Mediating masculinities: the production of media representations in sport

In recent years, masculinity has become an intensely researched topic that, in various books, has been discovered, theorised, deconstructed, dislocated, unwrapped, unmasked, and placed in perspective. There is, of course, no single essential trans-historical and trans-cultural masculinity. Investigation of such ‘moments’ as the Roman circus (Wiedemann 1992; Crowther 1996), the chivalric conventions of the sixteenth century (Brailsford 1969), gentlemanly behaviour in the eighteenth century (Cohen 1996), nineteenth-century muscular Christianity (Mangan 1981) or the Empire adventurers of the late nineteenth century (Dawson 1994), show that masculinity is always shaped in ways that have a social and historical specifi city. In analysing these processes, it is therefore necessary to consider discontinuities as well as continuities (Roper and Tosh 1991).