Abstract:This essay explains the role of sports media entertainment in habituating audiences to a logic of conservative populism, which connects justifications for racialized and gendered violence with a sense of anxiety and humiliation. The essay develops the concept of antagonistic sports fandom, a mode of engagement in which verbal duels become the dominant way that fans and media figures engage with sports. It argues that one of the crucial roles of antagonistic sports fandom is to provide a public forum where the pleasure of subjugating bodies can be justified via the invocation of victimization and humiliation, presented as apolitical fun. The essay develops these points by examining the sports media company Barstool Sports, the FX television series The League, and the 2009 film Big Fan.
{"title":"Antagonistic Sports Fandom","authors":"Thomas P. Oates","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a905862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a905862","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explains the role of sports media entertainment in habituating audiences to a logic of conservative populism, which connects justifications for racialized and gendered violence with a sense of anxiety and humiliation. The essay develops the concept of antagonistic sports fandom, a mode of engagement in which verbal duels become the dominant way that fans and media figures engage with sports. It argues that one of the crucial roles of antagonistic sports fandom is to provide a public forum where the pleasure of subjugating bodies can be justified via the invocation of victimization and humiliation, presented as apolitical fun. The essay develops these points by examining the sports media company Barstool Sports, the FX television series The League, and the 2009 film Big Fan.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43361895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The history of campaigns against apartheid through sport reveals messy relationships between athletes and social movements, advancing recent debates over the possibilities and constraints of sport politics. The anti-apartheid movement coalesced around a transnational sporting boycott to isolate South Africa, but the American tennis icon Arthur Ashe made a series of visits to compete there in the 1970s. Ashe believed in participation as the primary mechanism for change through sport, only later embracing the boycott. When tennis tournaments and rugby tours brought South Africans to the United States, anti-apartheid organizations mobilized their own confrontational protests to interrupt play. As the growing movement won over athletes and South African propaganda turned toward commercial sport spectacle, the special position that athletes occupied provided leverage. However, their magnified legacy also obscured how resistance to apartheid through sport found success in the first place. Despite the appeal of participation as the natural path of progress, strategies of confrontation often proved more effective in the struggle against apartheid. Questioning the politics of participation and widening the frame to consider confrontation changes our understanding of sport politics, looking beyond individual athletes and bringing everyday people off the sidelines.
{"title":"Playing on Grassroots: The Anti-Apartheid Movement, Arthur Ashe, and the Sport Boycott","authors":"Evan DiPrete Brown","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a905867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a905867","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The history of campaigns against apartheid through sport reveals messy relationships between athletes and social movements, advancing recent debates over the possibilities and constraints of sport politics. The anti-apartheid movement coalesced around a transnational sporting boycott to isolate South Africa, but the American tennis icon Arthur Ashe made a series of visits to compete there in the 1970s. Ashe believed in participation as the primary mechanism for change through sport, only later embracing the boycott. When tennis tournaments and rugby tours brought South Africans to the United States, anti-apartheid organizations mobilized their own confrontational protests to interrupt play. As the growing movement won over athletes and South African propaganda turned toward commercial sport spectacle, the special position that athletes occupied provided leverage. However, their magnified legacy also obscured how resistance to apartheid through sport found success in the first place. Despite the appeal of participation as the natural path of progress, strategies of confrontation often proved more effective in the struggle against apartheid. Questioning the politics of participation and widening the frame to consider confrontation changes our understanding of sport politics, looking beyond individual athletes and bringing everyday people off the sidelines.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48085355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:During the 1970s, the Black Panther Party believed in and provided sports programming that spoke to community embodiment. The Party's approach aligned with what Jack and Micki Scott called "the sports liberation movement." Though understudied in sports history, the Scotts endeavored to create a revolution motivated by the 1968 Olympics. They controversially wrote about and taught sports in a way that prioritized the needs and well-being of professional athletes and everyday people, rather than US patriotism and capitalism consumption. Influenced by fellow leftists like the Scotts, the Black Panthers circulated ideas on freedom and free movement, drawing inspiration from international role models in non-European, socialist countries too. They imagined that socialist sports could escape the militarization of sport in the US and find space for gender inclusion. Their interpretation of socialism showed up in both philosophy and pedagogy, on and off the mat. Using sports archives from the Party as well as broader newspaper research, I contend in this essay that the Panthers, representative of the larger Black Power movement, politicized sport as a necessary site to revolutionize the everyday person's life.
{"title":"Vanguard of the Athletic Revolution: The Black Panther Party, Micki and Jack Scott, and the Sports Liberation Movement","authors":"M. Aziz","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a905868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a905868","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:During the 1970s, the Black Panther Party believed in and provided sports programming that spoke to community embodiment. The Party's approach aligned with what Jack and Micki Scott called \"the sports liberation movement.\" Though understudied in sports history, the Scotts endeavored to create a revolution motivated by the 1968 Olympics. They controversially wrote about and taught sports in a way that prioritized the needs and well-being of professional athletes and everyday people, rather than US patriotism and capitalism consumption. Influenced by fellow leftists like the Scotts, the Black Panthers circulated ideas on freedom and free movement, drawing inspiration from international role models in non-European, socialist countries too. They imagined that socialist sports could escape the militarization of sport in the US and find space for gender inclusion. Their interpretation of socialism showed up in both philosophy and pedagogy, on and off the mat. Using sports archives from the Party as well as broader newspaper research, I contend in this essay that the Panthers, representative of the larger Black Power movement, politicized sport as a necessary site to revolutionize the everyday person's life.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49049162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On an American Study of Sports: A Conversation","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a905869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a905869","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46170819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay examines how the Golden State Warriors' multimedia empire invites viewers to embrace Silicon Valley–driven transformations of space and body that appropriate value generated by Black, Brown, and working-class communities for the benefit of a wealthy, white ownership class. These transformations form part of the tech industry's imperializing adventures in bodily and societal improvement through the intertwined processes of disruption, technological solutionism, datafication, and financial speculation. First, we show how the Warriors promote analytics, wearable technology, surveillance, and white managerialism as keys to success on and off the court. We then turn to the team's 2019 move from Oakland's Oracle Arena to San Francisco's Chase Center, which offered investment and networking opportunities for Silicon Valley elites while making the team less affordable and physically accessible to its traditional Black and working-class Oakland fanbase. Ultimately, we argue that the Warriors promote Silicon Valley processes of wealth extraction by obscuring where and how value is generated, both within the labor relations that define the Warriors' sports organization and in the gentrification of the Bay Area and the commodification of Black Oakland for an increasingly non-Black fanbase.
{"title":"Silicon Valley's Team: The Golden State Warriors, Datafied Managerialism, and Basketball's Racialized Geography","authors":"Kit Hughes, Evan Elkins","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a905860","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a905860","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines how the Golden State Warriors' multimedia empire invites viewers to embrace Silicon Valley–driven transformations of space and body that appropriate value generated by Black, Brown, and working-class communities for the benefit of a wealthy, white ownership class. These transformations form part of the tech industry's imperializing adventures in bodily and societal improvement through the intertwined processes of disruption, technological solutionism, datafication, and financial speculation. First, we show how the Warriors promote analytics, wearable technology, surveillance, and white managerialism as keys to success on and off the court. We then turn to the team's 2019 move from Oakland's Oracle Arena to San Francisco's Chase Center, which offered investment and networking opportunities for Silicon Valley elites while making the team less affordable and physically accessible to its traditional Black and working-class Oakland fanbase. Ultimately, we argue that the Warriors promote Silicon Valley processes of wealth extraction by obscuring where and how value is generated, both within the labor relations that define the Warriors' sports organization and in the gentrification of the Bay Area and the commodification of Black Oakland for an increasingly non-Black fanbase.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49654767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Body Athletic","authors":"Joseph Darda, Amira Rose Davis","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a905858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a905858","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66308619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay considers how queer Latinx recreational sporting communities construct homosocial environments through their occupation of public spaces in Los Angeles. Field observations and ethnographic analysis identify how soccer communities provide Latinx women access to homosocial spaces through the social networks they create on and off the fields. The relationships and interactions of the participants in women's leagues serve as case studies of the radical homo-intimate formations within the Latinx community. The amalgamation of homonormative and heteronormative identities within women's teams alludes to the tacit treatment of sexuality within leisure sporting community spaces. The narratives of league women grant an auxiliary conceptualization of Latinx identity formation and negotiations of belonging outside the frameworks of the traditional Latino community and the hegemonic gender and sexual body politics of the US state.
{"title":"Nos Vemos en la Cancha: Latinx Women Athletes Making Place in Los Angeles","authors":"K. Pulupa","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a905864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a905864","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay considers how queer Latinx recreational sporting communities construct homosocial environments through their occupation of public spaces in Los Angeles. Field observations and ethnographic analysis identify how soccer communities provide Latinx women access to homosocial spaces through the social networks they create on and off the fields. The relationships and interactions of the participants in women's leagues serve as case studies of the radical homo-intimate formations within the Latinx community. The amalgamation of homonormative and heteronormative identities within women's teams alludes to the tacit treatment of sexuality within leisure sporting community spaces. The narratives of league women grant an auxiliary conceptualization of Latinx identity formation and negotiations of belonging outside the frameworks of the traditional Latino community and the hegemonic gender and sexual body politics of the US state.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43049229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For example, Gilmore notes that few people asked why California prison growth came to a halt in 2011 after over twenty years of expansion. These themes challenge the notion that prisons are I inevitable i , a deliberate fiction created to naturalize prisons and one that Gilmore's work methodically disassembles. 4 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Mothers Reclaiming Our Children", in I Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 181-240;Gilmore, "Public Enemies and Private Intellectuals: Apartheid USA", in I Abolition Geography i , 78-91;Gilmore, "You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape", in I Abolition Geography i , 355-409. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of American Quarterly is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
{"title":"Against Inevitability","authors":"Alisa Bierria","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898164","url":null,"abstract":"For example, Gilmore notes that few people asked why California prison growth came to a halt in 2011 after over twenty years of expansion. These themes challenge the notion that prisons are I inevitable i , a deliberate fiction created to naturalize prisons and one that Gilmore's work methodically disassembles. 4 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, \"Mothers Reclaiming Our Children\", in I Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 181-240;Gilmore, \"Public Enemies and Private Intellectuals: Apartheid USA\", in I Abolition Geography i , 78-91;Gilmore, \"You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape\", in I Abolition Geography i , 355-409. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of American Quarterly is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41263773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives","authors":"K. Moriah","doi":"10.1353/aq.2023.a898169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898169","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66308602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}