Michael Messner

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Sociology

For 3 decades we have tracked and analyzed the quantity and quality of coverage of women’s and men’s sports in televised news and highlights shows. In this paper, we report on our most recent iteration of the longitudinal study, which now includes an examination of online sports newsletters and social media. The study reveals little change in the q...

In just a few decades, sport has undergone a radical gender transformation. However, Cheryl Cooky and Michael A. Messner suggest that the progress toward gender equity in sports is far from complete. The continuing barriers to full and equal participation for young people, the far lower pay for most elite-level women athletes, and the continuing de...

This article draws upon data collected as part of a 25-year longitudinal analysis of televised coverage of women’s sports to provide a window into how sexism operates during a postfeminist sociohistorical moment. As the gender order has shifted to incorporate girls’ and women’s movement into the masculine realm of sports, coverage of women’s sports...

How do men respond to feminist movements and to shifts in the gender order? In this paper, I introduce the concept of historical gender formation to show how shifting social conditions over the past forty years shaped a range of men's organized responses to feminism. Focusing on the US, I show how progressive men reacted to feminism in the 1970s by...

Is sport good for kids? When answering this question, both critics and advocates of youth sports tend to fixate on matters of health, whether condemning contact sports for their concussion risk or prescribing athletics as a cure for the childhood obesity epidemic. Child’s Play presents a more nuanced examination of the issue, considering not only t...

The last quarter century has seen a dramatic movement of girls and women into sport, but this social change is reflected unevenly in sports media. This study, a 5-year update to a 25-year longitudinal study, indicates that the quantity of coverage of women’s sports in televised sports news and highlights shows remains dismally low. Even more so tha...

PurposeThis chapter introduces a conceptual schema with which the authors chart the historical trajectory of four realms of feminist antiviolence efforts in the United States, describing strains and tensions between and within each realm, with a particular focus on the efficacy of violence prevention. Design/methodology/approachWe draw on feminist...

Five experts, Lisa Wade, Brian Sweeney, Amelia Seraphia Derr, Michael A. Messner, and Carol Burke, discuss how institutions deal with sexual assault and whether or not policies really protect victims.

Huge numbers of children participate in sports. However, kids and sports are rarely seen, much less systematically studied by sport sociologists. Our survey of the past decade of three major sport sociology journals illustrates a dearth of scholarly research on children and sport. While noting the few exceptions, we observe that sport studies schol...

One of the long-standing trends in research on gender in sports media is the lack of coverage of women’s sport and the lack of respectful, serious coverage of women’s sport. In this article, we critically interrogate the assumption that the media simply provide fans with what they “want to see” (i.e., men’s sports). Using quantitative and qualitati...

Shock jock radio by its very nature involves the creation of spectacle through outrageous utterances that simultaneously reinforce and resist dominant norms (Nylund, 2007). Self-proclaimed media “bad boy” Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University Scarlett Knights, National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) women's basketball championship...

In this essay, Michael Messner focuses on a key part of a broader research agenda on gender and sport and reflects on the context and meanings of media characterizations of men and masculinities in the sport setting. The first part of the essay focuses on how one’s core identity as a male who grew up experiencing understandings of sport through the...

By the mid-Twentieth Century in the U.S., a dominant ideology of natural, categorical differences between women and men was an organic part of the unequal distribution of women and men into domestic and public realms, especially in middle class families. Sport was a key site for the naturalization of this ideology, which! call "hard essentialism."...

A scholarly literature on the intersectional realities of race, class, gender, and sexual privilege exists, but professors often struggle with how to teach it, especially given our own (often) privileged positions. Here, the author describes how he uses self-reflexive story-telling as a point of entre to encourage students to think about their own...

Using intersectionality and hegemony theory, we critically analyze mainstream print news media's response to Don Imus' exchange on the 2007 NCAA women's basketball championship game. Content and textual analysis reveals the following media frames: "invisibility and silence" " controlling images versus women's self-definitions"and, " outside the fra...

Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1. "It's All for the Kids": Gender, Families, and Youth Sports 2. "Looking for a Team Mom": Separating the Men from the Moms 3. "We Don't Like Chick Coaches": Women at the Helm 4. "You Don't Have to be a Drill Sergeant": Men at the Helm 5. "They're Different-and They're Born Different": Engendering the Kids 6....

Today, in a world quite different from the one that existed just thirty years ago, both girls and boys play soccer, baseball, softball, and other youth sports. Yet has the dramatic surge in participation by girls contributed to greater gender equality? In this engaging study, leading sociologist Michael A. Messner probes the richly complex gender d...

Based on a multiyear study, this article analyzes the reproduction of adult gender segregation in two youth-sports organizations in which most men volunteers become coaches and most women volunteers become “team moms.” We use interviews and participant observation to explore how these gender divisions are created. While most participants say the di...

Arnold Schwarzenegger's celebrity status allowed him to project a symbolic masculine persona that was effective in gaining political power as California governor. The well-known violent tough-guy persona that Schwarzenegger developed in the mid-1980s contributed to a post—Vietnam era cultural remasculinization of the American man. But this narrow h...

Men's superordinate status sets the stage for them to understand their interests as opposed to those of women. But hierarchies among men complicate this. Through an examination of the narratives by critics of Title IX at the U.S. Secretary of Education's 2002 hearings on Title IX, the authors argue that subordinated groups of men within sports (i.e...

American women have flooded into sports at all levels in the last several decades—but you would never know it from watching the evening news.

This study of televised sports news on three network affiliates and ESPN’s SportsCenter extends and expands on earlier studies in 1990 and 1994 to examine the quality and quantity of televised coverage of women’s sports.The dominant finding over the decade spanned by the three studies is the lack of change. Women’s sports are still “missing in acti...

This study of televised sports news on three network affiliates and ESPTs SportsCenter extends and expands on earlier studies in 1990 and 1994 to examine the quality and quantity of televised coverage of women's sports. The dominant finding over the decade spanned by the three studies is the lack of change. Women's sports are still "missing in acti...

A hard-hitting look at the persistent inequities in women's sports participation. In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls' and women's dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclu...

Recent research on children's worlds has revealed how gender varies in salience across social contexts. Building on this observation, the author examines a highly salient gendered moment of group life among four- and five-year-old children at a youth soccer opening ceremony, where gender boundaries were activated and enforced in ways that construct...

Recent research indicates that the televised sports that U.S. boys watch most include pro basketball, pro football, pro baseball, Extreme sports, sports highlights shows, and the dramatic pseudosport of pro wrestling. Based on a textual analysis of these televised sports shows and their accompanying commercial advertisements, the authors identify 1...

Some feminists have seen sex role theory as limited, even dangerous; others see it as useful mid-range theory. This article sheds light on this debate through an examination of the discourse of the men's liberation movement of the 1970s. Men's liberation leaders grappled with the paradox of simultaneously acknowledging men's institutional privilege...

Although there has been some scholarly scrutiny of gays and lesbians in sport, there has been very little “studying up” on the social construction of heterosexuality in sport. In this paper, I begin by drawing on recent historical research on sexuality to reflect on the significance of the emergence of the heterosexual at precisely the time in hist...

Explores the intersection of race and gender by examining two ascendant political discourses about African American males: (1) Afrocentrism; and (2) black feminist thought. Reviews recent African American history and the development of both Afrocentrism and black feminism. (CFR)

This article analyzes the print media’s ideological framing of the 1991 story of boxer Sugar Ray Leonard’s admission of having physically abused his wife and abused cocaine and alcohol. We examined all news stories and editorials on the Leonard story in two major daily newspapers and one national sports daily. We found that all three papers framed...

This research compares and analyzes the verbal commentary of televised coverage of two women's and men's athletic events: the “final four” of the women's and men's 1989 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournaments and the women's and men's singles, women's and men's doubles, and the mixed-doubles matches of the 1989 U.S. O...

This paper utilizes a feminist theoretical framework to explore the contemporary social meanings of sports violence. Two levels of meaning are explored: first, the broad, socio-cultural and ideological meanings of sports violence as mediated spectacle; second, the meanings which male athletes themselves construct. On the social/ideological level, t...

This paper evaluates a growing genre of studies of masculinity and sport. It is argued that sport sociology, like sociology in general, has become more gender conscious but not necessarily more feminist. Feminist critiques of objectivism and value-free sociology and feminist calls for a values-based feminist standpoint are discussed. Two responses...

This article, based upon a comparative analysis of televised coverage of the “Final Four” of the women's and men's 1993 NCAA basketball tournaments, sheds light on some of the mechanisms through which an “audience preference” is socially constructed for men's sports over women's sports. First, we examine the temporal framing of the women's and men'...

This article is based on in-depth interviews with 30 male former athletes of different race and class. I use feminist theories of the social construction of gender to explore the relationship between the construction of masculine identity and boyhood participation in organized sports. I examine family, peer group, and community relationships as key...

Men's studies' scholars have begun to critically examine and deconstruct the meaning of masculinity, but thus far, most of their studies have focused exclusively on the lives of white, middle-class men, ignoring the implications of racial and social class differences and inequalities among men. Sport sociologists, on the other hand, have examined t...

This paper explores the historical and ideological meanings of organized sports for the politics of gender relations. After outlining a theory for building a historically grounded understanding of sport, culture, and ideology, the paper argues that organized sports have come to serve as a primary institutional means for bolstering a challenged and...

This anthology is organized around specific themes that define masculinity and the issues that men confront over their lifetimes. In addition, we incorporate a social constructionist perspective that examines how men actively construct their masculinity within a social and historical context. Related to this construction and integrated in our exami...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Sociology)--University of California, Berkeley, May 1985. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 331-344).