Masculinity, Sport and Mobile Phones:

2010

This article contributes to recent debates between supporters of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, as exemplified by R. W. Connell, and a new generation of gender scholars, as to how best explain the dynamic and fluid relationships between men, and men and women, in the early 21st century. Here, the author concurs with many of Connell's critics and proceeds by arguing that recent feminist extensions of Bourdieu's original conceptual schema-field, capital, habitus, and practice-may help reveal more nuanced conceptualizations of masculinities, and male gender reflexivity, in contemporary sport and physical culture. This author examines the potential of such an approach via an analysis of masculinities in the snowboarding field. In so doing, this article not only offers fresh insights into the masculine identities and interactions in the snowboarding field but also contributes to recent debates about how best to explain different generations and cultural experiences of masculinities.

The rise of 'surf style' in mainstream fashion in the 1990s made enormous profits for businesses like Quiksilver and Billabong which had begun life as specialist sportswear suppliers to a niche market. Since then the look has become ubiquitous, and now, just as the wearing of military style is not confined to the armed forces, 'surf style' is worn in and out of the water by surfers and non-surfers alike. But this is a look which can not be reduced to the superficial use of hibiscus flower motifs and surf-related slogans: it is typified by the surfing body. The surfing body, clothed in brands that convey subcultural authenticity or naked and wearing only sun bleached hair or tribal tattoos came into being in the late 1980s. Against a background of economic growth in the West, a new youth culture emerged. Working visas to the antipodes for under 26s were available along with, in the UK, a student grants and readily available casual work at home to finance the trip and on arriving, to venture into the Pacific Rim. The 1990s gap year phenomenon was born, and with it, the surfing body. Heels cracked by salt water and sandals, hair knotted by the sea, the surfing body signified conspicuous leisure as clearly as the crinoline-wearing bourgeois wife's of the 19th century. No wonder then that products aimed at creating its simulacra in chilly buttoned-up Britain were so eagerly marketed and consumed. This paper will explore some of the issues around social class and aspiration inherent in the pursuit of the surfing body, examining the gendered consumption of a fashionable look which embodies both activity and idleness.

This Research Insight piece examines how Southern California recreational women surfers experience, cope with and contest their marginalized status within the male-dominated sport of surfing. Drawing on literature that focuses on women in alternative sports, I find that women surfers face similar contradictions, such as developing strategies to cope with and contest their marginalized status and creating separate spaces. Surfing is a fruitful area of study because it is a recreational activity that is not bound by any formal rules or regulations that separates women and men from participating with each other, but as this study will show, surfers are constructing gender boundaries. This study builds on existing literature that examines the varying ways sporting women resist and reproduce dominant cultural understandings of gender, as well as focuses on how creating separate spaces is a source of empowerment for women in masculinized spaces.

Sociology of Sport Journal, 2011

This paper examines the potential of social theory for enhancing researcher reflexivity and praxis in the ethnographic field. More specifically, we advocate the potential of feminist interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “regulated liberties” for helping critical ethnographers navigate some of the embodied political and ethical tensions and challenges encountered in male-dominated physical cultures. Drawing upon examples from our fieldwork in surfing and snowboarding cultures, we illustrate some of the strategies we employ to subtly subvert problematic cultural norms and values within these action sport cultures. Engaging the work of poststructural feminist and Bourdieusian scholars, we raise some of the ethical questions and concerns we have experienced as cultural members and feminist researchers while engaging with participants in the waves and on the slopes.

This article explores the sensual world of men who surf. Self-reflexive and fictocritical in tone, it meditates on how many studies of masculinity tend to separate the social and bodily. The article maps a way to pull bodies and feelings back into such studies in a productive manner. Affect theory is used to evidence how doing masculinity is built on feelings and intimacy. In turn, the article grounds gender in the activities of everyday life that function to bring together the sociological, psychological, and biological. Furthermore, the article argues that by researching through bodies, it is possible to complicate traditional tropes of masculinity that position it as stable and unemotional. Most important, the researcher’s body is shown to be integral to any imagination of how the surfing culture works.

Sport, Social Media, and Digital Technology: Sociological Approaches, 2022

Purpose: This chapter outlines the extent to which the traditional characteristics of masculinity in sport-initially played out in sports stadia and the traditional media in the late nineteenth and throughout most of the twentieth century-are now also a feature of social media and digital technology platforms in the twenty-first century. At the outset, this chapter discusses the historical association between masculinity and sporting competition and how this has played an important role in presenting a normative heterosexual identity amongst players, fans, and the traditional media. The chapter then discusses the introduction of social media and digital technology platforms and the impact this history is having in these rapidly consumed spaces, with a particular focus on language, such as hate speech. Design/methodology/approach: This chapter examines and discusses a myriad of literature from inside and outside of academia that explores masculinity, sport, and/or the internet. These discussions are backgrounded within a historical context and connected to contemporary examples. Findings: Social media and digital technology platforms have provided opportunities for athletes, the media, and fans, to engage in more of an active debate on masculinity in sport than existed in the twentieth century. However, the chapter also addresses the traditional characteristics of masculinity that remain in the culture of sport and in online environments, especially surrounding hate speech. Originality/value: This chapter, while engaging in an emerging topic of discussion, offers important recommendations for future research and the ways in which this can be methodologically carried out on the internet on a variety of topic areas surrounding masculinity in sport from a sociological perspective.

Given the global ubiquity of the phenomenon of the selfie and the rise of the GoPro action camera, this paper argues that in today’s social conditions of high-modernity the selfie offers a way of bridging the ‘hinge between digital and physical modes of existence’ (Rubenstein & Fisher, 2013, p.13). Although perceived as more ‘intuitive and fun’ than simply texting (Lobinger & Brantner, 2015, p.1857), its material and social practice, however, does not stay unproblematic, but complex and with ambiguities itself. This paper’s discourse is embedded within a narrative and phenomenological theoretical accounts of identity and selfhood focused on the centrality of the human body such as those of Ricoeur (1992), Goffman (1959), Shilling (2005) and Heidegger (1953). The discussion further explores contemporary understandings of digital media, the role of the photographer and his/ her body beyond representation including accounts by Baudrillard (1994), Rubenstein & Fisher (2013) and recent scholarly appropriations on the phenomenon of the selfie published within the 2015 Featured issue (9) of the ‘International Journal of Communication’. Investigating into the lived experiences in the case of surf selfies with the GoPro action camera, it is then argued that the act of taking and sharing photographic records of one’s own body offers authenticity of one’s digital mode of existence but stands in conflict with one’s physical way of being with regards to perceived authenticity of others and one’s own experience of self. This study’s results illustrate the problematic relationship between on and offline identities, which are conclusively argued to be rooted within continuing fluctuating concepts of self between ‘the self as an image and as a body, as a constructed effect of representation and as an object and agent of representation’ (Frosh, p.1621).

Contemporary Japan

In postmodern society, the field of consumption has replaced the world of production as the main arena in which dominant stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are communicated and reinforced. Previous research findings suggest that deference to male authority, homosociality, hierarchical junior-senior relationships, conformity and control, and the appreciation of pain and violence are characteristic elements which exaggerate masculine traits and devaluate feminine ones in sports in Japan. My own experiences with rock climbers in Western Japan questions the conventional wisdom of the preponderance of such "masculinity rites"-which overwhelmingly have been observed in highly formalized, competitive, and organized settings. Confronting traditional, mainstream sports with less explored subcultural modes of alternative sport involvement, such as surfing, skateboarding, or climbing, this article explores to what degree hegemonic masculinity has also shaped ideas and ideals of maleness within lifestyle sport and whether these subcultural spaces actually offer the opportunity for the experience of alternative modes of masculinity.

Book review of Belinda Wheaton's The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sport

Journal of Sociology

This article explores motorcycling as an arena for the choreography and performance of body practices of pleasure for young men with hearing disabilities. The article advances the argument that the discursive multiplicity of identities experienced in motorcycling destabilises precepts that privilege paid work and institutionalised competitive team sports as absolute bastions of masculine existence. Drawing on data collected from an interview with one young man with a severe hearing disability, it will be shown that his experience of both finding a stable occupation, and participating in institutionalised team sports, is marked by ongoing difficulties. By contrast, participation in motorcycling is an occasion by which he (re)constructs and enhances his masculine identity. The embodied experience of motorcycling invokes possibilities for an interconnection with the masculine, and dialogic exchange with the identity of hearing disability. This demonstrates an uncertainty of settlements regarding what constitutes 'masculinity' and 'disability' in different sites and contexts.

Sport, Education and Society, 2013

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of women's sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring alternative surfing of conceptualising the processes of exclusionary power. In this paper, we focus on the voices of women recreational surfers to explore the changes which may or may not be occurring at smaller, more localised levels of women's engagement with surfing culture. An ethnographic methodology was employed to ask women how and why they engage in surfing and what it means for them, rather than asking questions based on existing assumptions. In presenting the data we draw upon the double meaning afforded by the term 'to patronise' as a means of framing the complex ways that women continue to be differentiated in surfing culture, and the ways they respond to this. In the final section, we employ a Foucauldian analytic lens to explore the subtle normalising practices in which women are incited to recognise and undertake the practices of the valued masculine ideal of the 'good surfer' through caring acts and advice offered by male surfers. This post-structuralist perspective offers space to think outside of simple resistance and reproduction, instead considering a complex space where women and men negotiate power in a range of ways from contextual, subjective positions. In conclusion, we argue that women recreational surfers are enacting alternative ways of operating within the power relations that circulate in the waves, creating ever-changing spaces for new ways of doing and knowing surfing to emerge.

Mark Stranger Surfing Life: Surface, Substructure and the Commodification of the Sublime (Ashgate, Farnham. 2011) pp288 £60 ISBN: 978-0-7546-7443-6