Beer, Babes, and Balls: Masculinity and Sports Talk Radio

by David Nylund, Eric Anderson (Foreword by)

Overview

Beer, Babes, and Balls explores the increasingly popular genre of sports talk radio and how it relates to contemporary ideas of masculinity. Popular culture plays a significant role in fashioning identities, and sports talk radio both reflects and inspires cultural shifts in masculinity. Through analysis of the content of sports talk radio as well as interviews with radio production staff and audience members, scholar and avid sports talk radio listener David Nylund sheds light on certain aspects of contemporary masculinity and recent shifts in gender and sexual politics. He finds that although sports talk radio reproduces many aspects of traditional masculinity, sexism, racism, and heterosexism, there are exceptions in these discourses. For instance, the most popular national host, Jim Rome, is against homophobia and racism in sport, which indicates that the medium may be a place for male sports fans to discuss gender, race, and sexuality in consequential ways. Nylund concludes that sports talk radio creates a male bonding community that has genuine moments of intimacy and connection, signifying the potential for new forms of masculinity to emerge, while simultaneously reproducing traditional forms of masculinity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791479421
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Series:	SUNY series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	206
File size:	546 KB

About the Author

David Nylund is Assistant Professor of Social Work at California State University at Sacramento. He is the author of Treating Huckleberry Finn: A New Narrative Approach to Working with Kids Diagnosed ADD/ADHD and the coeditor (with Craig Smith) of Narrative Therapies with Children and Adolescents.

Table of Contents

Foreword Eric Anderson xi

Acknowledgments xv

1 Opening Pitch: Thinking about Sports Talk Radio 1

Sports Talk Radio 2

Theorizing Masculinities 5

Development of Manhood in Twentieth-Century United States 8

Masculinity and the Sports Media 10

Media and Cultural Studies 14

Critical Radio Studies 15

Outline of the Book 17

Part I The Climate for Sports Talk Radio

2 The Sports Talk Radio Industry: From Rush to Rome 21

Radio Deregulation and Talk Radio 22

Sports Talk Radio: An Extension of Political Talk Radio? 26

3 Inside the Sports Radio Industry: Ads and Lads 28

Influence of Advertising, Ratings, and Corporate Radio 29

Sports Radio and Public Discourse 33

Romantic Belief in Sports 37

Hanging Out at the Station 43

Part II Reading Sports Talk Radio

4 The Jim Rome Show: "Myspace.com" For Men 53

Jim Rome: Hip Sports Talk Radio Host 54

Speech Codes and Themes: Learning How to Survive in the Jungle 58

The "Jungle": A Site for the Performance of Masculinity 59

Male Rite of Passage on The Jim Rome Show 61

In-Group Humor on The Jim Rome Show 64

The Contradictions of Masculinity 66

5 Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Jungle 68

Gender: Competing Masculinities 69

Gender: Women in the Jungle 72

Queer Eye for the Sports Guy 75

The Race Card 90

Rome Has No Class 99

Jungle Nationalism 102

Hegemony or Hope? Sports Talk Radio's Potential 106

Part III The Audience of Sports Talk Radio

6 In the Jungle with the "Clones" 111

Interviewing the "Clones" 112

The Entertainment Value 117

Homosociality 118

The Audience Does Social Issues 120

7 Where Everybody Knows Your Name 124

Cheers to MondayNight Football 125

Lou From Lodi 130

A Community of Callers 136

Among the [Clones] Hooligans 141

8 A Sports Radio Intruder 148

My Take on the Audience of Sports Talk Radio 151

9 My Final Take 155

Sports Talk and Civic Discourse 156

Sports and Sexuality 159

Masculinity and Sports 161

Notes 165

Bibliography 173

Index 185

Editorial Reviews

"This rather brief yet ambitious book … is … readily accessible to a more general audience, and is a welcome addition to the growing literature on masculinity and the masculine identity creation process." — CHOICE

"Nylund's self-reflexivity (largely because he is trained as a psychotherapist) of both loving sport and sports talk radio, but standing firmly for his pro-gay, pro-women, and pro-racial equality beliefs, might position Nylund as the perfect spokesperson for opening up the airwaves, the third space, for the inclusion of those previously marginalized by sport." — from the Foreword by Eric Anderson

"Nylund examines the inner workings of the creation of Jim Rome's virtual radio culture in compelling and thought-provoking ways." — Andrew C. Billings, Clemson University

From the Publisher