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This paper uses a genealogical approach to explore the conjuncture at which the longstanding but partial and uneasy silence surrounding painkiller use in the National Football League seems increasingly under threat. We historicize and problematize apparently self-evident narratives about painkiller use in contemporary football by interrogating the gendered, racialized and labor-related discourses surrounding Brett Favre's 1996 admission of a dependency on Vicodin, as well as the latest rash of confessions of misuse by now retired athletes. We argue that these coconstructed and coconstructing moments of noise and silence are part of the same discursive system. This system serves to structure the emerging preoccupation with painkillers in the NFL, with Favre's admission still working to placate anxieties surrounding the broader drug problems endemic to the league, and failing to disrupt our implicit knowingness about painkiller use, thus reinforcing ongoing cultures of silence and toughness in professional football.Cet article adopte une approche généalogique pour explorer la conjoncture par laquelle le silence persistent, bien que partiel et inconfortable, au sujet de l'utilisation de médicaments analgésiques dans la National Football League semble de plus en plus menacé. Nous faisons l'historique et problématisons les récits en apparence évidents en soi à propos des analgésiques dans le football contemporain en interrogeant les discours genrés, racialisés et sur le travail qui entourent l'aveu en 1996 par Brett Favre d'une dépendance au Vicodin, ainsi que la récente série de confessions d'abus par des athlètes désormais à la retraite. Nous suggérons que ces moments de bruit et de silence qui se construisent ensemble font partie du même système discursif. Ce système sert à structurer la préoccupation de plus en plus grande par rapport aux analgésiques dans la NFL, l'aveu de Favre permettant de calmer les anxiétés entourant les problèmes plus vastes de drogue qui sont prévalents dans la ligue, et ne réussissant pas à déranger notre connaissance de l'utilisation de médicaments antidouleur, renforçant ainsi les cultures persistantes du silence et de la robustesse dans le football professionnel.

Activists and journalists in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro are using social media to intervene in the violence that shapes their communities. In this article I draw on critical urban and digital media theory to understand how militarized policing, the spatialization of race, and discourses of criminalization influence favela populations. I examine how these discursive and material violences are motivating residents to autoconstruct new digital communities. Through digital autoconstruction, journalists and activists are using social media technologies to safely direct mobility, to witness police violence, and to unsettle socio-spatial imaginaries of endemic crime. As such, they are deploying digital practices to disrupt material, epistemological, and discursive mechanisms of social control. These actions show that digital technologies are always-already embodied and take shape through material histories, such as those of racialized state violence. Journalists and activists in Complexo do Alemão ultimately demonstrate that targets of violence are not simply victims of digital and violent surveillance, but are active in creating new digital relationships of care across diverse scales, transforming these technologies in the process.

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