Sportista

Female Fandom in the United States

Andrei S. Markovits, Emily Albertson

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781439909645, 9781439909638
• eBook ISBN: 9781439909652
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The typical female sports fan remains very different from her male counterparts. In their insightful and engaging book, Sportista, Andrei S. Markovits and Emily Albertson examine the significant ways many women have become fully conversant with sports—acquiring a knowledge of and passion for them as a way of forging identities that until recently were quite alien to women.
 
Sportista chronicles the relationship that women have developed with sports in the wake of the second wave of feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The changes women athletes have achieved have been nothing short of revolutionary. But, as Markovits and Albertson argue, women's identities as sports fans, though also changed in recent decades, remain notably different from that of men. Sportista highlights the impediments to these changes that women have faced and the reality that, even as bona fide fans, they "speak" sports differently from and remain largely unaccepted by men.

In the series Politics, History and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Youth The Origins of Gender Difference in Sport
• 2. Women in Men’s Worlds Process of Exclusion and Suppression of Females in Male-Dominated Realms Other Than Sport
• 3. Women as Sports Producers Progress and Problems
• 4. Fandom and the Typical Female Sports Fan
• 5. Sportista I: Professional Women in the Contested Space of Sports Media Issues of Entry and Acceptance
• 6. Sportista II: Following as a Hobby, the A-Typical Female Sports Fan Superfans in Their Own Right, with Their Own Voice, and Speaking Their Own Language
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Lists of Interviewees
• Index