Gender And Class Ideologies In Sport

Within the context of sport, explain how gender and class ideologies play a part in the perpetuation of inequities in 21st century western society. You should draw on political and contemporary theory and research to support your argument.

Introduction
The study of the relationship between sports and the society has become a focus of many research studies in the last decades. The theories of sport and society first emerged in an institutionalised form in the 1960’s in the West, as a part of higher education expansion (Theberge, 2002). Studies that stem from these theories aim to analyse whether different societal ideologies have an influence on the way people participate in and perceive sports, especially, if such ideologies lead to the
It states that any unpaid activities are reshaped by the capitalists into forms that produce labour power, which alienates human beings from each other and from their ability to realise their potential as species. For example, education is reshaped into homework, taking care of one’s family is reshaped into housework and athletic recreational activity is reshaped into modern sport that brings money and can be worshiped (Cleaver, 2009). Some might say that Marxist theories are outdated and cannot be applied to modern situations, however, many different types of Marxism have been developed in the last century. For example, Neo-Marxism developed in the 1960s and is a more applicable to the modern world perspective than the original Marxism. In turn, Humanist Marxism is based on the idea that human beings are able to change their lives, while Structuralist Marxism states that human beings are the products of underlying structures. Stemming from the Frankfurt School of Humanist Marxism, Critical Theory was developed that identifies what is distinctively human and uses it as a starting position from which to criticise the structure of modern society. Due to the Conflict Theory, Humanist Marxists rejected the idea that sport has any positive force in the society at all and proposed that it is ideological, exploitative, divisive, alienating and ‘a prison of measured time’, according to Brohm (1978). As a result, the capitalist class ideologies perpetuate the inequities in sport, as the capitalists have the power to change the experiences of the working class via introducing new sports objects to worship or withdraw the ‘sacred’ players from the games, while the Proletariat only has a choice of either participating in these games, thus bringing the money to the