"Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Global and Universal Contexts is concerned with wider, international applications of language to sport. Topics discussed range from women's volleyball uniforms, ballroom dancing, female athletes as victims, soccer fans, nudity debates, homophobia, misogyny, Title IX, NASCAR, extreme sports, and trekking, to Japanese sports reports, Canadian hockey, sailors in the French press, British portrayals of Wimbledon champs, Australian heroes, German sports editorials, and masculinity relative to Mount Everest."--Publisher's description.

Sexual rhetoric is the self-conscious and critical engagement with discourses of sexuality that exposes both their naturalization and their queering, their torquing to create different or counter-discourses, giving voice and agency to multiple and complex sexual experiences. This volume explores the intersection of rhetoric and sexuality through the varieties of methods available in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies, including case studies, theoretical questioning, ethnographies, or close (and distant) readings of "texts" that help us think through the rhetorical force of sexuality and the sexual force of rhetoric.

Overcoming the Neutral Zone Trap challenges hockey’s norms, pushes its boundaries, and provides new ways of conceptualizing its role in North American culture. The editors of this engaging interdisciplinary collection use the metaphor of the neutral zone trap to explore the ways that hockey’s culture and structures work to exclude marginalized people. The book features both personal and scholarly accounts of agents of change—people, ideas, and events—that confront the challenges associated with making hockey a more inclusive space. By exposing assumptions about hockey culture, Overcoming the Neutral Zone Trap opens up critical discussions of previously underexplored topics as they relate to the women’s game, Indigenous participation, viable career pathways, masculine identities, hockey parents, mental health, and social media. This is a book for fans, players, organizers, and researchers alike. Contributors: Angie Abdou, Kieran Block, Cam Braes, William Bridel, Judy Davidson, Jonathon R.J. Edwards, Catherine Houston, Colin D. Howell, Chelsey H. Leahy, Roger G. LeBlanc, Cheryl A. MacDonald, Fred Mason, Brock McGillis, Vicky Paraschak, Brett Pardy, Ann Pegoraro, Kyle A. Rich, Tavis Smith, Noah Underwood

This book takes a close look at systems and rhetorics of silencing in sports training. Using the case study of the Larry Nassar abuse scandal at Michigan State University and within USA Gymnastics, the book explores multifaceted problems of speaking, silencing, and listening in youth and college athletic organizations, investigating the cultures of abuse and discursive practices that silence victims while protecting abusers. The author foregrounds the victims’ voices through an analysis of victim impact statements and victim interviews, while examining other textual artifacts to understand the institutional behaviors and actions both before and after the case caught public attention. Exploring the issue far beyond the single organization, the author discusses the norms, values, ideologies, and expected behaviors of youth and college sports programs as institutions to help describe “rhetorical cultures of champion-building.” This innovative study offers new perspectives that will interest students and scholars of sport communication, rhetoric, organizational communication, criminology, and feminist theory.

This book examines women's participation in the Olympic Games since they were allowed to be included in that global arena. Using a holistic, social scientific approach, and emphasizing the rhetoric of sport mediatization, Female Olympians reviews the literature relative to sexism, racism, and ageism before providing historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural perspectives such as the gendered language of Olympic reportage, religious considerations, women’s bodies relative to their training for the Games, drugs and doping, and female Paralympians. With numerous critical case studies, never-before assembled data, and personal interviews with athletes, this volume offers insights that both investigate and celebrate female Olympians’ successes.

This book examines the political debates over the access to live telecasts of sport in the digital broadcasting era. It outlines the broad theoretical debates, political positions and policy calculations over the provision of live, free-to-air telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship. In so doing, the book provides a number of comparative case studies that explore these debates and issues in various global spaces.

Providing a much-needed cutting-edge update on the last major publication on sport hazing practices published more than two decades ago, chapters cover the continuation of potentially harmful, traditional initiations, and the cycle of status from initiated to initiator.

This volume presents a collection of essays that explore the relationship between sporting clothing and gender. Drawing on uniform and sports apparel as a means of exploring the socio-sexual politics of contemporary US society, the contributions analyse the historical, political-economic, socio-cultural and sport-specific dimensions of gendered clothing in sport. Part of a two-volume series (the other discussing this phenomenon in a global context), contributors cover topics such as WNBA uniform politics, military promotion, female sportscaster clothing, magazine depictions, plus-size exercise apparel, FloJo, the Skirt Chaser 5k race, and the socio-politics of the LPGA, CrossFit, roller derby, rock climbing, and more. As the first single compendium to discuss American sportswomen’s apparel, this collection will be of interest to practitioners and scholars of sports history, the sociology of sport, and gender/media studies.

We expect sports to be fair and equal--everyone who tries out has a chance to play and everyone who plays hard has a chance to win. But is that really true? In reality, female athletes are paid far less than their male counterparts. Youth sports often cost too much for many families to participate in. African American athletes continue to face discrimination both on and off the field. Adaptive sports are considered to be only for those with disabilities. But there are signs of progress as sports organizations try to promote equality and fairness. This study explores the intricacies of inclusion and exclusion in sports.

This book celebrates the life and career of Eric Dunning. Eric Dunning was a pioneer of the sociology of sport, firstly known for his ground-breaking theoretical work with Norbert Elias, and his study of the development of football. Subsequently he published seminal work on amateurism, professionalism and the development of rugby (with Kenneth Sheard) and on football hooliganism (with Patrick Murphy and John Williams) and became a focal point for figurational sociological work on sport. Such was the scope of his thinking and the force of his personality that he bestrode the sociology of sport from its inception and initial organisational formation to his retirement. This book charts the breadth and depth of Eric Dunning’s influence through a series of chapters written by friends, colleagues and others who have worked with his ideas. Chapters provide an overview of his thinking, reflect on his own core research, and describe the departures this inspired across a range of topics embracing politics, sport, health and education, spanning different nations and sporting cultures. This book will be beneficial to students, researchers and professionals with an interest in sport and in the relationship between sport and society. The chapters in this book were originally published in Sport in Society.