The 'male preserve' thesis: Sporting culture and men's power
Introduction
Since the mid-19th century, when the modern Westernised form of competition sport took shape, there has been a shifting yet robustly gendered structure to the experience of playing, consuming, managing, teaching and marketing sport. In this regard, save for a number of important examples, sports in various forms were created by men, for men (and boys). In light of this, critical studies of men, masculinity and sport culture have emerged as a major area of research in the sociology of sport (e.g. Dunning, 1986; Messner, 1992; Messner & Sabo, 1990; Pronger, 1990). Drawing on various feminist, social constructionist, or poststructuralist theories of gender, these scholars argued that sport served to sustain symbolic idealisations of male power, normalise the marginality of women and reinforce rigid status hierarchies among men themselves. In exposing the inequalities enshrined within sports culture, along with the manifold dangers endured by boys and men in the stakes of ‘proving’ masculinity in and through sport, this body of scholarship placed the potentially harmful nature of the masculinity–sport relationship firmly into the academic discourse on sport and society.
Furthering recommendations for positive change, scholars of men, masculinity and sport joined wider feminist activism challenging the established male hegemony in sport. Coupled with shifting social attitudes towards women’s athleticism (Cahn, 1994; Heywood & Dworkin, 2003; Theberge, 1987) and growing, yet somewhat limited, public enfranchisement of sexual minority groups (Anderson, 2009; Pronger, 2000) from the mid-1990s onwards, the activist ambitions of pro-feminist scholars have begun, in part, to be realised. Nevertheless, the long-standing relationship between men, narratives about masculinity and certain sporting spaces has been maintained, recast and in some places reinforced (Aitchison, 2006; Matthews, 2014, 2016a; McKay, Messner, & Sabo, 2000; Wellard, 2012).
In this chapter we explore these social processes by turning attention to the concept of sport as a ‘male preserve’. With this notion as our starting point, we outline in turn how sport has historically constituted male power in both structural and symbolic ways; how its role in doing so has begun to be challenged from without as well as within; and how those at the centre of this relationship have managed to ‘hold back the tide’ of change in several important respects. Throughout, we explore the dynamics of gender relations, rather than simply focusing on ‘masculinity’, as it is within the detailed unfolding of such social processes that we argue scholars are able to more adequately evidence, conceptualise and theorise the lives of men. Although our focus is necessarily limited due to the constraints of space, we argue that these dynamics represent a key analytical problem for academics interested in sport and critical studies of men, as they point to pertinent questions around social change, gender relations, and the operation and preservation of power.