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Sport has proven to be one of the key institutional sites for the study of the social construction of gender. Organized sport, as we now know it, was created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by and for White middle class men to bolster a sagging ideology of “natural superiority" over women and over race-and class-subordinated groups of men (Crosset 1990; Kimmel 1990; McKay 1991; Messner 1988; Whitson 1990). Thus, although sport was seemingly based in natural physical endowments, it was socially constructed out of the gender, race, and class-based stratification systems of Europe and the United States.[...] It took a gender analysis of sports ideologies and commercialization to unravel the ways sport is organized to sell masculinity to men. Today, that same gender analysis is being applied to the deconstruction of the selling of a shifting imagery of physical femininity in women athletes. Note, however, the persistence of the gender segregation so evident in organized sport from the beginning in nearly all cases, men's and women's sports are carefully segregated, and men's sports are still assumed to be mostly for male spectators. Women's sports, however, to be successful, have to be attractive to men as well as women viewers. As a result, notions of conventional masculinity and femininity persist. Sport, as a cultural and commercial production, constructs and markets gender; besides making money, making gender may be sport's chief function. It may appear ironic that an institution that has continued to contribute to the reconstitution of hegemonic masculinity throughout the twentieth century has become a key site for the …