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Rhode Island College • Gender and Women’s Studies
GEN 350
Sex, Sport, and Society
Online Course
Information about the History of Online Courses
Instructor: Dr. Carolyn Fortuna
Email: cfortuna@ric.edu OR c4tuna@aol.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/genderandsport
Office: Whipple, outside our classroom
Classroom: Whipple 218
Phone: (cell) 401-309-3399
Office hours: Thursdays 3:00-4:00, OR by e-mail, by Skype, or by other special arrangement
Catalog Description
Students will conduct multidisciplinary analyses of issues, patterns, and processes surrounding the intersection of gender and sport. Through scholarly and media textual analysis, this course will explore how amateur and professional sports reproduce dominant definitions of femininity and masculinity in society. We will identify how the systems, structures, and institutions of the contemporary sports world have become a primary mechanism for the construction and distribution of gendered identities.
Expanded Description
The objective of this course is to examine--- critically--- the relationship between gender and sport. Sport in contemporary society has great potential and intrinsic promise for positive change around gender dispositions, especially when multiple feminisms --- political, regional and global perspectives --- are taken into consideration. Students will develop discourse analysis and content analysis techniques to explore the social, cultural, and political meanings within sport and gender representations. Through interdisciplinary connections drawn from Social Science and Behavioral Science disciplines, students will examine the politics of gender and sport through constructs of race, sexual orientation and identity, nationalism, and consumer culture. Students will compose with a wide variety of multimodal (print, audio, visual, and digital) classical and contemporary texts.
Structure of the Course
Conversations about and inquiry into power, privilege, gender, sex, feminism, and femininity/masculinity will anchor our course. Students will collaborate by decoding, understanding, and engaging in the rules and codes of academic culture, which we will call "dialogicality." Because the topics, issues, and themes we will discuss will reveal our divergent interpretations of our life experiences, each of us is expected to show respect for and insight into the worldviews of fellow students and the instructor. Most importantly, students will contribute through a combination of prerequisite knowledge around feminist theory, receptivity to additional conceptual frameworks, application of course themes as they evolve, and increasing degrees of personal self-reflection.
Relationship to the Professional Program
This course supports the main goals of Gender and Women's Studies at Rhode Island College, which are to discover and communicate new knowledge about women, to reexamine and reinterpret existing knowledge about women, and to synthesize and integrate this understanding into the tradition disciplines. Students in this course will articulate diverse theoretical perspectives related to understanding gender roles and gender oppression. They will continue to gain understanding of and respect for difference in their lives as they encounter issues in which class, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation influence the diversity of the female experience.
Relationship to the Conceptual Framework of Gender and Women’s Studies
Because Gender and Women's Studies is a flexible, versatile program that supports many careers, students in this course will continue to develop writing, critical thinking, research, public presentation, and leadership skills that are valuable in multiple fields. The experiences in this course can apply to subsequent careers in teaching, writing, law, social work, business, creative arts, government, journalism, medicine, science, public advocacy, and many other areas. The broad interdisciplinary work of this course translates into informed citizenship, inquiry-oriented graduate work, and personally satisfying employment.
Course Objectives:
As a result of taking this course, the student should be able to:
1. Promote an understanding and appreciation of the ways that sport serves as a reflection of dominant constructions of gender in society.
2. Engage in academic discourse through accommodating a language of interpretation to analyze how gender is learned and produced, both historically and in the contemporary world.
3. Analyze texts about gender and sport within scholarship, journalism, fiction, and contemporary media, with the goal of unpacking various representations of gender and sport in textual messages.
4. Interrogate gender role stereotypes as they apply to amateur and professional sports, including debates about physiology that inform the predominance and perpetuation of sex-segregated teams in sport.
5. Identify major milestones in the history of females in sport so as to develop an understanding of gender inequality and how it varies historically, today, across cultures, and within other group structures.
6. Recognize the issues related to gender, heterosexism, and homophobia in sport.
7. Explain how the market economy feeds into emphases on hegemonic sporting masculinity.
8. Demonstrate the ability to clearly communicate via current research on specific topics through written and online compositions/discussions.
9. Develop skills of analytical and critical thinking, information literacy, reading complex texts (including non-print media), writing, and speaking effectively and persuasively.
10. 10. Research according to the methodology of the social sciences, including conducting field research, interviews, data collection, and of doing analysis of readings in social and behavioral sciences.
11. Offer recommendations for the ways that sport can be a mechanism to improve society through innovative thinking around gender.
Pre-Requisites:
Students should have mastery knowledge of topics and themes within foundational Gender 200 courses, such as the capacity to:
· * probe gender as one of the foundations of every existing social order in gender and society;
· * consider competing theories and approaches to gender and sexuality, and explore the ways in which these intersect with concepts of race, ethnicity, age and class;
· * promote both the study of gender and feminist scholarship;
· * and, reflect on the social and structural implications of gender through multidisciplinary approach.
Texts
The texts for this class include scholarly journal articles, newspaper and magazine articles, poems, song lyrics, book excerpts, and other texts. I have placed these and other resources on the Blackboard website I created specifically for this class. Thus, students do not have to purchase any texts for this course. To access the necessary materials for this course, please log into your browser, then go to and bookmark our class website:
Because all of our course materials are transmitted electronically, I strongly recommend that students bring a laptop, tablet, or Smart Phone to class, if possible, to refer to materials under discussion. Access to technology also gives students the option to compose electronically when called upon for critical analysis and reflection. Based on the needs on the class, some small alterations to the texts or sequence may occur as the semester evolves.
Basic Expectations
As an upper level undergraduate seminar, this course relies on students’ active participation both in and outside of class. I expect each student to read the required text(s) before coming to class each week and/or to compose insightfully and to be prepared to discuss all texts--- original and assigned. Whether reading online or from a print copy, students should refer to electronic, typed, or written prepared notes in class. To comprehend texts in meaningfully ways, students should underline, highlight, write in the margins, and/or use comments in Word. What should students annotate? Note the argument statement, supporting details/ key concepts, areas of the text that stand out, unfamiliar vocabulary, points of confusion/frustration: strive to see the specifics and the overarching picture. Students do not have to be experts on the issues — but they should come prepared to engage in the collaborative interpretation. Through the process of talking out the issues and listening to others work out their own deductions, we will all come to a richer understanding of the concepts at hand.
In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, Rhode Island College is committed to making reasonable efforts to assist individuals with disabilities. Students with any special needs should make arrangements to meet with me as soon as possible. The Student Life Office (CL 127 — 456-8061) is also available to you as a resource.
I will make all appropriate accommodations to ensure that this is a valuable class for you.
Course Schedule
Overview of Topics
A Note on Grading Distribution:
The grading system for this course is as follows:
· Participation (attendance, contributions to class, timeliness of assignment submissions): 5%
· Sports Autobiography: 10%
· Title IX Explorations: 15%
· Same Sex Orientation Video Learning Module: 15%
· Content Analyses of Female Athletes of Color: 15%
· Replication Study: 15%
· Final Presentation: 25%
In-Depth Descriptions of Assignments Due
Sports Autobiography (10%): You will write a 3-page, double-spaced personal narrative about your sport/ game/ physical activity experiences. Use first person narrator and lots of voice and imagery. Allow us, as your readers, to be with you as you describe your life journey in conjunction with sports/ games/ physical activities. Tell us the story of you, your life, and your world view through your sports journeys.
Your personal narrative should include information on:
· what sorts of games you played while growing up;
· with whom you played these sports;
· sport heroes and other influential figures that affected your decision to play (or not to play) sports and other games;
· describe sporting opportunities that you were or were not offered;
· speculate as to why these opportunities did or did not occur;
· the positive and negative experiences of sport and physical activity;
· the impact these experiences had on your life;
· what sport means in your life now;
· what sport meant to you as a child.
Sports Autobiography Rubric
Title IX Explorations (15%): You will research a series of texts around the Title IX legislation and then write your own transformational composition as part of our teaching and learning hybridity.
Title IX is a short and simple federal law: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
Your assignment has two parts. 1) Follow the directions within a Webquest survey of texts, in which you will explore various points of view of constituents. These individuals’ lives and capacities to participate in sports were affected by lack of legal gender equity and, subsequently, by Title IX legislation, which infused new requirements and opportunities around gender into U.S. culture.
2) Write a transformational composition, in which you assume the fictional point of view of a female who was deprived of equity in sports prior to Title IX legislation. [Full instructions for both parts of this assignment are located on our class Blackboard website.]
Title IX Learning Module Rubric
PART I: Survey of Texts
PART II: Transformational Writing
Content Analyses of Images of Female Athletes of Color (15%): Conduct a Content Analysis of three of the images, one at a time.
For each image you choose, write a 4-7 sentence Content Analysis that synthesizes all your content analysis interpretations analytically. In other words, what is the significance of the visual image in relation to sports, culture, gender, and society?
· Offer a detailed description of each object in the visual image you are observing.
· Describe how particular objects in the visual image relate to other objects in the visual image.
· Explain the symbols, representations, or allusions from culture come to mind when you view this visual image.
· Identify any social and/ or historical basis for symbols, representations, or allusions in the image.
· Discuss the author of this visual image briefly. Examine who and what the target audience is.
Scholarly Article Rubric
4 Points - The replies are excellent: they weave the essential information from the prompts, direct excerpt(s) you chose from the class reading, and your own interpretation of important ideas.
3 Points - The replies are very good: they weave most of the essential information from the prompts, do or do not include a direct excerpt from the class reading, and include your own interpretation of important ideas.
2 Points - The replies are satisfactory: they weave the some information from the prompts, the class viewing/ readings, and/or your own interpretation of important ideas.
Rubric: Visual Analyses of Female Athletes of Color
Rubric for Replying to Online Posts
2 Points - The reply is excellent: it weaves the essential information from the prompt, the class readings, and the response into his or her discussion of the topic.
1 Points - The reply is very good: it weaves the most of the essential information from the prompt, the class readings, and the response into his or her discussion of the topic.
0 Point – The reply is unsatisfactory: it may be a simple "me, too" comment that neither expands the conversation nor demonstrates any degree of reflection by the student.
A Replication Study--- Representations of Masculinity in Media Sports Texts (15%):
You will plan a survey of one significant television sports media texts. You will devise a study that is comparable to a section of the data sample that Messner, et al conducted (2 hours of Sports Center on ESPN, 90 minutes of Extreme sports on Fox and ESPN, 2 hours of professional boxing [or other sport that falls outside the top four of baseball, basketball, football, and hockey], 2 playoff games of basketball, 2 broadcasts of football, 1 broadcast of baseball). Messner’s researchers totaled 23 hours of sports programming, “nearly one quarter of which was time taken up by commercials” (76).
After viewing your segment(s), compare your findings against the “Televised Manhood Formula” that the Messner research group found. You should offer a nuanced interpretation of your contemporary televised sports media text, drawing on the work we have done together in the course and the Messner study. Because your presentation must be multimodal (at least four of the following five modalities: visual, video, audio, digital, and print), you must create your presentation on your blog, and you must navigate the blog as you deliver your presentation. You may also infuse another electronic type of program. [Suggestions = Google website; Windows Movie; Pinterest; Prezi].
Messner Replication Study: Representations of Masculinity in Media Sports Texts
Final Gender and Sports Media Analysis Project (25%): Choose Intersectional themes from our Gender and Sports course that interest you (race, sexual orientation, gender identity, consumer culture, nationalism/globalism, etc.) and make for compelling research.
Develop your themes through designing and answering a research question. Compose an argument statement that answers the research question, based on the data that you accumulate during your study.
Compile your textual analyses on your Final Project blog. Your original multimodal composition must be grounded in the methodology of the social sciences and must include:
· 1 example of your own field research;
· 1 (minimum) reading from this class as support for your argument;
· 3 scholarly articles (with evidence that you have unpacked them for the same criteria in the scholarly research protocol);
· 3 (minimum) discourse analysis protocols (print text, such as a blog, poems, newspaper article, magazine article, editorial, short stories, song lyrics, advertisement, comic books, graphic novels);
· 3 (minimum) content analysis protocols (visual or video text such as a commercial, You Tube short film, film trailer, music videos, televised interviews, video games).
Your presentation to the class should incorporate multiple modalities (digital, audio, visual, video, and print modalities) and should really engage the class.
You’ll present your project orally to the class in a 20-minute presentation allotment of time. Please practice running your presentation ahead of time so your delivery will be fluid and you’ll shine!