REVIEWS | EXCERPT | CONTENTS | AUTHOR BIO | SUBJECT CATEGORIES
How people perform their sexual identities as athletes and spectators
Sportsex
Search the full text of this book
Toby Miller
Interview with Toby Miller, 2001
Outstanding Academic Title, Choice, 2002
"Lively, informed, thoughtful, provocative, and susbstantive...[Sportsex] deals perceptively and quickly with the broadest range of concerns about sexuality and representation in and around the world of high-profile sports."
—Michael Real, Department of Communication, San Diego State University, and author of Global Ritual: Olympic Media Coverage and International Understanding
Sportsex examines the landscape of sports writ globally. And it is about the way sport allows men and women—but mostly men—to consider their looks, their vitality, and their relationship to their gender in ways that would be considered taboo in any other context.
Miller pays particular attention to the way celebrity is considered around the world through a number of different athletic activities. Along the way he also offers his own personal connection to sport as both a researcher and recipient of its abuses and pleasures.
In a world where everything is considered in its relationship to globalization, sport is one of the few arenas of social life that can be concretely seen in international terms. Sportsex opens that world up in a way that is accessible and significant for anyone interested in the shape of our emerging world culture.
Excerpt
Reviews
"Sportsex is the work of impassioned fandom and a voracious cultural appetite."
—Michael Bérubé, Politics and Culture
"A groundbreaking study of the globalization of the body through sports, particularly sports driven by the media and advertisers... Those concerned with sports will debate Miller's stimulating ideas for some time to come."
—Choice
"Miller goes inside the locker room and situates the sports star—whether a lesbian tennis player, an out Austrialian rugby player, or a sexually ambiguous professional basketball player—into the larger contexts of bodily representation, political economy, and identity. As Americans contemplate the public ramifications of other professional athletes coming out of the closet, Miller's in-depth inquiry offers some illuminating perspectives."
—Kevin Arnovitz, Out
"The best book on sexuality and sport to date... There are no other[s] that compete indirectly or directly with this one... [This] book will be seen as a significant contribution and will help shape the field of studies on sport and sexuality."
—Cheryl Cole, Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Finally, a book that gets beyond a simple condemnation of media culture and the way it functions in sport to a more complicated analysis of both positive and negative potentialities. Sportsex explores the sexualization and commodification of both male and female athlete bodies and the consequences for a real destabilization of gender polarities. A fascinating and highly readable contribution to sport and media studies."
—Leslie Heywood, author of Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding and Built to Win: The Rise of the Female Athlete as Cultural Icon
"A hugely enjoyable, smart and sexy examination of the role sports and athletes play in the contemporary lesbian and gay sexual imagination."
—Tim Miller, author of Shirts & Skins
Toby Miller's column about the recent OUT magazine editorial concerning a closeted professional baseball player is now up on The ADVOCATE's website. This is an exclusive piece Miller, author of Sportsex, wrote for the national gay news publication. Read the article.
Contents
Introduction: Sportsextro
1. Bodnam: Body, Nation, Media
2. Commodifying the Male Body = Problematizing Hegemonic Masculinity?
3. Panic Sports and the Racialized Male Body (with Jim McKay and David Rowe)
4. Courting Lesbianism (with Jim McKay and Randy Martin
Conclusion: Bookers with Hooters
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author(s)
 | Toby Miller is Professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy at New York University, and is the author of numerous books on media, culture, and sport, including The Avengers and Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. |