Abstract
While broadcasters and sponsors care about the iconic handballgirl and the narrative of her underachieving boy colleagues, the question remains—do media sports have any implications for our everyday social life? Do media-produced meanings about handball have any influence on the meanings generated within handball cultures? Entering into the youth-handball arena, at some distance from the visual iconicity of the handballgirl, this chapter explores her impact on action. Repeatedly, the elite women handballer symbolically reappears at the youth sport arena to shape the imitations that girls, coaches, and parents use to maneuver their own drama. But there is more. While it might be tempting to fall at ease with believing that sport myth is something produced by the journalist residing within a money-hungry sport/media-complex, this study of youth sport shows that the need for myths about chance, fears, and hope remains also in the everyday sports of modernity. In Norwegian sport halls, youth and adults hinge onto the athletic quest. In the form of hermeneutic loops, they fit out their own drama with both the hierarchal and democratic meaning that they find in and can feed back to their nearby landscapes of meaning.
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Broch, T.B. (2020). Throwing Like a Handballgirl: Performance and Materiality. In: A Performative Feel for the Game. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35129-8_4
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