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On November 5, 2011, Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator for football at Penn State University, was arrested on charges of abusing 8 boys over a 15-year period. In this paper, I strategically deploy feminist methodological considerations to "give voice" to marginalized groups, Foucault's concept of discourse and discursive silences, and media framing analysis to interrogate silence as a means by which various forms of power and privilege operate in the scandal. I extend the discussion of silence to engage the critical sport studies' critique of the "institutional center of sport" and examine what was left outside of the frame in the mainstream news media coverage. These silences within media frames rendered invisible an important critique of the contemporary culture of big time athletic programs. In this way, silence operated to simultaneously reaffirm the institutional power of big time athletic programs and the culture of sport wherein violence is normalized.

Given the significant increase in the number of women and girls participating in sport, it is now a commonly held belief that girls have ample opportunities to participate in sport and, consequently, that girls who do not participate choose to do so because they simply lack interest in sport. Using qualitative methodologies and the sociology of accounts, the author examines a recreational sport program for low-income minority girls in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Applying Giddens's theory of structuration to emergent themes from participant observations and interviews, the findings illustrate how structures, as they are embodied through the everyday interactions of their participants, simultaneously constrain certain forms of agency while enabling other forms. This study advances sociology's disciplinary understanding of social construction by illustrating how social structure and cultural discourses interact in shaping everyday social interactions.

Sport has undergone a radical gender transformation. However, the authors suggest, progress toward gender equity in sports is far from complete. The continuing barriers to full and equal participation for young people, the far lower pay for most elite-level women athletes, and the continuing dearth of fair and equal media coverage all underline how much still has yet to change before we see true gender equality in sports. The chapters in this text show that is this not simply a story of an "unfinished revolution." Rather, they contend, it is simplistic optimism to assume that we are currently nearing the conclusion of a story of linear progress that ends with a certain future of equality and justice. This book provides theoretical and empirical insights into the contemporary world of sports to help explain the unevenness of social change and how, despite significant progress, gender equality in sports has been no slam dunk.--description provided by publisher

Girls and women have more opportunities since Title IX, but the playing field is still far from level. Cheryl Cooky and Nicole M. Lavoi explore how major inequities remain, especially in terms of media attention, distribution of institutional resources and opportunities to coach and lead in the world of sport.

Women make up increasingly large proportions of fan bases of the most popular spectator sports in the United States and are recognized as a viable marketing segment. Despite their growing cultural and economic presence, scholars have noted the stereotypical assumptions women sports fans routinely experience, particularly with regard to the widely held assumption that women's interest in men's sport is primarily motivated by heterosexual attraction to male athletes. Recently, feminist scholars have begun to investigate the role of heterosexual desire in shaping the experiences of women sports fans. Building on this literature, we examine the role of heterosexuality in women's fandom of men's sports, bringing to our research the feminist articulations of contradiction and a both/and ethos. In doing so, we empirically interrogate popular understandings of the role that women's heterosexual sexual desire plays in the consumption of men's sports through an examination of the lived experiences of women fans. Drawing on qualitative semistructured interviews with 11 self-identified women sports fans, we found that the participants navigated the marginalization of women's heterosexuality in sport fandom in four ways: by positioning the sexualization of athletes as antithetical to fandom, by challenging the exclusion of women's heterosexuality in the fan cultures surrounding men's sports, by discussing their own experiences of sexualizing athletes with guilt or ambivalence, and by downplaying the role that sexual attraction plays in their own fandom. We conclude that the marginalization of women sports fans' heterosexual desire within the institutional center of sports denies important facets of their experience and thereby upholds normative understandings of gendered sexuality that underpin masculine hegemony in sport.

Caster Semenya, a South African female track and field star from rural Limpopo South Africa, won the IAAF 2009 World Championships in the 800-meter event. She was then subjected to "gender-verification" testing. Media reports, especially in the United States, underscored that Semenya underwent gender-verification testing because of her "deep voice, muscular build, and rapid improvement in times." Combining content and textual analysis, we conducted a comparative media analysis of the Caster Semenya controversy in the United States and the South African print news media. Results demonstrated that the United States print media coverage framed the controversy in terms of Semenya's "true" sex, "medicalized" debates about sex testing, and discussed the limitations of medical assessment of male and female bodies in sport. In comparison, South African print media sources focused on human rights, nationalism, and "strategic essentialism" to frame Semenya as a "true" woman defending the nation against a perceived racist assault. We conclude the article with transformative visions of sport rooted in postcolonial feminism and critical feminist studies.

This study of televised sports news on three network affiliates and ESPN's SportsCenter extends and expands on earlier studies in 1990 and 1994 to examine the quality and quantity of televised coverage of women's sports.The dominant finding over the decade spanned by the three studies is the lack of change. Women's sports are still "missing in action" on the nightly news, and are even less visible on SportsCenter. Textual analysis revealed some change over the decade, but mostly showed continued gender asymmetries in televised sports news and highlight shows: (a) the choice to devote a considerable proportion of the already-thin coverage of women's sports to humorous feature stories on nonserious women's sports, and (b) the (often humorous) sexual objectification of athlete women and nonathlete women. The authors conclude with a discussion of how and why television has continued to cautiously follow, rather than lead or promote, the growth in girls' and women's sports.

Reflexivity is considered a hallmark of qualitative research. With the continued growth in team-based research, more attention is needed to what it means to practice reflexivity within the context of these research collaborations. In this article, we draw upon scholarship on reflexivity and our own experiences to develop what we term 'collaborative feminist reflexivity' (CFR). CFR represents a form of reflexivity that is distinctly collaborative in how it is enacted, grounded in feminist epistemological and ethical commitments, holistically engaged throughout the research process, and multifaceted, involving multiple formal and informal practices. In critically analyzing our own reflexive practices in the context of an interdisciplinary, multi-method study on hashtag activism related to domestic violence, we seek to identify specific practices for research teams as well as interrogate the potentials and limitations of these practices for enacting feminist reflexivity.

Scholars have argued that digital spaces are key sites for feminist activism, which can be seen in the emergence of "hashtag feminism," or the use of social media hashtags to address feminist-identified issues through sharing personal experiences of inequality, constructing counter-discourses, and critiquing cultural figures and institutions. However, more empirical research is needed that examines both the possibilities and constraints of hashtag feminism. Through a qualitative analysis of 51,577 archived tweets and semi-structured interviews, we trace the ways #WhyIStayed creates a space for feminist activism in response to victim-blaming related to domestic violence through voice, multivocality, and visibility. More specifically, we critically analyze postfeminist discourses within #WhyIStayed in order to examine contradictions within the hashtag event as well as how these postfeminist contradictions shape possibilities for feminist activism online.