Male-to-Female Violence in SportsWorld: What We Know and What We Don't Know


Walter DeKeseredy, West Virginia University

There was a vibrant surge in the 1980s and 1990s of social scientific investigation into hypermasculine male athletes and their abuse of women. However, this wave receded over the past two decades and eventually disappeared. Even highly seasoned violence against women scholars and activists have not been fleet of foot in dealing with the offline and online abusive acts committed by a sizeable portion of men who play the most popular and profitable sports. Buttressing this claim is the fact that DeKeseredy et al.’s (2023) Skating on Thin Ice: Professional Hockey, Rape Culture, and Violence Against Women is the first sociologically informed book on the specific relationship between sport and woman abuse published since 1998. It is thus time to go back and examine this topic again. The main objective, then, of this paper is to, from a feminist perspective, what we currently know and dont know about male athletess online and offline violence against women. Suggestions for further empirical and theoretical work are also featured in this piece.

This paper will be presented at the following session: