By Way of Conclusion: A Cultural Sociology of Sports

Abstract

Sport and gender researchers have perhaps been more interested in what they can do with sports, how to make sports better, than in what sport is. This is problematic insofar as claims to how meaningful sports shape gender can be made more powerfully when the context-free culture-structures and grammars of sports are theorized. Gender is central to social life, but cultures recognize gender in both subtly and clearly varied manners. Sports shape genders as genre, codes, and narratives bring moralities and folkloric ideas to bare on the public gravity of gendered sport interaction. A cultural sociology of sports tries hard to decouple culture and politics, making repeated claims about the autonomy of culture, and points to hedging and uncertainty about cultural causality in the cultural studies tradition. While critical theorists see competition as the centerpiece of the pathological sport-forms produced under capitalism. This book shows how sports perform competition. Here, at the switch-point amid interaction and broad culture is where a cultural sociology of performance gives promise. It holds the capacity to elucidate the coexistence of solidary and conflict, to reveal its phenomenology as a performative feel for the game, which shapes the social life of sport in society.