F eminist and g ender t heories

Feminist and Gender Theories  
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This points to a realm of institutional politics 
where men’s and women’s interests are very 
much at stake, without the publicity created 
by social movements. Public-sector agencies 
(Jensen 1998; Mackay and Bilton 2000; 
Schofield, forthcoming), private-sector corpora-
tions (Marcband and Runyan 2000; Hearn and 
Parkin 2001), and unions (Gorman et al. 1993; 
Pranzway 2001) are all sites of masculinized 
power and struggles for gender equality. In each 
of these sites, some men can be found with a 
commitment to gender equality, but in each case 
that is an embattled position. For gender-equality 
outcomes, it is important to have support from 
men in the top organizational levels, but this is 
not often reliably forthcoming.
One reason for the difficulty in expanding 
men’s opposition to sexism is the role of highly 
conservative men as cultural authorities and 
managers. Major religious organizations, in 
Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, are controlled 
by men who sometimes completely exclude 
women, and these organizations have often been 
used to oppose the emancipation of women. 
Transnational media organizations such as Rupert 
Murdoch’s conglomerate are equally active in 
promoting conservative gender ideology.
A specific address to men is found in the 
growing institutional, media, and business com-
plex of commercial sports. With its overwhelm-
ing focus on male athletes; its celebration of 
force, domination, and competitive success; its 
valorization of male commentators and execu-
tives; and its marginalization and frequent ridi-
cule of women, the sports/business complex has 
become an increasingly important site for repre-
senting and defining gender. This is not tradi-
tional patriarchy. It is something new, welding 
exemplary bodies to entrepreneurial culture. 
Michael Messner (2002), one of the leading ana-
lysts of contemporary sports, formulates the 
effect well by saying that commercial sports 
define the renewed centrality of men and of a