Messner, Michael A. : University of Southern California
Review
"For many years, Michael Messner has provided unparalleled insights into gender issues in the arena of
sport. With Taking the Field he opens our eyes and ears to how much work still lies ahead before girls and women
truly take the field with equal societal approval as boys and men. We're thirty years beyond the passing of Title
IX, but when you read Taking the Field, you realize we're not yet where we want to be."
--Diana Nyad
Submitted By Publisher, October, 2003
Summary
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 exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated-and yet, as Michael
Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite
profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations.
To explore the current paradoxes of gender in sport, Messner identifies and investigates three levels at which
the "center" of sport is constructed: the day-to-day practices of sport participants, the structured
rules and hierarchies of sport institutions, and the dominant symbols and belief systems transmitted by the major
sports media. Using these insights, he analyzes a moment of gender construction in the lives of four- and five-year-old
children at a soccer opening ceremony, the way men's violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial
interests and dominant men's investment in maintaining the status quo in the face of recent challenges, and the
cultural imagery at the core of sport, particularly televised sports. Through these examinations Messner lays bare
the practices and ideas that buttress-as well as those that seek to disrupt-the masculine center of sport.