In recent decades, there has been a generational shift of the US veterans' peace movement, from one grounded mostly in the experiences of older white men of the Vietnam War era, to one informed by a young, diverse cohort of post-9/11 veterans. In Unconventional Combat, Michael A. Messner traces this transformation through the life-history interviews of six veterans of color to show how their experiences of sexual and gender harassment, sexual assault, racist and homophobic abuse during their military service has shaped their political views and action. Drawing upon participant observation with the Veterans For Peace and About Face organizations and interviews with older male veterans as his backdrop, Messner shows how veterans' military experiences form their collective "situated knowledge" of intersecting oppressions. This knowledge, Messner argues, further shapes their intersectional praxis, which promises to transform the veterans' peace movement and potentially link their anti-militarist work with other movement groups working for change. As intersectionality has increasingly become central to the conversation on social movements, Unconventional Combat is not only a story about the US veterans' peace movement, but it also offers broad relevance to the larger world of social justice activism.

Vivid narratives, fresh insights, and new theories on where gender theory and research stand today Since scholars began interrogating the meaning of gender and sexuality in society, this field has become essential to the study of sociology. Gender Reckonings aims to map new directions for understanding gender and sexuality within a more pragmatic, dynamic, and socially relevant framework. It shows how gender relations must be understood on a large scale as well as in intimate detail. The contributors return to the basics, questioning how gender patterns change, how we can realize gender equality, and how the structures of gender impact daily life. Gender Reckonings covers not only foundational concepts of gender relations and gender justice, but also explores postcolonial patterns of gender, intersectionality, gender fluidity, transgender practices, neoliberalism, and queer theory. Gender Reckonings combines the insights of gender and sexuality scholars from different generations, fields, and world regions. The editors and contributors are leading social scientists from six continents, and the book gives vivid accounts of the changing politics of gender in different communities. Rich in empirical detail and novel thinking, Gender Reckonings is a lasting resource for students, researchers, activists, policymakers, and everyone concerned with gender justice.

Is sport good for kids? When answering this question, both critics and advocates of youth sports tend to fixate on matters of health, whether condemning contact sports for their concussion risk or prescribing athletics as a cure for the childhood obesity epidemic. Child's Play presents a more nuanced examination of the issue, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports - in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television - play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society. Rather than focusing exclusively on self-proclaimed jocks, the book considers how the culture of sports affects a wide variety of children and young people, including those who opt out of athletics. Not only does Child's Play examine disparities across lines of race, class, and gender, it also offers detailed examinations of how various minority populations, from transgender youth to Muslim immigrant girls, have participated in youth sports. Taken together, these essays offer a wide range of approaches to understanding the sociology of youth sports, including data-driven analyses that examine national trends, as well as ethnographic research that gives a voice to individual kids. Child's Play thus presents a comprehensive and compelling analysis of how, for better and for worse, the culture of sports is integral to the development of young people - and with them, the future of our society.

Is sport good for kids? When answering this question, both critics and advocates of youth sports tend to fixate on matters of health, whether condemning contact sports for their concussion risk or prescribing athletics as a cure for the childhood obesity epidemic. Child's Play presents a more nuanced examination of the issue, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports - in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television - play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society. Rather than focusing exclusively on self-proclaimed jocks, the book considers how the culture of sports affects a wide variety of children and young people, including those who opt out of athletics. Not only does Child's Play examine disparities across lines of race, class, and gender, it also offers detailed examinations of how various minority populations, from transgender youth to Muslim immigrant girls, have participated in youth sports. Taken together, these essays offer a wide range of approaches to understanding the sociology of youth sports, including data-driven analyses that examine national trends, as well as ethnographic research that gives a voice to individual kids. Child's Play thus presents a comprehensive and compelling analysis of how, for better and for worse, the culture of sports is integral to the development of young people - and with them, the future of our society.

Michael Messner, already known for his nuanced explorations of masculinities in sport, here humanely explores the evolving, often confusing dynamics of masculinities between three generations of boys and men. This candid memoir will make engrossing reading for both seasoned scholars and newcomers to gender studies. Cynthia Enloe, author of Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War For decades, feminist scholars, memoirists, and novelists have explored the lineaments of mother-daughter relationships, yet the world of fathers and sons has garnered relatively little attention. In his closely observed memoir, King of the Wild Suburb, noted Gender Studies scholar Michael Messner opens up the affective terrain between fathers and sons, and in the process deepens and complicates our understanding of masculinity. Alice Echols, author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture Michael Messner's reflections on coming of age in the pivotal Sixties deftly captures the fault lines that separated so many young men and women from the lives of their parents and grandparents. It was, perhaps, easier for young women to rebel and choose careers over homemaking than it was for young men to opt out of a culture that made war, guns, and hunting the anchors of manhood. King of the Wild Suburb helps us understand how masculinity has changed, albeit still precariously, making it possible to maintain a fidelity to one's past while passing on to the next generation a freedom to explore new ways to be a man. Jan E. Dizard, author of Mortal Stakes: Hunters and Hunting in Contemporary America

Today, in a world quite different from the one that existed just thirty years ago, both girls and boys play soccer, baseball, softball, and other youth sports. Yet has the dramatic surge in participation by girls contributed to greater gender equality? In this engaging study, leading sociologist Michael A. Messner probes the richly complex gender dynamics of youth sports. Weaving together vivid first-person interviews with his own experiences as a volunteer for his sons' teams, Messner finds that despite the movement of girls into sports, gender boundaries and hierarchies still dominate, especially among the adults who run youth sports. His book widens into a provocative exploration of why youth sports matter - how they play a profound role in shaping gender, class, family, and community.

Why is the American male's sense of self so closely intertwined with his success, or failure, as an athlete? What are the physical and emotional costs, to individual men and society at large, of engaging in organized athletics? Are sports good for men and boys? Michael Messner addresses these questions and more in his fascinating new study of masculinity and sports. Using interviews with thirty male former athletes, Messner argues that sports, so central to the lives of millions of boys and men, play a key role in shaping our society's definition of what it means to be a man. Messner shows us that lifelong relationships with colleagues, friends, lovers, wives, and children are affected by the barriers to intimacy constructed through sports. America's jock culture equates true manhood with athletic success, driving men to view the world in terms of status, power, and privilege. The Lombardian ethic that "winning isn't everything; it's the only thing" pushes America's athletes to continue to play even when hurt, to take drugs, and to treat women and others as mere objects. Sexism, homophobia, and racism pervade the world of sports, and Messner's conversations with male athletes of different races, classes, and sexual orientations reveal their struggles to reconcile the world of sports with the reality of their private lives. America's boys and men, as well as its girls and women, can find camaraderie and pleasure on the playing field, but the rules of the game must change first. The rules will only shift, Messner convinces us, when we begin to change our definitions of what it is to be men and women.

Vivid narratives, fresh insights, and new theories on where gender theory and research stand today Since scholars began interrogating the meaning of gender and sexuality in society, this field has become essential to the study of sociology. Gender Reckonings aims to map new directions for understanding gender and sexuality within a more pragmatic, dynamic, and socially relevant framework. It shows how gender relations must be understood on a large scale as well as in intimate detail. The contributors return to the basics, questioning how gender patterns change, how we can realize gender equality, and how the structures of gender impact daily life. Gender Reckonings covers not only foundational concepts of gender relations and gender justice, but also explores postcolonial patterns of gender, intersectionality, gender fluidity, transgender practices, neoliberalism, and queer theory. Gender Reckonings combines the insights of gender and sexuality scholars from different generations, fields, and world regions. The editors and contributors are leading social scientists from six continents, and the book gives vivid accounts of the changing politics of gender in different communities. Rich in empirical detail and novel thinking, Gender Reckonings is a lasting resource for students, researchers, activists, policymakers, and everyone concerned with gender justice.

In just a few decades, sport has undergone a radical gender transformation. However, Cheryl Cooky and Michael A. Messner suggest that the progress toward gender equity in sports is far from complete. The continuing barriers to full and equal participation for young people, the far lower pay for most elite-level women athletes, and the continuing dearth of fair and equal media coverage all underline how much still has yet to change before we see gender equality in sports. The chapters in No Slam Dunk show that is this not simply a story of an "unfinished revolution." Rather, they contend, it is simplistic optimism to assume that we are currently nearing the conclusion of a story of linear progress that ends with a certain future of equality and justice. This book provides important theoretical and empirical insights into the contemporary world of sports to help explain the unevenness of social change and how, despite significant progress, gender equality in sports has been ""No Slam Dunk"".

In the past, when sport simply excluded girls, the equation of males with active athletic power and of females with weakness and passivity seemed to come easily, almost naturally. Now, however, with girls' and women's dramatic movement into sport, the process of exclusion has become a bit subtler, a bit more complicated -- and yet, as Michael Messner shows us in this provocative book, no less effective. In Taking the Field, Messner argues that despite profound changes, the world of sport largely retains and continues its longtime conservative role in gender relations.

To explore the current paradoxes of gender in sport, Messner identifies and investigates three levels at which the "center" of sport is constructed: the day-to-day practices of sport participants, the structured rules and hierarchies of sport institutions, and the dominant symbols and belief systems transmitted by the major sports media. Using these insights, he analyzes a moment of gender construction in the lives of four- and five-year-old children at a soccer opening ceremony, the way men's violence is expressed through sport, the interplay of financial interests and dominant men's investment in maintaining the status quo in the face of recent challenges, and the cultural imagery at the core of sport, particularly televised sports. Through these examinations Messner lays bare the practices and ideas that buttress -- as well as those that seek to disrupt -- the masculine center of sport.

Taking the Field exposes the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which men and women collectively construct gender through their interactions -- interactions contextualized in the institutions and symbols of sport.

The profound changes wrought by the feminist movement were by no means restricted to women. In the years since feminism has taken root, the role of men and masculinity has begun to undergo its own redefinition. Michael A. Messner provides a sociological framework to understand the responses of men to the changes, challenges, and crises in the social organization of gender. By examining not only what certain groups of men say about gender but what they do, Messner helps to illuminate the various social movements engaged with the politics of masculinity. Politics of Masculinities is one of the first books in the new Gender Lens series, which will look at the social world through the lens of gender. The mission of the series is to unpack the assumptions about gender that pervade social life, and to examine the centrality of these assumptions to the way we perceive and interpret our world. Politics of Masculinities is an ideal introduction to the discussion of gender roles and masculinity. This book will be of interest to students and professionals involved in gender studies, sociology, and menAEs studies. This product is now available from: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Phone: 800-462-6420 Fax: 800-338-4550 http: \\www.rowmanlittlefield.com

The profound changes wrought by the feminist movement were by no means restricted to women. In the years since feminism has taken root, the role of men and masculinity has begun to undergo its own redefinition. Michael A. Messner provides a sociological framework to understand the responses of men to the changes, challenges, and crises in the social organization of gender. By examining not only what certain groups of men say about gender but what they do, Messner helps to illuminate the various social movements engaged with the politics of masculinity. Politics of Masculinities is one of the first books in the new Gender Lens series, which will look at the social world through the lens of gender. The mission of the series is to unpack the assumptions about gender that pervade social life, and to examine the centrality of these assumptions to the way we perceive and interpret our world. Politics of Masculinities is an ideal introduction to the discussion of gender roles and masculinity. This book will be of interest to students and professionals involved in gender studies, sociology, and menAEs studies

What does it mean for men to join with women as allies in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence? Based on life history interviews with men and women anti-violence activists aged 22 to 70, Some Men explores the strains and tensions of men's work as feminist allies. When feminist women began to mobilize against rape and domestic violence, setting up shelters and rape crisis centers, a few men asked what they could do to help. They were directed "upstream," and told to "talk to the men" with the goal of preventing future acts of violence. This is a book about men who took this charge seriously, committing themselves to working with boys and men to stop violence, and to change the definition of what it means to be a man. The book examines the experiences of three generational cohorts: a movement cohort of men who engaged with anti-violence work in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of the feminist anti-violence mobilizations; a bridge cohort who engaged with anti-violence work from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, as feminism receded as a mass movement and activists built sustainable organizations; a professional cohort who engaged from the mid-1990s to the present, as anti-violence work has become embedded in community and campus organizations, non-profits, and the state. Across these different time periods, stories from life history interviews illuminate men's varying paths-including men of different ethnic and class backgrounds-into anti-violence work. Some Men explores the promise of men's violence prevention work with boys and men in schools, college sports, fraternities, and the U.S. military. It illuminates the strains and tensions of such work-including the reproduction of male privilege in feminist spheres-and explores how men and women navigate these tensions.

A revealing look at gender issues in contemporary sport.