller, 2010 ; Wilkinson, 2004 ).…”

“The Mother of All Comebacks”

“…Radcliffe continued to run throughout her pregnancies, and in doing so, she was represented as a role model for other pregnant women (McGannon et al, 2012). Her pregnancy and motherhood shifted media discourses away from her status as an elite athlete (Walton, 2010) to her status as a fitness role model (McGannon et al, 2012), underscoring Mary Louise Adams’s observation that “[d]espite huge increases in the numbers of women and girls participating in sport over the past few decades, ‘sport’ has yet to become a gender-neutral noun” (2013, p. 521). In keeping with ideological portrayal of women athletes (Birrell & Theberge, 1994), Torres’s and Radcliffe’s status as mothers is highlighted above their status as elite athletes, reinforcing their motherhood as equal to heterosexuality and womanhood, while also further perpetuating the notion that fitness—not athleticism—equates to womanhood.…”