Abstract
Despite its title, Markovits’ and Albertson’s Sportista is as much a book about men as it is about women. The authors argue that while most men become “native speakers” of sports, women tend to “speak” sports with an accent due to different gendered socializations as well as a historical association of sports with masculinity. Furthermore, it is paradoxically the democratic nature of sports fandom—that is, the lack of formal credentials that are required to claim membership in the world of sports fans which often allows fandom to transgress race, class, and nationality—that serves to marginalize passionate and knowledgeable female sports fans. Since talking sports is so engrained in masculinity—and assumed to be so foreign to women—men serve as gatekeepers of “true” fandom and continually redefine the threshold of who gains entry.
Boys are steered toward sports and sports talk, while girls continue to be presumed disinterested. After presenting research about the social mechanisms that continue to impede women’s access into male-dominated spaces, the authors turn to their investigation of women as producers (i.e., athletes) and consumers (i.e., fans and spectators) of sports. Drawing on studies from the United States and Europe, as well as surveys and qualitative interviews conducted with college students and female sports journalists, they explore how the highly masculine world of sports is experienced by female student athletes, casual female sports fans and so-called sportistas—the small minority of women who are highly “literate” in sports. Markovits and Albertson subclassify sportistas into female sports fans (amateur sportistas) and female sports reporters (professional sportistas).
The authors argue that although audiences for major sporting events are almost 50 percent female, the typical female sports fan follows sports differently than the average male fan. The world of many men revolves around following, practicing, and talking (and bonding by means of) sports. In contrast, for most female athletes and casual fans, sports remain more confined to the field, the practice facility and the event itself and do not extend into their every conversation, as these women have no interest in reading every preview, recap, and analysis of last night’s game.
Turning to the small minority of sportistas, Markovits and Albertson argue that for these women being strongly vested in the world of sports means reconciling tensions between their interest in this male domain and their femininity, which puts them in a no-win situation. Being constantly forced to prove knowledge in order to be accepted as a legitimate fan, the sportista necessarily falls short because the exclusive club of sports fans has already predetermined what a “real fan” is (namely, not female) and judges her every mishap in sports trivia as proof of what is already known: that a woman remains an outsider to this world. At the same time, however, the sportista is not only forced to continually reaffirm her femininity but also to defend her hard-earned and precarious status at the margins of “true” fandom by distancing herself from other women in her attempt to prove that she is more than a bandwagon fan. Navigating these contradictions, the sportista is inevitably pushed to the margins of both the male and the female communities of sports fans.
Sportista is a well-argued and original work and its shortcomings lie primarily in its limited scope. In this way, the title of the book is somewhat misleading, as Sportista is not a comprehensive study of US female sports fandom, but exclusively deals with young, white, middle-class (and implicitly heterosexual?) college students. Not only are a wide range of female sports fans absent from this discussion, but we also miss out on an intersectional analysis of how race, class, sexuality, age, and gender play out in sports fandom. Is it harder or easier for these white middle-class college students to find acceptance as sportistas than it would be for working-class women or women of color? And is there an added pressure for queer women to reject the world of sports because of possible experiences of being defeminized or is this even a facilitator in entering this male domain?
Despite these shortcomings, Sportista is an important and engaging contribution to the field of sports and gender—as well as the study of masculinities—that convincingly analyzes the glass ceiling in sports fandom.