You’d Look Terrible in a Skirt!: Masculinities and Men’s Netball

Brendon Robert Tagg (2008). You’d Look Terrible in a Skirt!: Masculinities and Men’s Netball PhD Thesis, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland.

       
Attached Files (Some files may be inaccessible until you login with your UQ eSpace credentials)
Name Description MIMEType Size Downloads
n40914747_phd_abstract.pdf n40914747_phd_abstract.pdf application/pdf 20
n40914747_phd_content.pdf n40914747_phd_content.pdf application/pdf 0
n40914747_phd_front.pdf n40914747_phd_front.pdf application/pdf 462
n40914747_phd_totalthesis.pdf n40914747_phd_totalthesis.pdf application/pdf 13
Author Brendon Robert Tagg
Thesis Title You’d Look Terrible in a Skirt!: Masculinities and Men’s Netball
School, Centre or Institute School of Social Science
Institution The University of Queensland
Publication date 2008-03
Thesis type PhD Thesis
Supervisor Johnson, Helen
Phillips, Murray
Subjects 220000 Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts - General
Formatted abstract A rapidly growing body of literature reveals that sport is a significant site for the perpetuation of hegemonic masculine ideology. However, there has been remarkably little research investigating masculinities within female-dominated sports such as netball. In order to help fill such a gap in the literature, this project provides an ethnographic account of élite male netball players in southern New Zealand.
The project investigated the ways that men’s netball players reconciled participation in a stereotypically ‘feminine’ sport with rigid local definitions of masculinity. Of specific interest were the ways in which players challenged and/or reproduced (a) hegemonic masculinity, (b) stereotypes of sport as an inherently ‘masculine’ activity, and (c) netball’s reputation as a ‘feminine’ sport. The thesis also considered how players reconciled stereotypes of men’s netball with their own experiences.
In the first part of the thesis, academic literature, popular literature and media conceptions of masculinities in sport are reviewed in order to formally identify themes of hegemonic masculinity and constructions of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ sports participation. In the second part, which was based on participant-observation, an understanding of the grounded ‘ways of being’ a male netball player and their inherent social contradictions are presented using a phenomenological existentialist perspective. The final part provides a series of in-depth, open-ended interviews with élite men’s netball players. Anchored in the hermeneutic tradition, the participants’ lay language is provided as the most accurate reflection of their ways of seeing and relating to both their sporting subculture and society in general.
Through the combination of these methods and theories derived from critical feminism, radical feminism, and post-modern feminism, the ways in which hegemonic discourses envision men’s netball players are explained and a reflexive understanding of how individual players construct, negotiate, and resist dominant conceptions of masculinity is developed.


 
Citation counts: Google Scholar Search Google Scholar
Access Statistics: 1077 Abstract Views, 495 File Downloads  -  Detailed Statistics
Created: Tue, 07 Oct 2008, 12:01:52 EST by Noela Stallard on behalf of Library - Information Access Service