Suchergebnisse

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key foundational scholar on gender and sport, Kari Fasting, assesses sociological inquiry about sexual harassment in sport and its relation to the development of policy. The trajectory of this research on gender, sexual harassment and abuse (GSHA) in sport lies in feminist politics and advocacy. While sexual harassment and abuse in sport is widespread across sports, comparability in studies has been difficult due to issues of measurement and underreporting. Key challenges to doing research in this areas include difficulties in obtaining grant funding, access to and cooperation from athletes and perpetrators, and moral and ethical dilemmas in data gathering and reporting. Future work can build on recommendations by major organizations such as the IOC and UNICEF about organizational policies to curb sexual harassment and abuse; future research needs to advance systematic knowledge about the impact of policies and actions about sexual harassment and abuse in sport.

The purpose of this study is to locate which variables are the best predictors of participation in sport. Based on the assumption that many factors interact and decide whether a person is going to be physically active or not, a prediction model is presented. The model include the following predictors: Sex, age, marital status, children, education, occupation, working-hours, physical activity in connect ion with work, the environment's involvement in sport, grade of urbanization, trade area and number of recreational and sport facilities in the neighbourhood. The analysis is based on data from a nationwide survey among the Norwe gian population. Altogether 3,098 individuals, from 15 to 87 years of age, took part in the study. The statistical analysis used were Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) and Automatic Interaction Dectection (AID). The prediction model explains 20% of the variance. The strongest predictors were the environment's involvement in sport, geographical area and occupation. The first predictor alone explained al most half of the variance. At the end of the article implication for further re search is discussed. The author suggest that new predictors should replace some of those with low predictive values. Psychological as well as other sociological variables are suggested.

The purpose of the article is to analyse how female sports are presented in television and newspapers in Norway. This is done in order to clarify whether or not the mass media lend support to a traditional inhibiting image to female sport participation. The results of the content analysis show that stereotyping masculine and feminine language were seldom used in describing female and male sport per formers. The quantitative image of gender and sport was on the other hand, not in accordance with the real extent of female and male sports events. This biased image may be a result of the male sports editorial staff's own attitudes towards female sport participation, together with the influence from the male part of the public. The consequences of these facts may be very severe. It may be that the mass media rather inhibit than stimulate women's further development and in volvement in sports.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of how men aged 40–90 years with different educational and ethnic backgrounds talk about their own bodies, and how social dimensions, especially masculinity and age, are reflected in their talk. Eighteen men from a small rural town in Norway were interviewed. The findings indicate that the men have a complex relationship to their own bodies. Three main themes were found in the way they talked about their own bodies: functionality in relation to their everyday life and in relation to sport and physical activity; physical and mental health; appearance both in relation to how their bodies were perceived by others and in relation to their own perception of their body. The three themes were not mutually exclusive and were often interwoven in terms of how they were talked about. The results are discussed in relation to theories of masculinity with a focus on Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity. One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the project is that the men expressed their relationships with their bodies in conflicting and complex ways, including concerns which can be interpreted as gendered and age-related.

The hip-hop culture has evolved from the ghettos of The Bronx, New York in the 1970s, into a global phenomenon. Despite such prominence there is an absence of academic research on the hip-hop culture element: breakdance. Through eight months of participant observations and 17 qualitative interviews, this study investigates the identity construction process among breakdancers with diverse ethnic backgrounds in Norway. The aim is to provide an insight into the lives of young people and their impression management in constructing a breaker identity. The analysis highlights the complex and contested nature of breakdance as it is experienced and viewed by young people performing breakdance in Norway. Through deliberate impression management the breakdancers construct an alternative identity detached from other social categories. As a result, breakdance seems to counter social oppression and to have an empowering and liberating potential different from the common stigmatization and stereotypical prejudices regarding gender and ethnicity that many have experienced.

This article examines race and racism in sport based on the experiences of black Norwegian athletes. The findings are based on in-depth qualitative interviews with nine female and eight male black athletes. Race and racism concepts are explored to draw attention to different approaches of understanding racism in sport, from the individual to the institutional level. The findings add to previous critical scholarship which cautioned that sport should not be taken for granted as free from racial inequalities. By using Critical Race Theory (CRT), we examine how racializations of racial minorities in sport from mere stereotypes to the ways institutions function, work to produce and reproduce racial inequalities. We argue for a more systematic and critical analysis of contemporary Norwegian sport for a better understanding of how race relations and racism are exercised. This is expected to contribute in the development of better and more effective policies to deal with racial and ethnic diversity in contemporary Norwegian sport.

Kari Fasting, Gertrud Pfister & Sheila Scraton: Disrupting
gender? A cross-national study of female soccer players' perceptions of masculinity and femininity

Traditionally football has been a masculine sport, even though there has been a dramatic increase in the number of female footballers in many countries since the beginning of the 1970s. Through qualitative, in-depth interviews with female football players in England, Germany, Norway and Sweden (N= 40), the article explores how far women, who are engaged at a highly competitive level in a "male" sport like football, actively construct alternative femininities, subvert traditional meanings of femininity and/or respond to the cultural ideals of "acceptable" femininity. The results indicate that the football players do all these.They actively construct alternative femininities while responding to cultural ideals of acceptable femininity at the same time. The data also revealed that sport is a social field that not only produces gender, but that it is also an arena where gender can be bent, shifted and changed. The most striking result of the study, however, was that the results were much the same across the national borders.

Although it is often assumed that the prevalence of sexual harassment is different indifferent sports, the assumption has not been empirically tested. This study considers whether the experience of sexual harassment varies by sport. The female elite athletes ( N = 553) in the study participated in 56 different sport disciplines. These were grouped as: 1) team or individual sports; 2) extent to which clothing required for competition is revealing; 3) gender structure (male- or female-dominated membership statistics); and 4) gender culture (masculine, gender-neutral or feminine). The data show that sexual harassment occurs in every sport group. Female elite athletes who participated in 'masculine' sports appear to experience more harassment than women in the other groups. We conclude that, when it comes to female athletes' experiences of sexual harassment, sport type matters far less than sport participation per se.

This article investigates national similarities and differences with respect to how women enter the world of football and whether gender relations continue to impact on both their access to and opportunities in the sport. The data comes from 40 semi-structured interviews with top-level women footballers in England, Germany, Norway and Spain. Early male influences are discussed in relation to: existing work on socialization into sport, notions of femininity, and the different cultural contexts. The organization of youth sport is identified as a crucial factor in influencing girls and young women's opportunities to play football. Furthermore, although men continue to have a considerable influence on the women's game, even when women have no conscious intentions of resistance, they incorporate their own meanings into the sport.

This article presents data from a cross-cultural study titled 'Gender Relations in Sport — The Experiences of Czech, Greek, and Norwegian Female Sport Students'. The main research question asked is: what are the amounts and the forms of male and female sexual harassment experienced in a sport setting by female sport students in Czech Republic, Greece, and Norway? Women ( N = 616) who were studying in sport departments of academic institutions in the three countries participated in the study. The results show that 34 percent of the students had experienced sexually harassing behavior from a man and 12 percent from a woman. Experiences of sexually harassing behaviors from both men and women were reported more often in the Czech Republic and Greece than in Norway.The form of sexual harassment the participants reported experiencing the most was 'repeated unwanted sexual glances, etc.' (22%). The difference between female and male harassment is discussed in relation to patriarchal power. The overall differences between countries are discussed in relation to the three countries' gender orders, gender equality laws as well as the anti-sexual harassment laws inside and outside sport organizations.