Alternative sports have been situated within backlash politics whereby subcultural or marginal representations illustrate a victimized white male. While this may be true of some sports, skateboard media fosters a sustained critique of “whiteness.” To understand the representation of white resistance in skateboarding, we must locate the sport within the larger historical context of white male rebellion found in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Norman Mailer’s White Negro (1957). Similar to these countercultural narratives, skateboard media represents a tension between a death of whiteness (symbolized by co-opting “blackness”) and its inevitable rebirth (through prolific marketing of white skaters). Unlike the Beats, however, the dialectics of white resistance appear in skateboard media through advertisements that are often underscored by parody, which produces its own set of complexities.
In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of ''tough guys'' from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of ''expendability'' within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 and map its representation of masculinity, physical labor, and ageing. We do this by looking at The Expendables as essentially a labor text. In doing so, we find a smorgasbord of working bodies and types of physical labor that reveal multiple intersections among discourses of masculinity, class, ageing, and race that simultaneously reflect the divisions of (physical) labor in the industries in which the stars work-Hollywood film and professional sports.
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.
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