Book Review 1 Book Review Review of Whose Game? Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports By Rebecca Joyce Kissane and Sarah Winslow Temple University Press 2020, 242 pages. ISBN: 9781439918876. http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009748 Reviewer: Tristan Bridges, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA I knew little about fantasy sports leagues before reading Kissane and Winslow’s multi-method analysis of participants in fantasy sports. In Whose Game? Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports, Kissane and Winslow examine the ways that gender, race, and class shape the structure and experience of fantasy sports participation in ways that reproduce an intersectional array of inequalities under the guise of “good fun.” Their central argument is that fantasy sports matter and are more than an insignificant pastime. They show how diverse forms of identity and inequality are policed and maintained in ways that allow women to participate, but work to (re) situate them as outsiders within the world of fantasy sports. One of the elements of the book that I enjoyed a great deal is that it is a sociological study of something I think many assume to be mundane, focusing on everyday participants in a pastime that is much larger than I had realized— estimates of the industry are upwards of $7 billion annually (p. 5). Kissane and Winslow document the ways that gender, race, and class inequality are deeply embedded in the interactions that structure fantasy sports leagues. And as with many other social contexts, men with concentrated collections of privileged identities not only dominate the social context of fantasy sports, but also do so in ways that simultaneously reflect and reinforce enduring and intersectional forms of power and systems of inequality. Fantasy sports offer new more interactive versions of being a fan, one that offers people participating in fantasy sports more of a feeling of shared accom- plishment with athletes, fostering new ways of feeling closer to the action. Indeed, fantasy sports have quite literally altered the landscape of sports consumption and fandom. The context enables fans to feel control and ownership not offered in the same ways by what Kissane and Winslow refer to as “traditional fandom.” While traditional fandom involves and rewards authentic allegiance to a specific team or teams, fantasy sports fandom extends and transforms this through © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. Social Forces 1–3 doi:10.1093/sf/soaa138 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sf/advance-article/doi/10.1093/sf/soaa138/6056298 by Columbia University, tbridges@soc.ucsb.edu on 08 January 2021