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The media today portrays a culture as well as a way of life. It not only brings us entertainment, it also is a means of today to keep in touch with the outside world. My discussion will be about sport and media and how this is related to the views of masculinity and femininity. I will use this topic to discuss how meaning structures are used and how people apply ‘meaning systems’. I will also include the significance of ‘people using meaning structures as opposed to being used by them’, an assumption made by Alasuutari. The analysis on the articles, which relate to masculinity and femininity in sport, will explore the distinction between how producers and audiences use ‘meaning systems’. According to Alasuutari and Corner, ‘meaning systems’ are commonly used in media to send out messages to ‘readers’. Communication media constitutes a culture, as they provide contexts in which meaningful expressions are produced and received (Ericson 1995). “There is no single correct analysis of any given text, and it is due to this polysemic nature of meaning systems that brings about the emphasis of discourse (Mckee, 2001). Why does sport matter in terms of gender politics? Two main issues are involved here: First is the ideological role of sport in maintaining unequal power relations between men and women, and second is the disparity between resources and amount of media attention given to male and female sport. “Sport plays a key role in legitimizing particular ideologies around masculinity and femininity that support the domination of women by men. While male domination is being challenged in nearly being challenged in every sector of society, there is a whole field of activity where male dominance just seems to be taken for granted. The implications of this range from the exclusion of women from workplace discussions of sporting events, through the ubiquity of sporting metaphors in the language of business and politics, to the legislation of the male violence.” (Brookes, 2002, p124) The link between sport and violence and/or sexual abuse by men against women has become one of the key issues within sports sociology today. The media has been seen to have direct implication in the link between sport and violence and sexual abuse. There have been indications that incidents of domestic violence increase during periods when particular sporting events are being broadcast. Furthermore, the media play a role in representing domestic violence involving sportsmen in a particular manner. “Hegemonic masculinity is not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same. It is, rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable” (Connell, 1995, p 76). “Through its definition in opposition to femininity, hegemonic masculinity works to legitimize not just the subordination of women and the marginalization of gay men, but also other subordinated masculinities, ‘some heterosexual men and boys are too expelled from the circle of legitimacy.” (Connell, 1995, p. 68-94) “Masculinity and femininity are ‘gender projects…processes of configuring practice through time’ (Connell, 1995, p.72). According to Connell, there are three sites of gender configuration: one is the individual life course, the second is discourse, ideology or culture; and lastly the institutions such as the state, the workplace and the school.” As part of discourse, ideology or culture, how masculinity is represented in the sports media is only one aspect of how hegemonic masculinities are produced and reproduced. When we see media images that may obvious media images of masculinity in sports, although they do have their significance, we might not be one of athleticism, but one of excessive violence, which is either on or off the field. It is those images that we come across daily, but don’t look twice at, that are most significant in terms of relating the definition of hegemonic masculinity. Newspaper and television supplements of sports are always filled with images or footage of sportsmen taking part in routine action. Although this is normal everyday coverage, people who see these images are encouraged to equate the controlled aggression central to sport with masculinity. When some form of masculinity is made explicit, it usually is some form of transgression, whether it is on or off the field. One example of the sensationalized media coverage of a sporting event is when Mike Tyson bit of Evander Holyfield’s ear in a boxing match. They sensationalized the news by adding stories on his criminal records. In the article in appendix 1, ‘Tyson gets image maker’, Tyson is reported to be getting help from an image-maker to restore the tattered reputation of the former heavyweight champion. Because the issue was so publicized, Mike Tyson’s image was totally damaged, the reporting ‘produced a set of essentialist discourse that conflated narratives of race and ethnicticy with deviant or criminal behaviour’ (Boyle and Haynes, cited in Brookes, 2002, p. 134). In this case, the media has condemned the action of Tyson as a sportsman. His behaviour is not one to be held up as a model of masculinity to be emulated. In appendix 2, “People v. Simpson: Unfinished Business", intertexuality can be put into place. It is difficult to make sense of this text without first relating it to other texts within the same context. “Intertexuality refers to the process of making sense of texts in reference to their relations with other texts. It involves the circulation and exchange of meanings, not as atomized bits (words/signs) but as packages of meaning” (Schirato, T & Yell, S, 2000, p.
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