Playing at Being Men: Baseball and Masculinity in Michael Chabon's Summerland (Critical Essay‪)‬

The multitude of functions sport performs in contemporary Western society is well known. Sport is popularly praised for promoting health and fitness, individual self-esteem and community identity. However, such a picture ignores the destructive aspect of sport's cultural influence. Its link to aggression and discourses of superiority are particularly harmful to the images of gender sport perpetuates. Consequently, sport offers a profound insight into the simultaneous representation and construction of a dominant and, ultimately restrictive, masculinity. In Michael Chabon's Summerland, we are presented with a critique of sport as it is popularly conceived in contemporary America through the proposal of a new kind of sport, one that is inclusive and dialogic. In Chabon's ultimate game of baseball, we find a sporting arena akin to Bakhtin's notion of the carnival. Chabon disrupts stable gender binaries and boundaries and proposes an identity that is constantly in negotiation. Consequently, masculinity is no longer a fixed category, nor is femininity, and in a liberating gesture for the individual, both become performative categories that can be used at will. Significantly, Chabon proposes solutions to the "problems" of masculinity, creating a new baseball, which encompasses and accepts differences. This new baseball is organized around principles of plurality and community rather than segregation and exclusion. His text exposes a binary gender division as unnatural and makes a gender hierarchy unthinkable. As a result, Chabon's world becomes a world of hope and regeneration.