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This article re-enacts a typical experience of male sport initiation at a university in the south of England and presents a confessional account of my own shifting epistemological position and desire to create more balanced, ethical, reflexive and self-effacing research. The tale of initiation is constructed from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with male collegiate football (soccer) players and subsequent purposive conversations with male collegiate rugby players. It aims to confront the reader with the lived experience of male student sport initiations, providing a platform for unremitting reflection and greater possibilities for academic recourse. In particular, I suggest, the tale constructs a dais for sociological dialogue about the existentiality and configurations of, and relationships between, deviance, masculinities and subcultural identities in a student sport setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building on previous discourse analytic studies in the context of male athletic cultures and subcultures, this article uses pro-feminist perspectives to analyse the talk of male university football (soccer) players in the UK. The (re)production of hegemonic masculinity in men's football has largely been taken for granted in sociology of sport, with very little literature producing actual empirical research to support the claim. The study presents extracts of players' conversations from the changing room and student bar, and examines the ways in which the men negotiate masculine positional identity and (re)affirm separation from the ‘other’, such as women and gay men. The three most predominant topics of conversation (excluding omnipresent talk about football itself) were identified as academic studies, alcohol consumption, and women. Each extract of the men's talk was subjected to critical discourse analysis and is discussed in this article in relation to (pro)feminist debates about hegemony and constructions of masculine self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article is an examination of how femininity, masculinity and physicality are created and (re)presented within the English tabloid press. In identifying mechanisms for the construction and maintenance of (hegemonic) femininity and masculinity within sport, a gendered sports formula has been developed to analyse and explain sports coverage within this particular medium. Copies of the Sun and Mirror newspapers were collected and analysed over the course of the summer of 2000. The study highlights that idealized conceptualizations of femininity and masculinity are prevalent within the dominant narratives of both publications, not least through the disproportionate ratio of male/female sports coverage where only 5.9 percent of the sports reporting focused upon women's sport. Our analysis of this mechanism is explicated through focusing upon one of the most photographed athletes in the world today, the Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova. Kournikova, we posit, is the most powerful symbol of the masculinity/femininity nexus within media sport and accounted for one-third of all articles on women's sport. She is presented as the masculinists' transcendent image of the idiosyncratic sportswoman, whereby masculinity is maintained through ideological representations of femininity. While the analysis does not focus exclusively on Koumikova, it is argued that she, more than any other athlete, epitomizes the gendered sports formula within the tabloid press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]