Sport, Masculinities and the Body

Book excerpt: This groundbreaking work explores masculinity and the body within sports. Sports continue to retain expectations for presentations of specific forms of masculinity. The body is central to these presentations. These everyday bodily performances are rehearsed and performed either successfully or unsuccessfully - and the consequences of these actions play a significant part in the ability of the individual to continue to take part. Through participant observations, sporting life-history interviews (with over forty men) and research with children, this book examines the ways in which 'appropriate' sporting masculinities are learned and enacted to varying degrees of success. Wellard highlights the social processes which impact upon individual constructions and formulations of masculine identity and reviews these in relation to broader debates on gender, embodiment and sporting participation. This book contributes not only to the academic fields of sport and gender, but also to the efforts to confront continued forms of 'accepted' gender discrimination.