Here are a few of the many reasons I keep reading everything Mike Messner writes:

1) He seems to take the feminist "personal is political" slogan to heart, revealing much more of himself and his own questions and vulnerabilities than most other male writers.

2) He uses both academic and journalistic techniques to research his topics and support his theses.

3) He lacks the arrogance of many experts, retaining an open mind as he delibertely attempts to look at things in original ways.

4) The topic of this book -- and several of his others -- continues to fascinate me. By looking at how we "do gender" in a sporting context, we come to understand so much about how and why any and all women and men behave as we do.

Highly recommended. -- Mariah Burton Nelson

USC Sociologist Michael Messner, who has spent the majority of his academic career studying issues of sport, masculinity, and power has written a truly significant book with Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports. The book finds a place for much of his previous research, as well as the research of other gender and sport scholars, to elicit the mechanisms in which gender is produced, reproduced, and contested in sport.

The premise of the book holds that gender is a product of structure, culture, and an individual's interactions within culture. This serves as the launching point for a deft discussion of the affects of sport in America. Messner has a talent for seeing the larger picture in seemingly "normal" events, and in Taking the Field he analyzes the affect that "normal" interactions in sport has on the subjugation of women and gay men, and the real and symbolic violence committed against both women and men by men.

Messner's work is important to scholars of both sport and gender, but is particularly important to gender scholars who too frequently fail to recognize the power sport, and sport media, has in shaping current gender relations, particularly the institutionalization of manhood. But Taking the Field is also highly recommend for anybody who has an interest in understanding the larger implications of American sport, beyond winning and losing. It is a must read for coaches, parents, and educators who have anything to do with sport.

To help us understand how theory hits the road, Messner highlights familiar news events such as the Columbine Massacre, or the 1999 Women's World Cup Championships, and analyzes them from a social-feminist perspective. In such he clearly elucidates the perils of the way we do sport in America and shows us that the concepts and theories he speaks of are not just found on the pages of books - that they are real, with real life application, and have a very real affect on people's lives.

Taking the Field is also important because it brings both homophobia and the mediea into the center of analysis. Whereas much attention has been given to the media's role in gender relations, I have been wholly discouraged by the absence of homophobia from much sport literature, and from sport in gender literature. Taking the Field shows the significance homophobia plays in sport, shaping and maintaining athletics as a masculine and heterosexual institution, and how important sport is in the production of gender

In the end Dr. Messner suggests that resistance to the system is possible (perhaps even inevitable). The masculinist center of sport has a soft underbelly and it is currently challenged by individual sports, female athleticism, the growing presence of gay male athleticism, and progressive individual men who are no longer willing to allow the system to function in a homophobic and misogynistic manner. But while these challenges to a hegemonic masculinity have threatened sport's ability to be openly sexist and homophobic, we must understand how sport attempts to reproduce itself covertly, so that we can continue to progress toward a culture of equality...

The 2nd edition to this books introduces readers to the complex narratives on gender in modern society. The numerous articles included in this volume represent some of the leading scholarship on gender in society, and introduces readers to the theoretical and methodological works of numerous researchers.This anthology is important and essential to scholars, feminists, and teachers. This is an excellent book for graduate student and undergraduate students alike.

Messner basically develops a sociological chart for analyzing writings and activism from men's groups. He reviews the literature in this field over the past three decades. This book will help you to understand much about antisexist men, the Million Man March, gay male pornography, and many other topics. This is definitely one of my favorite men's studies text.

The articles in this collection absolutely blew my mind. This book contains a comprehensive collection of both theorists and practitioners who work in the gender field, writing on topics ranging from semantics to masculinities. If you have an interest in gender as a social construct, this book is for you. I would suggest this selection to anyone in the gender, masculinities, or feminist theory fields. Excellent!

It's a kind of tedious read, but the central idea (at least what I came away as the central idea) is great: masculinity, and athletics aren't two bad notions in and of themselves. But when you put the two together, and not properly supervised, you can come up with some horrible stuff. He goes about proving this by interviewing some ex-jocks and comes up with some great material. It's basically a sociological sutdy, but works out nicely.

Sex, Violence and Power in Sports is a compelation of short articles written by the authors (and others) with such diverse topics as locker room talk, what can be said about a society whose fascination with sports is a direct correlate of how much blood is spilled during the game, and the inside-outside dillema of homosexual atheletes. This in itself is somewhat new--few sociologists have attempted to tackle (no pun intended) the subject of the athletic subculture. What's more new, however, is the feminist slant the authors have taken to explain the culture of athletes as part of the larger patriarchy. Sure, it's a weighty book, and its suggestions that athletics are "deviogenic" would be denied by all well-socialized athletes, but it is well worth the read.