Cheryl Cooky

About

Cheryl Cooky is a professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Purdue University. Her research focuses on three main areas: gendered media representations of sport; gender politics of sport and public policies; and how gender shapes sports experiences, cultural meanings, and organizational structures in sports. She is the co-author of Serving Equality: Feminism, Media and Women's Sports (2022, Peter Lang Publishers) and No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change (2018, Rutgers University Press). Her research has been published in a diverse array of journals including the Journal of Sex Research, Sex Roles, Gender and Society, American Journal of Bioethics, and Sociology of Sport Journal, among others. Committed to making research accessible to general audiences, Dr. Cooky has authored opinion-editorial articles, appeared as an expert in several documentary films, television and radio programs, and has been quoted in over 100 national and international news media outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, Forbes, Globe & Mail, The Guardian, and National Public Radio, as well as ESPN. She is the Editor of Sociology of Sport Journal, the flagship journal of the field, and a past-president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Media studies
• Gender studies
• Business
• History
• Advertising

Selected publications

• One and Done: The Long Eclipse of Women’s Televised Sports, 1989–2019

  Communication & Sport · 2021 · 170 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  For 3 decades we have tracked and analyzed the quantity and quality of coverage of women’s and men’s sports in televised news and highlights shows. In this paper, we report on our most recent iteration of the longitudinal study, which now includes an examination of online sports newsletters and social media. The study reveals little change in the quantitative apportionment of coverage of women’s and men’s sports over the past 30 years. Men’s sports—especially the “Big Three” of basketball, footb…

  PublisherDOI

• “This Isn’t Just About Us”: Articulations of Feminism in Media Narratives of Athlete Activism

  Communication & Sport · 2020 · 90 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Historically, the world of sport has served as a symbolic site for social justice, ushering change in the wider society and inspiring movements that often do not directly or solely tie to sport. Recently, academics and sports journalists have noted a “rebirth” of athlete activism in the United States. Despite the activism of women of color, who have initiated and been at the center of these movements, and sportswomen’s outspokenness on a variety of social justice issues, women’s roles are render…

  PublisherDOI

• Chasing Equity: The Triumphs, Challenges, and Opportunities in Sports for Girls and Women.

  2020 · 38 citations

  Publisher

• Sexualized and Athletic: Viewers’ Attitudes toward Sexualized Performance Images of Female Athletes

  Sex Roles · 2020-04-21 · 22 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Serving Equality

  Peter Lang Verlag eBooks · 2022-01-25 · 21 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Serving Equality: Feminism, Media, and Women’s Sports offers a much-needed methodological innovation to sports media research by expanding the focus beyond traditional sports media outlets to examine the diversity of media outlets writing about sports. In doing so, Serving Equality draws analytical attention to the ways in which feminism and feminist principles such as equality, progress, empowerment, and intersectionality shape media narratives of women’s sports. With a focus on networked sport…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael A. Messner

  19 shared

• Shari L. Dworkin

  University of Washington Bothell

  13 shared

• Dunja Antunovic

  University of Minnesota

  5 shared

• Nicole M. LaVoi

  4 shared

• Danielle Corple

  Wheaton College - Illinois

  4 shared

• Jasmine R. Linabary

  4 shared

• Faye Linda Wachs

  California State Polytechnic University

  3 shared

• Michela Musto

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

Similar researchers at Purdue University

• Laurence B. Leonardh-74
• Alexander Francish-39
• James A. McCannh-20