Emotion Work for Merriwell and Billy Clyde: Challenging American Football’s Two-Tiered Gender System on Friday Night Lights

This article considers the construction of significant cultural themes in the television series Friday Night Lights ( fnl ) that represent a rather remarkable evolution in the nature of meaning making in media representations of American football. fnl advances a dominant frame that challenges the game’s established tendencies to provide a key enabling mechanism through which limited roles for women have been justified by “a two-tiered gender system with men on top.”