This study focuses on connections between labor struggles in professional sports and the epidemic of concussions among athletes, specifically in the National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL). Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we explain how popular media presents concussions in ways that are informative but often avoid a more politicized discussion of the athlete as a manual worker whose body succumbs to use and abuse of sport. We found two recurring themes in the North American popular press, including a tendency to (1) rely on a trope of “millionaires-versus-billionaires” to explain (and minimize) recent labor lockouts in the NFL and NHL and (2) shift focus on league deniability to athletes’ self-responsibility in the concussion “crisis.” Despite the urgency in which sports concussions and brain injuries have been reported in recent years, the two narratives work to discourage readers from recognizing how such health issues arise under specific relations of production, and that an athlete is a particular type of worker whose body is subjected to decline and disposability like so many other bodies under late capitalism. As we argue, working conditions are inseparable from concussions in professional sports, a phenomenon that requires further development within the popular press.
This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. Our concerns crystallized during the spirited feminist responses to a fiery roundtable debate on Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) in New Orleans in November 2012. At that session, one audience member after another spoke to what they saw as the unacknowledged appropriation by PCS proponents of longstanding feminist—and feminist cultural studies—approaches to scholarship and writing. These critiques focused not just on the intellectual moves that PCS scholars claim to be making but on how they are made, with several audience members and some panelists expressing their concerns about the territorializing effects of some strains of PCS discourse.
This article draws on the work of two poststructural theorists, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, to illustrate that although it is possible to posit identity from an exclusively discursive account (Foucault) or an exclusively psychoanalytic account (Lacan), it is necessary to put such accounts into conversation to more productively engage in the process of identification. Through use of an advertisement (in which a female athlete sees herself in a mirror) and an analogy to the scientific laws of reflection, this article illustrates that in order to see oneself (identify) one must recognize something in, on, or through their body, and this recognition of the body is always a misrecognition that might more appropriately be called identification. This article is therefore a reading of identification through the productive exploration of the woman on both sides of the mirror, highlighting both discursive and psychoanalytic accounts of her subjectivity. The pervasiveness of the body within these accounts is notable because it highlights the possibilities of the body as a point of articulation between discursive and psychic accounts of identification. The article also illustrates that even when identity is acknowledge as constructed, fragmented, and multiple, it is still meaningful, material, and political.
Attempts to unify and mobilize the U.S. collegiate wrestling community to “save” it from decline frames Title IX as the main “problem” to overcome. The logic of a community of identification at work in this strategy limits the interventions that can be made for wrestling while enabling corporate men’s sport to remain the hegemonic form of U.S. collegiate athletics. We explicate and critique the varied articulations of wrestling as a community of identification following Helstein’s (2005) call to deconstruct assumptions of unified sporting communities and to consider communities of articulation. We illustrate how communities of identification necessarily fail and how moving toward communities of articulation offers an intervention that enables a reframing of the relationship between Title IX and collegiate wrestling that could motivate meaningful change.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.