Book Reviews

Linda K. Fuller, Editor. Sport, Rhetoric, and Gender: Historical Perspectives and Media Representations. NY: Palgrave
MacMillan: New York, 2006. Reviewed by Jay Baglia, Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network
Courses addressing the intersection of media and
gender are growing on Americas college campuses.
While earlier offerings in gender studies tended to focus
on communication styles or the psychosocial
developments inherent in gender roles, the emergence of a
focus on sports and media is an obvious and popular
development in this interdisciplinary area.
Fullers edited collection is a worthy complement to
preceding studies of gender, sports, and media, namely
Wenners (1989) Media, Sports, and Society, Messner and
Sabos (1990) Sport, Men, and the Gender Order:
Critical Feminist Perspectives., Creedans (1994) Women,
Media, and Sport, and Baker and Boyds (1997) Out of
Bounds: Sports, Media, and the Politics of Identity. In this
collection, Fuller divides the twenty-one offerings into six
sections: 1) language; 2) historical perspectives; 3) print
media; 4) broadcast media; 5) visual media; and 6) classic
case studies. To be clear, the chapters that make up these
sections do not all address media and yet each points to
mediated communication and the power of rhetorical
constructions. In addition to the twenty-one chapters,
there is also an introduction by the editor, which contains
a muscular bibliography. A variety of contexts and many
different sports are represented. Curiously absent from
this volume are womens competitive softball, golf, and
gymnastics. Likewise, I expected at least one chapter to
address the growing impact of womens coaching and
leadership.
The chapters that launch this collection including
the introduction appropriately address the role of
language, the phenomenon of competitiveness, and the
concept of hegemony in this critical arena of gender
studies. A series of historical treatments of sport and
gender follow and while I often find examination of a
particular historical figure interesting and relevant, the
analysis of the sportswriter Annie Laurie (One of
Americas First Sportswriters) lacked direction. I was
unclear whether this chapter was included purely for
historical context or as an exploration of gendered writing
in the male-dominated field. In either case, the author
cites only two of Lauries news stories. On the other hand,
Nancy Rosoffs look at how womens sportswear was
advertised in the decades before and after the fin de sicle
was revealing, demonstrating how emphasis moved from
fashion to function.
The next section Print Media Representations
contains five chapters and they demonstrate a varied
cross-section of topics. The chapter about the WNBA is
excellent as it reveals how news coverage of this growing
spectator sport both inhibited its early years and
contributes to its burgeoning appeal. While discourse
analysis is often the go-to method when considering
critical treatments in the field of gender studies, the
choice in this case is solid, for access is plentiful, the

results establish a trajectory for both advances and

limitations, and it is replicable. With its consistent
approach, this section is the books strongest.
One wonders then why each of the next two sections
that follow Broadcast Media (with two entries) and
Visual Media (with three) would stray so far with regard
to approach and utility. Specifically, I was surprised by
the chapter analyzing Britney Spears lyrics and videos.
While this was a well-written piece, it was clearly out of
place; the attempt to connect its revelations to an
imprecise operationalization of health was a stretch. For
different reasons, a chapter analyzing the rhetoric of the
University of Connecticut/University of Oklahoma
Womens NCAA basketball championship of 2002
provided scant return. From the beginning of this chapter,
I wondered why the tack seemed so anti-Connecticut
Husky. Upon turning to the contributors section, I
discovered that the author was a Oklahoma faculty
member. When the methods section revealed that the
analysis was produced by a graduate class, I wondered
why the authors affiliation with the University of
Oklahoma was not revealed in the text. Indeed, one of the
real advances in third-wave feminist criticism is that
acknowledging positionality of the researcher adds
credibility. With few exceptions, this contemporary turn
in subject-position was not shared by many of the authors
of this collection
The truly good news about this collection is the
Classic Case Studies section. Crawfords chapter about
NASCARs Jeff Gordon left me feeling more
knowledgeable about the gender perspective in this
strangely popular spectator sport and is the only chapter
that specifically addresses masculinity. Likewise,
Golimbiskys chapter about Little League Moms is the
only one using the participant/observer approach and, as a
result, we live and breathe her perspective.
The contributors of this volume represented
journalism, media criticism, kinesiology, sociology,
English, anthropology, and communication studies. Such
a range is apt for this area of research. The book is
recommended reading for anyone developing a course in
sports, gender, and media. While I would have a hard
time saying the entire book should be adopted for a single
class, there are plenty of chapters that I would assign for
an introductory gender class, a journalism class, a
methods class, or even a U.S. history class. And they are,
for the most part, well-written and easily accessible for
the undergraduate liberal arts student. I would be remiss,
however, if I were to leave the book jacket photograph
without remark. The image is that of a by-any-standards
attractive blond woman in a red dress about to hurl a
football; she bears a striking resemblance to a mid-80s
Christie Brinkley. In the background are what appear to
be several Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, fans, and media
Women and Language, Vol. 31, No. 2, Pg. 57

personnel. It is a peculiar selection for a book that

attempts to advance feminist criticism in this genre. To
make matters worse, she is not holding the laces correctly
to throw a serviceable forward pass. I would not,
however, say that she throws like a girl. Rather, she is
throwing like someone who is not in the picture to throw
a proper pass. Clearly, her role is to be beautiful and
sexually alluring. One step forward, two steps back.
References
Baker, Aaron & Todd Boyd, Eds. (1997). Out of bounds: Sports, media,
and the politics of identity. Indiana University Press.

Creedan, Pamela, Ed. (1994). Women, media, and sport: Challenging

gender values. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Messner, Michael A. & Don F. Sabo, Eds. (1990). Sport, men, and the
gender order: Critical feminist perspectives. Champaign, IL:
Human Kinetics Publishers.
Wenner, Lawrence A., Ed. (1989). Media, sports, and society. Newbury
Park, CA: Sage.

Sport,
Rhetoric,
and
Gender:
Historical
Perspectives and Media Representations is available
from Palgrave MacMillan for $65.00 Hardcover, ISBN:
1403973283.
Reviewer Jay Baglia is a Medical Educator at the
Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network in
Allentown, PA.

Clara Sarmento, Editor. Eastwards/Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the 21st Century? Cambridge
University Press. Reviewed by Hsin-I Cheng, Santa Clara University
In recent years, voices of non-white, non-middleclass, and non-U.S./European women have been gradually
reclaimed (e.g., Behar and Gordon, Collins, Enloe,
Kaplan, Alarcn and Moallem, hooks, Mohanty, Moraga
and Anzalda, Ong, Shome, Spivak). Documenting the
shared struggles and triumphs among women across
nation-states remains a continuous project. Eastwards/
Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the
21st Century? surveys pressing issues on how language,
culture, and state apparati influence gender equality in the
globalized world.
This collection cogently calls for inclusion of those
whose voices have been neglected or even erased in
academic research. Conditions of womens lives in areas
such as India, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, China, and Southeast
Asia are discussed. In general, all seven chapters attempt
to unfold the structural effects of national constitutions,
religious doctrines, or linguistic practices on women. In
Construction and Reaffirmation of Social Gender
Stereotypes, and The Semiosis of the Feminine in
Bangla Language the authors interrogate the ways in
which women in India are linguistically located in a
binary system that excludes gender equality and
perpetuates authentic femininity. Such framing leaves
the unbalanced social space imbued with power-laden
ideologies unchallenged. Like India, which has undergone
significant socio-economic shifts in the past decades,
nations such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and China have
gone through their own transformations. Three chapters
Gender Equality in Ukraine, Culture and Language,
and Marriage in China as an Expression of a Changing
Society critique the impact on womens lives after
(inter)national statutes were materialized. Each briefly
discusses the conditions for women under the previous
political entity and illustrates the social, economic, or
political (in)congruencies that occurred during and after
these changes.
The final chapters in this anthology discuss texts
produced during the colonial and postcolonial eras in
Portuguese India and Southeast Asia. In The Other
Women and Language, Vol. 31, No. 2, Pg. 58

Woman in the Overseas Space, Maria de Deus Manso

reflects on womens conditions under the Portuguese rule
of parts of India during the 17th century. There, women
were positioned in between local practices that denied
their rights and liberation through Christian conversion
offered by the colonial government. In a similar vein,
Heading East this Time identifies controversial issues
of womens rights after decolonization in various
societies such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and
Indonesia. Both chapters suggest that interstitial space
might have occurred in these transcultural contact
zones. Overall, this collection raises intriguing topics on
the interactive nature of gender and communication.
Eastwards/Westwards contributes to interdisciplinary
interests on issues pertaining to gender equality. By
shifting terrains of inquiry away from the U.S. and
European-centered topics and perspectives, this
compilation encourages readers to acquire additional
knowledge on historical and current geopolitical
relationships in order to understand the complexity of
womens conditions. This collection of thought-provoking
articles triggered my desire for more in-depth analyses on
the historical contexts and socio-political currents in the
critiques. I was left with questions about the significant
common threads that connect these struggles in which
various oppressive forces and insidious forms of power
subjugate women in these nation-states.
Eastwards/Westwards: Which Direction for Gender
Studies in the 21st Century? accomplishes an ambitious
task of unpacking linguistic and structural injustices
enacted against women around the globe whose situations
have often been neglected. It would be a beneficial text
for graduate students who are beginning to explore gender
relations on political, historical, and linguistic fronts.
Eastwards/Westwards: Which Direction for Gender
Studies in the 21st Century? is available from Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, $69.00, hardback; ISBN 1-84718308-5.
Reviewer Hsin-I Cheng is an Assistant Professor of
Communication at Santa Clara University.

Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books; Henry Holt and
Company, 2007. Reviewed by Joey W. Pogue, Pittsburg State University - Kansas
It has been eight years since the tragedy of 9/11. In
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11
America, Susan Faludi recognizes 9/11 as a great
moment of possibility which could turn the myths we
live by into progressive truths. Incorporating critiques of
media, the Bush administration, and patriarchal
mythology, Faludis examination of 9/11 as an
emasculation of America deconstructs Americas gender
order. According to Faludi, after 9/11, U.S. citizens
experienced a psychosomatic shock induced by the
awareness that neither America nor the heroic men in
charge of her protection were invincible. The terror she
identifies reflects a masculine powerlessness appearing in
a variety of forms political, economic, social and,
perhaps most alarmingly, sexual. The fantasy she
uncovers is pure masculine projection.
While feminism had become part of the mainstream
prior to 9/11, in the aftermath, the movement was
blatantly discredited. Spokespersons from the media
transformed independent women and feminine strength
into traitorous scapegoats. Encouraged by gatekeepers
who were pro-administration, pro-domesticity and
antifeminist, many Americans were invited to revisit a
Father-Knows-Best ideology reminiscent of the 1950s
Cold-War era. Any feminist voice attempting to explain
9/11 was quickly vilified. When Susan Sontag suggested
that a few shreds of historical awareness might help us
understand what had just happened (27), New York Post
columnist Rod Dreher retaliated that he wanted to walk
barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, grab
[Sontag] by the neck, drag her down to ground zero and
force her to say that to the firefighters (27). Citing a
variety of publications, Faludi argues Drehers rant was
but one example of many sentiments that elevated to
new legitimacy the venting of longtime conservative
antifeminists who were accorded a far greater presence
after the attacks (22).
Echoing Sontag, Faludi characterizes response to the
tragedy as an old familiar pattern of Americas investment
in patriarchal virility. Her chapter The Cowboys of
Yesterday, notes the presss elevation of New Yorks
firefighters into idealized profiles of masculinity that the
firemen themselves found unrealistic. Such unrelenting
idealization was captured vividly in a CBS interview
when rookie firefighter Tony Benetatos was urged to
assert that 9/11 had turned him from a boy into a man.
Instead, staring back at the camera, he replied: Has it
made me a man? No. Whats a man? (73).
Focusing on the fiction of heroic patriarchy, Faludi
refers to history and frontier icon, Daniel Boone, who
said: Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are
related to me which exist only in the regions of fancy
(256). Like Boone, the firefighters shunned media
attempts to turn them into super human beings. When

Rudy Giuliana claimed they had performed the greatest

single rescue mission in Americas history (66),
surviving firefighters regarded his claim as preposterous.
Selective media coverage reinforced a pathos of
idealized masculinity. When tears were shed by the men
of ground zero, crying was identified as a courageous
sign of unshaken manhood (73). Weakness, dependency
or stress, simply were not discussed. Abandoned widows,
fragile little girls, and damsels in distress, on the other
hand, were everywhere. Faludi recounts how newscasters
and talk-show hosts sentimentalized wives without
husbands and mothers without sons (90). Not
surprisingly, post 9/11 media sources indicated that
traditional marriage was reclaiming popularity while
corresponding stories reported women surrendering their
professions, returning home and choosing to bear rather
than abort children.
Drawing upon history, Faludi cites numerous
examples from the colonial era forward that explain how
media have fostered our culture's adherence to a doctrine
of separate spheres. While men are free to navigate the
outside world, women remain constrained to hearth and
home. When women do attempt to leave their domain,
peril and the accompanying need to be rescued by heroic
men are inevitable. Media use of one of Americas
favorite tropes, the captivity narrative," provide
numerous historical and contemporary illustrations.
Examining accounts of women abducted by Native
Americans, Faludi exposes a huge gap between the actual
events and their subsequent framing by media sources. In
a pointed comparison of media distortions from both
colonial and contemporary eras, Faludi recounts the
stories of three captives, each made famous through
media depictions later found to be at distinct variance
with reality. Mary Rowlandson and Cynthia Ann Parker
were kidnapped by Indians in the colonial period. Jessica
Lynch was the post 9/11 representative of the captivity
narrative in her designation as the most famous prisoner
of war taken in Iraq.
Faludi offers persuasive evidence that the stories
accepted as truth about these three women and their
experiences were in fact media creations, sensationally
altered to fit patriarchal fantasy. Rowlandson, relying on
ingenuity, flattery, and sewing skills, gained her own
freedom. Parker refused rescue and remained to bear two
children with her Comanche husband. And, after
countless media stories of her travails as a wounded
POW, it has become clear that the "rescue" of Pvt. Jessica
Lynch was just the most recent exploitation of the
damsel-in-distress theme, and was in large part a pure
media fabrication.
Critical response to The Terror Dream suggests that
Faludis critique of our cultures patriarchal narratives is a
solid one. In urging us all to question the authenticity of
Women and Language, Vol. 31, No. 2, Pg. 59

the narratives that are presented by the media for our

consumption, she invites us to consider post 9/11
consciousness with a careful introspection and reflexivity.
Whether her work is a subtle indictment of American
provocation for the 9/11 attacks is another question
altogether. What seems undeniable from her book is that
our mediated response to 9/11 has been one that is highly
gendered rendering troubling aspects of the gender order
visible and in need of further examination. For those
teaching Media or Gender Studies courses at both
undergraduate and graduate levels, the book is invaluable

in provoking students to think through the gendering of

our national histories, social relations, political realities,
and media fantasies.
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11
America is available from Metropolitan Books: Henry
Holt and Company for $26.00, hardcover; ISBN-13: 9780-8050-8692-8; or, ppbk ISBN-10: 0-8050-8692-7.
Reviewer Joey W. Pogue is an Assistant Professor of
Communication at Pittsburg State University Kansas.

Books in Brief: Editor Anita Taylors book notes on some interesting volumes, not all of them new,
that recently crossed the editors desk.
Historian Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife,
(Harper, 2002), looks at Judeo-Christian developments
and considers questions such as How did marriage
change from religious duty to a venue for personal
fulfillment? And if the original purpose of procreation has
been superceded, then for what? This book might be a
good companion piece to Stephanie Coontz recent book,
Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or
How Love Conquered Marriage (Viking, 2005); and for
those who might be new to the subject, her older
publications on marriage and family life might be
instructive: The Way We Never Were: American Families
and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992), and The
Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American
Families, 1600-1900 (Verso, 1988).
If the subject of marriage is of interest, Germaine
Greer can still be relied on for a fresh take on previously
visited subjects. Note her 2008 Harper publication,
Shakespeares Wife, that works to place this married
couple in context and to bring Ann, the long ignored
farmers daughter, to life.
To learn more about both a marriage and a woman
too often overlooked as we think about our forebearers
among outspoken women, see Eve LaPlantes American
Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the
Woman Who Defied the Puritans (HarperOne, 2004).
Hutchinson also deserves a larger place both in histories

Women and Language, Vol. 31, No. 2, Pg. 60

of free expression and rhetoric. Women and Language

should not have missed the opportunity to review this
book.
And for a look at one of the most widely known of
modern wives, see Susan Morrisons timely edited
collection, Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary:
Reflections by Women Writers (Harper 2008), aiming to
illuminate the attitudes women have toward powerful
women. Morrisons take could be a good illustration of
the argument made by Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher
Ulrich in Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History
(Knopf, 2007), a book she wrote exploring the question of
why a phrase she first wrote in an academic essay struck
such a chord that it is now one of the best-known slogans
of modern feminism, according to Michael Dirdas
review published in The Washington Post in 2007 (and
now posted on Amazon.com to advertise the book).
Finally, worth noting are a group of valuable
biographies: Paul J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among
Lions (Amistad, 2008); Carl Sferrazza Anthony, Nellie
Taft: The Unconventional First Lady of the Ragtime
Era (Harper, 2006); Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin:
The Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins, 2002); and the
reissue of Zora Neale Hurstons autobiography, Dust
Tracks on a Road (Harper Perennial Modern Classics,
2006).