A Performative Feel for the Game

"The meaning of sport is gendered-but not always as we might be imagining. A Performative Feel for the Game goes beyond taken-for-granted gender hierarchies. Through a cultural analysis of Norwegian handball, Trygve Broch teaches us how narratives, historical myths and welfare policies intermingle with processes of democratization, showing how sport is not reducible to power and inequality. A multifaceted social and existential sphere is thereby opened up. This is an exciting and intriguing read that will generate a lively debate among sport sociologists."

-Anna Lund, Associate Professor of Sociology, Stockholm University, Sweden

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Trygve B. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance. Sports not only reflect or reverse social realities, but capture and keep our attention when we use and experience them as a means to reflect on social life, injustice, and hierarchy. More specifically, blending approaches from media studies with ethnography, Broch explores the women-dominated sport of handball in Norway, a country that considers gender equality a basis of democracy. As such, the analyses here show how broadly available meanings about sameness and equality are mediated and experienced through a performative feel for the game.