A Review of Gendered Consumption in Sport and Leisure

Academy of Marketing Science Review,  2003  by Chun, Seungwoo,  McQuillan, Julia

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Lee McGinnis is an Assistant Professor of Marketing, Henderson 311-0, 1700 SW College Ave, Topeka, KS 66621, lee.mcginnis@washburn.edu, 785-231-1010, ext. 1894, FAX: 785-231-1063. Seungwoo Chun is a Marketing Doctoral Student, Department of Marketing, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln NE 68588-0492, schun@unlserve.edu, 402-472-2316. Julia McQuillan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 706 Oldfather Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588, jmcquillan2@unl.edu, 402-472-6616. Please send all correspondence to Lee McGinnis. This article is part of a special issue on "Gender Issues in Consumer Research" edited by James Gentry, Seungwoo Chun, Suraj Commuri, Eileen Fischer, Sunkyu Jun, Lee McGinnis, Kay Palan, and Michal Strahilevitz.

How are women's leisure and sport activities valued compared to men's? To answer this question, we review research from leisure sciences, sociology, history, and marketing. We use Firat's (1994) modern significations of gender framework to analyze how activities in contemporary Western cultures are separated into men's and women's and differentially valued. Even though the possibilities, freedom, and promise of a postmodern society hold out the likelihood of a post-gender society, gender as a system signifying differential value still exists (Firat 1994). Focusing on sports and leisure, we show that what is associated with women and femininity is devalued compared to what is associated with men and masculinity.

The hegemonic ideology of two genders is powerful in contemporary society. Examining insights from bodies that do not neatly fit into either category illuminates how "believing is seeing" when it comes to gender (Lorber 1994). Fausto-Sterling (2002) describes the changes in medical approaches to bodies that are not neatly feminine or masculine from helping individuals to live with their situation to medically altering infants to fit society's categories. She argues that at least five sexes would be more accurate than two, and that ideally we should think of sex as a continuum - "I would further argue that sex is a vast, infinitely malleable continuum that defies the constraints of even five categories" (Fausto-Sterling 2002, p. 469). She uses Foucault's notion of biopower to describe the "multiple contradictions" of the power to surgically control the "very sex of human body." While she accepts that the intent was to bring greater happiness, she does not agree that this is the only way. She says:

...if one accepts the assumption that in a sex-divided culture people can realize their greatest potential for happiness and productivity only if they are sure that they belong to one of only two acknowledged sexes, modern medicine has been extremely successful. On the other hand, the same medical accomplishments can be read not as progress but as a mode of discipline. Hermaphrodites have unruly bodies. They do not fall naturally into a binary classification; only a surgical shoehorn can put them there... Society mandates the control of intersexual bodies because they blur and bridge the great divide... In my ideal world medical intervention for intersexuals would take place only rarely before the age of reason; subsequent treatment would be a cooperative venture between physician, patient, and other advisers trained in issues of gender multiplicity. I do not pretend that the transition to my utopia would be smooth. Sex, even supposedly "normal," heterosexual kind, continues to cause untold anxieties in Western society...(Fausto-Sterling 2002, p. 471-472).

In this analysis, we explore changes in the world of sports and leisure to see how close we are to the simpler utopian world of participation without regard for gender. We first focus on the significations of gender categories developed from Firat's (1994) modern framework to a sports and leisure context. In the process, we add further explanation as to why these categories exist and offer some examples as to how they served as a divide between men and women in the modern era (assuming we are moving away from the modern era). With this categorization system, we are not attempting to prove or disprove any postmodernism arguments that have emerged in consumer research; we only use these categories as a convenient and efficient way to systematically assess the relevance of gender for contemporary sports and leisure.

Next we explore whether the different notions of masculinity and femininity constrain sports and leisure experiences. In other words, have the blurring of gender categories allowed people to be less constrained by notions of masculinity and femininity when making sports and leisure choices? Have these categories become so blurred that it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify engagement in a particular activity as masculine or feminine? Work from Firat (1994) and Firat and Venkatesh (1995) suggests that consumption experiences of men and women might become less constrained in postmodern societies due to such "blurring."