Enchanted Fusion: Bringing Together Game Play and Gender

Abstract

The preceding chapter shows how sports, as a playful engaging in games of chance, incites the involved actors and audiences’ interpretive inclination. It has also established a sense of the similarities that cut across the media depictions of men’s and women’s handball, in the form of a handball code. This chapter can now move on to explore how meaningful sports shape gender. This is a fundamental move in the cultural sociology of sports that is proposed in this book. Norwegian society and its many sport cultures are not analyzed as a byproduct of macro social and universal gender inequalities. Instead, this chapter joins broadly available myth and folkloric narratives about chance with the institutionalized handball code to reinterpret the journalist’s discourse. This chapter asks how journalists use gender to interpret the meaningful actions generated by a handball code that cuts across the sex binary. Indeed, coded similarities do not imply that gender is no longer relevant. By far. As the institutional code of handball shapes cultural pragmatics, journalists reach for gender culture to reflect on sport in society. This chapter shows how meaningful media sports intersect with gender.