S2 EP 9 - Producing Feminist Sports Knowledge

Michael Messner (USC) and Michela Musto (Brown Univ) join us to talk about how feminist sociology helps us to produce new, useful knowledge about sports and the social world. This is a companion episode to chapter 2 "Producing Knowledge About Sports in Society". We jump off from Messner's famous article "Barbie Girls and Sea Monsters" that analyzes a moment in youth sports that reveals how gender operates at the interactional level, the institutional or contextual level, and cultural level simultaneously. We then discuss how Musto builds on that research when studying a gender integrated swimming club to show how gender can be more or less salient across sporting spaces. We conclude with a discussion of how sociological knowledge has powerful uses in real world sports settings that can guide sports professionals when managing sports programs. What do you think? Join our Discord server to participate in the discussion: https://discord.gg/QDzzETYThv