A Performative Feel for the Game

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Introduction: Sport, Meaning and Gender

   • Trygve B. Broch

   Pages 1-39

3. Media, Sport Enchantment and Gender

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 41-41

      PDF

   2. Media and Sport Enchantment: Narrative, Myth, and Games of Modernity

      • Trygve B. Broch

      Pages 43-81

   3. Enchanted Fusion: Bringing Together Game Play and Gender

      • Trygve B. Broch

      Pages 83-110

4. Socialization, Sport Felicity and Gender

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 111-111

      PDF

   2. Throwing Like a Handballgirl: Performance and Materiality

      • Trygve B. Broch

      Pages 113-146

   3. Throwing Like a Handballboy: Enchanted Flows of Power

      • Trygve B. Broch

      Pages 147-185

   4. By Way of Conclusion: A Cultural Sociology of Sports

      • Trygve B. Broch

      Pages 187-200

5. Back Matter

   Pages 201-209

   PDF

"The meaning of sport is gendered—but not always as we might be imagining. A Performative Feel for the Game goes beyond taken-for-granted gender hierarchies. Through a cultural analysis of Norwegian handball, Trygve Broch teaches us how narratives, historical myths and welfare policies intermingle with processes of democratization, showing how sport is not reducible to power and inequality. A multifaceted social and existential sphere is thereby opened up. This is an exciting and intriguing read that will generate a lively debate among sport sociologists."

—Anna Lund, Associate Professor of Sociology, Stockholm University, Sweden

 

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Trygve B. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance. Sports not only reflect or reverse social realities, but capture and keep our attention when we use and experience them as a means to reflect on social life, injustice, and hierarchy. More specifically, blending approaches from media studies with ethnography, Broch explores the women-dominated sport of handball in Norway, a country that considers gender equality a basis of democracy. As such, the analyses here show how broadly available meanings about sameness and equality are mediated and experienced through a performative feel for the game.

• cultural sociology
• performance theory
• gender
• media
• youth culture
• Norway
• Norwegian culture
• handball

“I found it to be a challenging read. … I would encourage anyone with an interest in sport and gender to read this book, challenging as it might be, primarily for the stories about the lives and interactions of the young handball players.” (Alan Bairner, idrottsforum.org, June 18, 2020)

“In situating his ethnographic study of handball in Norway in a wider cultural sociological perspective, Broch has provided a refreshing, heterodox account of the experiential appeal and the progressive possibilities of sport. A Performative Feel for the Game is, no doubt, something of a provocation. But, it is one that will repay careful consideration by sport sociologists who are committed to understanding how global sport’s many auto-reproductive gender hierarchies might be shaken and dismantled.” (David Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia, and author of Sport, Culture and the Media (1999) and Global Media Sport (2011))

• Inland Norway University of Applied Scie, Elverum, Norway

  Trygve B. Broch

Trygve B. Broch is Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health and Sport Sciences, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, USA.