Higher Goals: Women's Ice Hockey and the Politics of Gender

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SUNY Press, Aug 10, 2000 - Sports & Recreation - 182 pages
The most extensive treatment to date of women's experiences in team sports, Higher Goals provides an ethnographic account of the "Blades," a Canadian team that plays at the highest levels of women's hockey. With a vivid depiction of life on the Blades, the book follows the team over two seasons, tracing their journey to a national championship. Key issues in the sociology of sport and gender studies are explored, including the construction of community among women athletes; the "feminine apologetic" and pressures on athletes to conform to feminine ideals; homophobia and the experiences of lesbian athletes; and physicality and women's experience in contact sports.
 

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Contents

The Blades Womens Ice Hockey and Paradoxes of Gender
1
Competitive Dominance Class and the Organization of Womens Hockey
19
The Dynamics of Team Life This Team is about What Happens on the Ice
39
The Everyday World of Elite Womens Hockey
59
The Politics of Gender
79
The Change Room and the Construction of Community
101
Physicality Body Contact and the Construction of Womens Hockey
113
Gender Sport and the Construction of Difference
139
Female Gladiators and the Road Ahead
155
NOTES
165
INDEX
177
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

Nancy Theberge is Professor in the Departments of Kinesiology and Sociology at the University of Waterloo. She is coeditor of Sport and the Sociological Imagination and coauthor of Why People Recreate.