Thursday’s Podcast: Gender and Sports

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

One of my favorite things about recording The 252 is that it gives me one more excuse to hang out for an hour with two of my closest friends on the Bethel University faculty: Chris Moore and Sam Mulberry. It’s all the better when another of our friends, philosopher Sara Shady, can join us as a special guest. Having earlier participated in discussions of college basketball and auto racing, Sara this week helped us think about gender and sports.

The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team earlier this fall before a match in St. Paul, MN – Creative Commons (Lorie Shaull)

It’d be hard to imagine a better partner for that conversation. Sara helps direct Bethel’s minor in Gender Studies and teaches its Intro to Gender Studies course in the Philosophy department. In our second segment, she took us through some of the key terms and debates in that course and connected them to the topic of our course, showing how sports can reflect, construct, and transform notions of gender.

In addition, we talked about sports fans booing the President of the United States, which Washington baseball team was the last to win the World Series, what happens to fandoms when franchises move from one city to another, and what we should make of Fox Sports broadcasting the scripted fiction that is WWE wrestling.

You can stream or download The 252 from Podbean and Apple Podcasts, along with other 3900 Network shows — e.g., Sara Shady, Public Philosopher.