Abstract
“We should get you skirts instead of shorts!”
“I got a bunch of nice girls. And you can’t win games like that!”
“You’re too worried about getting your hair done and going to do this and that. You’re not a competitor, a baller.”
These are some of the tamer quotes Michelle J. Manno uses from a halftime speech delivered by Midwest State University (MWSU) head women’s basketball coach Jessica King to introduce readers to the locker room culture of the MWSU women’s basketball team and the gendered, racialized nature of women’s basketball more broadly (p. 16). Over the course of her 220-page book, Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity, Manno, the assistant provost for diversity and inclusion at Northwestern University, takes readers further inside this team, sharing what she learned during her 9-month ethnographic study of the program and interviews with the players. Specifically, she explores how the norms and practices within the team mirror a sporting culture that has marginalized and othered women for everything from the words they say to the clothes they wear to how they carry themselves.
Manno’s book is compelling and thoughtful. Her anecdotes from the players give the book a personal, narrative feel, though she also thoroughly engages with the literature, frequently blending athlete commentary with research from seminal and contemporary gender and cultural studies texts. Her book’s thesis—“that women athletes are strictly policed based on gender and sexuality in complex, contradictory ways”—is clear in each chapter, and she does well connecting her observations from the MWSU team to broader moments in sports culture, including corporate promotions of Serena Williams in 2018 and social media commentary about Gabby Douglas’ hair in the 2016 Olympics (p. 8).
The first chapter of this book establishes the basis for Manno’s argument that sport is a “gender- and race-making institution,” and she uses the aforementioned locker room speech to detail the everyday ways in which those race and gender boundaries are drawn and reproduced by leaders and members of the team (p. 19). The biggest strength of this book, and a strength that comes through particularly well in this chapter, is Manno’s consistency in returning to the locker room moment or other vignettes from the team to show the points she’s making and tie the team’s experiences clearly back to the literature.
Chapter 2 is the most engaging chapter of the book. In this section, Manno details how a music video produced by the players on the MWSU team during a holiday training period led to scrutiny from the head coach because of the “girl on girl action” and general sexuality implied in the clip (p. 34). This example helps Manno transition into an overarching point about how the team’s coaches, and the athletes themselves, police such sexuality and self-expression in front of prospective athletes on recruiting trips. Chapter 2 also offers the deepest dive into the ways in which women’s college sport, as opposed to women’s professional sports or women’s sports more broadly, further limits athlete expression because of coach rules or particular team policies. As a former college athlete, this chapter felt relatable in select ways and stood out as one of the best paced chapters of the book because of the heavy focus on the player comments.
Chapter 3 builds on this discussion, focusing on how athletes are often perceived by their peers as bisexual or gay because of their choice of clothing and how such expectations of sexuality are particularly racialized in sports like basketball. Manno explains that the women on the MWSU team have heard men, specifically, “joke” about their relationship status and sexuality (p. 79). While not all the women athletes were offended by the jokes, such discriminatory comments about women’s sexuality still ultimately “serve the ideological function of reinscribing long-standing homophobic rhetoric about women in sports and particularly about lesbians as predatory” (p. 78).
The final two chapters of the book before the conclusion center around appearance, specifically the divide between presenting as “athletes” and presenting as “women” (p. 94). In Chapter 4, Manno explains how athletes navigate these two roles. When she asked a player, “You can’t be both?,” meaning you can’t be an athlete and a woman, the player just shrugged, as if resigned to the reality of saying no (p. 93). Manno notes that this internal tension between these identities, particularly for players of color, can perhaps be traced back to the racial history around gender, as she explains that women have been labeled as not “woman-enough” if they presented in ways that differed from heteronormative, White femininity (p. 109).
This issue of visibility and femininity comes through in Chapter 5 in more specific ways as Manno details the way some players elect to wear makeup during games or style their hair before competitions. Players also shared that they requested different lifting routines during practice to avoid getting big and “look[ing] like a man” (p. 141). The athletes’ stories and the ways in which Manno describes them are equally heartbreaking and revealing, as they shine a spotlight on the labor involved in being a woman athlete in the current collegiate system.
Manno writes about this team and these stories with compassion. There could be a temptation in such an ethnography and interview-based study to approach the athletes—particularly those who comply with their coaches’ mandates to self-police their gender expression and encourage their teammates to dress differently—with judgment, but Manno approaches these situations as an empathetic observer. She doesn’t apologize for the athletes, but she also explains, thoughtfully, why these situations may occur and how the socialization of gender and sexuality and sport led to these moments. Though at times I wondered why don’t the athletes call out some of these discriminatory comments or behaviors as problematic? Why is the coach allowed to say some of the things she does?, Manno’s book is not an indictment of the individual characters in the study. Instead, she presents the information and experiences and shows the reader how these situations and experiences are deeply embedded in a sporting system of power.
Previous scholars have explored how women athletes are constantly navigating their expressions of self in sporting environments ranging from boxing (McClearen, 2021) to surfing (Thorpe et al., 2017) and more. Manno’s book offers the why behind some of the athletes’ self-presentation choices and lived experiences. These individual decisions matter too, as Isard and Melton (2022) found that race, gender, and sexuality all intersect to play a role in the kind of media attention that an athlete generates. Journalists have historically covered women, particularly women of color (Velloso, 2023) and LGBTQ women, in stereotypical ways (Lavelle, 2014), and though reporting on women athletes has shifted from blatant sexism to “gender bland sexism,” these entrenched frames have not disappeared entirely, impacting such self-policing among the athletes themselves (Cooky et al., 2021). While there is no easy, instant solution to fix embedded inequality or marginalization of women in sports, the player-centric narratives in Manno’s book demonstrate why structural change is needed to create a more inclusive environment for all athletes in collegiate sports.
