When you think of Basketball, what do you think of? A powerful and aggressive 6 foot 6 able bodied male with well defined arms and incredible strength. An athlete that is envied and idolized by current and future basketball players. Now, place the same characteristics on a female basketball player, will she ever be respected as an athlete that trains as hard, and plays as tough? Throughout this paper we will attempt to uncover a couple of the many complexities hidden in sport, specifically how gender is socially constructed within basketball.
Sport research has exposed many sides of how gender is constructed within the commonly played sport of basketball. It has examined how male preserve has predominantly shaped sport into an institution …show more content…
Not only has dominant gender ideology been constructed at a young age, it continues to play a role through media and language. In basketball the most common way in which fans connect with their favorite team is through media, however, men’s basketball takes priority in exposure over women’s. Through media, such as television, sport is constantly reproducing traditional dominant gender ideology by images and messages which have become the norm and therefore we rarely question (Blinde, Greendorfer, & Shanker, 1991). With this said, women’s representation in the media is either absent or astonishingly low on television as well as top sports magazines (Blinde et al., 1991). The extent to which women's representation is valued is shown through research that 92 percent of sports reportings covered male sports, 5 percent covered women's sports and 3 percent covered gender neutral conversations (Messner, Duncan, & Jenson, 1993). This discrepancy of representation recreates the sense that sport is a man’s preserve where women are considered the “other” and not capable of achieving the same coverage as …show more content…
Hegemonic masculinity, where prevailing masculine traits are dominant over the subordinate others, is particularly apparent because women and men are sex-segregated into different categories in a competition. For example, in a marathon, females and males run together in the race but when talked about in the media they are sex-segregated into two different races, therefore, spectators do not get to see how a fair amount of the females can outrun the males (Fink et al., 2016). Creating a continuum in sport where everyone, regardless of gender, can compete against each other, has the potential to break down hegemonic masculinity in sport. Fink et al. (2016) analyzes this gender continuum when interviewing male “practice players” that play with an intercollegiate women’s basketball team. Confirming the expectation that the men would feel more athletic and superior to the females, the males all expressed that they were surprised on how good the women were and realized they had to step up to play with them (Fink et al., 2016).The males also believe the construction that females are not naturally athletic, so when they show great physical strength they are only considered “special”(Fink et al., 2016). For example, one practice player stated, “I wouldn’t even consider
Sport research has exposed many sides of how gender is constructed within the commonly played sport of basketball. It has examined how male preserve has predominantly shaped sport into an institution …show more content…
Not only has dominant gender ideology been constructed at a young age, it continues to play a role through media and language. In basketball the most common way in which fans connect with their favorite team is through media, however, men’s basketball takes priority in exposure over women’s. Through media, such as television, sport is constantly reproducing traditional dominant gender ideology by images and messages which have become the norm and therefore we rarely question (Blinde, Greendorfer, & Shanker, 1991). With this said, women’s representation in the media is either absent or astonishingly low on television as well as top sports magazines (Blinde et al., 1991). The extent to which women's representation is valued is shown through research that 92 percent of sports reportings covered male sports, 5 percent covered women's sports and 3 percent covered gender neutral conversations (Messner, Duncan, & Jenson, 1993). This discrepancy of representation recreates the sense that sport is a man’s preserve where women are considered the “other” and not capable of achieving the same coverage as …show more content…
Hegemonic masculinity, where prevailing masculine traits are dominant over the subordinate others, is particularly apparent because women and men are sex-segregated into different categories in a competition. For example, in a marathon, females and males run together in the race but when talked about in the media they are sex-segregated into two different races, therefore, spectators do not get to see how a fair amount of the females can outrun the males (Fink et al., 2016). Creating a continuum in sport where everyone, regardless of gender, can compete against each other, has the potential to break down hegemonic masculinity in sport. Fink et al. (2016) analyzes this gender continuum when interviewing male “practice players” that play with an intercollegiate women’s basketball team. Confirming the expectation that the men would feel more athletic and superior to the females, the males all expressed that they were surprised on how good the women were and realized they had to step up to play with them (Fink et al., 2016).The males also believe the construction that females are not naturally athletic, so when they show great physical strength they are only considered “special”(Fink et al., 2016). For example, one practice player stated, “I wouldn’t even consider