No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
A Detour Through `Nascar Nation'Ethnographic Articulations of a Neoliberal Sporting Spectacle
Abstract
This study offers an ethnographically informed critical interrogation of the spaces and spectacles of `NASCAR Nation'. Informed by a series of open-ended interviews with fans and administrators at NASCAR races, hundreds of hours of participant observation and spatial analysis at these events, and examination of various mediations of NASCAR driver-celebrity, spectacle, and fandom, this project illuminates the processes by which citizenship and entitlement in `NASCAR Nation' are both constructed and contested. The article also investigates the ways in which NASCAR — often referred to as America's `fastest growing sport' — has played a significant role in articulating the hegemonic structures of consumer capitalist neoliberalism and the current regime's brand of faith-based, militarized neoconservativism to the identity politics of stock car racing fandom.
... Of these events, the mega-events related to car racing (such as Formula 1, IndyCars, and NASCAR) are particularly interesting, since they have significant impacts on several cultural and economic aspects and image or branding of a tourist destination (Arnegger & Herz, 2016). From a North American perspective, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) is particularly interesting, since this form of car racing is almost exclusive to North America (Newman & Giardina, 2011). ...
... NASCAR racing has impacts on a wide variety of societal elements, including social, cultural, environmental, economic, local populations, car safety and so on (Coates & Gearhart, 2008;Newman & Giardina, 2011). For example, safety technologies that are developed for stock cars, such as roll cages or carbon brakes, are adapted and incorporated in commercial cars which the general public will be able to benefit from in their everyday driving (Coates & Gearhart, 2008;Peterson, 2009;Pierce, 2012). ...
... In the light of these studies, it can even be said that the identity of NASCAR and its various stakeholders is intimately linked to the presence of brands that reflect for many the capitalist and neoliberal character of American society. At the same time, some studies show how the consumption of derivative products, linked for many to these brands, is a very strong intrinsic character of NASCAR and its showmanship (Howell, 1997b;Levin et al., 2008;Newman, 2007;Spinda et al., 2009). Some of these products are centred on drivers, others on teams or car manufacturers, or on certain circuits. ...
Many countries, provinces and cities around the world use major sporting events as a catalyst for tourism development. The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), through its championships and racing events, has for many years, chosen to integrate itself into capitalist and neoliberal tourism and economic models. As a motorsport industry with strong historical, economic and media roots in American culture and certain values, NASCAR generates a myriad of tourism impacts on the territories hosting these races. This study, therefore, aims, through a scoping review of the scientific literature, to take stock of the scientific knowledge produced on NASCAR and its tourism impacts. This approach allowed the analysis of 28 scientific articles in depth and to draw several analytical conclusions. First of all, an observation was noted regarding a very strong involvement of sponsors and the media in this industry, which undeniably contributes to the creation of forms of sporting imagery around the teams and drivers). These sporting imaginaries undoubtedly colour the partisan cultures and even the fan communities that are created and evolve around and within this sporting ecosystem. The study of the tourist spin-offs of NASCAR has been studied in the scientific literature but appears to be rather limited or circumscribed, and must, therefore, be widely developed empirically.
... I extend these nascent conversations by foregrounding the broader institutional context within which dissent occurs. Specifically, I focus on how dissent structures precariousness in the context of a neoliberal polity enmeshed with the emotive force of cultural nationalism (Newman 2007;Rothe and Collins 2018). ...
... Transforming national security discourse into a spectacle becomes the heart of the neoliberal project, as it nurtures a form of citizenship that is actively invested in the commodification and consumption of state violence (Rothe and Collins 2018). Spectacle and identity politics thus play a central role in neoliberal consumerist projects, as fandom and citizenship are immersed in cultures of violence (Newman 2007). In the context of neoliberal identity politics, communities are embodied through the spectacle of brands. ...
... I argue that the intersection of cultural majoritarianism and neoliberal logics leads to an investment of the state in spectacles. These spectacles are often violent and transform citizens into passive consumers of state propaganda (Newman 2007;Rothe and Collins 2018). The emphasis on spectacles takes the focus away from building institutional capacities, and strong institutions are de-emphasized by actors controlling the state, as they fear that these institutions can become active sites of democracy. ...
In this study, I examine how dissenting subjects become precarious in the context of national security labor. I argue that the intersection of neoliberal and cultural nationalist practices produces a state formation, which is not genuinely interested in building institutional capacities for strengthening national security. Instead, the neoliberal, cultural nationalist state is more interested in investing in organizational actors who can produce spectacles, which transform citizens into passive consumers of state propaganda. Dissenters who call for expansion of institutional capacities threaten the prevailing authority structures, as institutions can then become sites for democratic action. Using auto-ethnographic approach to analyze the letters that I wrote while working in a national security organization in India and its subsequent coverage in the media, I contend that the marginalization of the dissenter is used as a tactic by the state for normalizing the erosion of institutional capacities.
... (O' Kane, 2011, p. 284) This cultural reservoir hints at how sporting rituals can provide social functions and cultural connections for communities or, indeed, nations (Butterworth, 2005;Newman, 2007). The sense of occasion associated with the Indy 500 as a vicarious lived experience, as well as the IMS as a memorable site, are further underscored by its familiarity. ...
... These performances arguably mesh with other American sports, notably baseball and NASCAR, in terms of their patriotic displays (Butterworth, 2005;Newman, 2007;Newman and Beissel, 2009). For example, NASCAR's rituals appear more categorically patriotic by aligning Christianity, the Religious Right, the military and predominantly conservative, white and Southern values. ...
... For example, NASCAR's rituals appear more categorically patriotic by aligning Christianity, the Religious Right, the military and predominantly conservative, white and Southern values. Newman (2007) suggests that these pre-race rituals serve to "spectacularize the preferred, hypermilitaristic, neoconservative identity politics of NASCAR Nation" (p. 302). ...
... (MacGregor, 2005, p. 141) However, as we have argued in more detail elsewhere (cf. Newman, 2007;Newman & Giardina, 2008), that "solidarity" did help grow the NASCAR brand. Through the propagation of Old South conservative values and exclusionary practices, NASCAR races brought to life a contextually important, racial homogeneity that not only excluded those nonwhite Southern subjects, but created symbolic value out of that exclusivity. ...
... 8 George W. Bush and his high-profile capitalist-turned-politico Party members (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, etc.) had become fixtures at the weekly NASCAR events before, and especially during, Bush's time in the Oval Office. During the 2004 election campaign-at what some might argue was the apex of the "Republican Revolution"-the son of an oil magnate-turned-baseball bourgeoisie-turned-President of the United States of America found in "NASCAR Nation" an important cultural space from which to anchor, and indeed protract, his brand of free-market, socially-conservative Republicanism (Newman, 2007). For "NASCAR country," based largely on the cultures of "traditionalism" and exclusivity nurtured during the sport's formative years, was widely considered "the home track of the Republican Party." "No other professional sport," wrote CNN/SI journalist Mike Fish (2001), "brags of having its guy in the White House. ...
... Elsewhere, we have followed other scholars (Denzin & Giardina, 2007;Kusz, 2007;Vavrus, 2007) in making the case that NASCAR best exemplified various features of George W. Bush's "recovery" of a singularly imagined "America," offering: rituals of prowar militarism at weekly races (fighter jet flyovers, the "Army Experience" as children's playground, etc.; cf. Newman, 2007); fan identities carved out of Home Depot, McDonalds, and Budweiser branded consumerism (cf. Braunstein, Newman, & Beissel, 2008); practices of "neo-Confederate" hegemonic whiteness within the sport's media and practiced spaces (cf. ...
This article profiles the ascent of stockcar racing from parochial pastime of the late industrial American South into an internationally-distributed corporate sport conglomerate. We explicate the role NASCAR (the sport's governing body), its spectacles, and its consumer-spectators played in reproducing the political, economic, and cultural conditions by which it was made both "local" and "global." It also briefly illustrates the problematic nature of recent initiatives to sell historically localized NASCAR commodities to "nontraditional" national and international markets.
... This 'fetishism of consumption' happens in a heteronormative, white-coded space that identifies the patriarchal family with the 'NASCAR family' (Williams & Connell, 2010, p. 368;Wright, 2002, p. 36). The seamless repetition of motorized speed, logo, and family form naturalizes the familial citizen-consumer as the ultimate expression of a neoliberal relationship to nature (Moreton, 2009;Newman, 2007;Probyn, 1998). ...
... Their exaggerated white southern cultural citizenship is perhaps a way of managing the disintegration of the liberal white subject (Cherniavsky, 2006, p. 108) Places, brands and the environment Interestingly the identification of NASCAR with the white south is a bone of contention in some accounts of the sport. Where critics see NASCAR as a neoliberal spectacle of mostly-rural 'white cultural nationalism' (Kusz, 2007;Newman, 2007) fans of the sport are more likely to call this association a 'stereotype' (Hugenberg & Hugenberg, 2008, p. 637) or to link the sport's association with white southern culture to a 'Yankee hiatus' (Wright, 2002, p. 223). Wright downplays the displays of white southern culture, such as the Confederate flag, at NASCAR events (p. ...
What are the cultural logics linking anti-environmentalism with social conservatism and pro-corporate politics? An investigation of NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) reveals the ways in which this sport embodies a relatively common American structure of feeling and corporeal relation to nature. Industrialization and neoliberal globalization have attenuated place-based identities, ecological affordances and subsistence strategies. As an expression of white American cultural citizenship, NASCAR manages this economic and ecological insecurity through a rearticulation of patriarchal familial commodity consumption and mobility. The evacuation of residual meanings and practices tied to specific ecologies makes the heteronormative nuclear family the privileged site for the type of consumption that signifies national belonging. An expectation of mobility underlines this detached consumption and also constitutes an appropriation of national territory. NASCAR thus represents a genre of American cultural citizenship that is implicated in the cultural politics of environmental protection and other public goods.
... In this formulation sport is commonly presented as hegemonic phenomena that celebrates traditional cultural forms in the face of broader societal transformations. For example, the sociology of sport has analyzed how the sport/war nexus plays out in the new post-9/11 security environment (Fischer 2014;Schimmel 2017;Vincent et al. 2010) and in the context of new popular sporting traditions, including the rise of professional women's sport (Batts and Andrews 2011;Bowes and Bairner 2018;Newman 2007). However, the focus of this scholarship is in pointing to the endurance and cultural adaptability of traditional militaristic cultural frames. ...
The Invictus Games is an international sporting competition involving military veterans who have become either wounded, injured or sick during their service. Having become a prominent event in the public sphere of participating nations that are drawn from Western security alliances, this article outlines results from a thematic analysis of Australian media surrounding the 2018 Sydney Games. While reporting of the Games included the use of cultural frames that reflect traditional symbolic relationships between sport and war, the data reveal new military–civilian discourses drawn from identity politics and focused on cultural recognition. These discourses emerge through the Invictus Games by (1) disability providing a cultural basis to demand greater respect for contemporary veterans and military service; and (2) empowerment narratives of rehabilitation being symbolically connected to participants’ reengagement with their former military identity. Institutional problems central to rising political activism amongst contemporary veterans did not feature in the media coverage. It is argued that the Invictus Games illustrates the need for sociology to conceive of militarization in more multidimensional ways, appreciating both the prominence of a civilian–military gap in contemporary culture and how various social actors in Defense utilize post-heroic narratives in seeking to redress this cultural divide.
... In the context of the South-such as through the social practices of institutions such as NASCARthe performativity of racialized representation offers a return to a cultural politics of the normative power of whiteness. The process of normalization manifests itself through several core institutions in the South, such that sport and leisure formations have contributed to an interconnected universe underpinned by White supremacist ideologies (Newman 2007). It is in this line of thought that the symbolic manifestations of racism are propagated and performed by Southern Whites, as are found to appear in the practices-both discursive and physical-within NASCAR spaces. ...
This article places its attention on how the spatial boundaries, practices, and separations—as structured by whiteness—impact the contestation and negotiation of meaning-making processes in the production and consumption of NASCAR space(s) for Black fans. It was through that vantage point that the participants demonstrated a nuanced understanding of whiteness, particularly through an awareness of NASCAR as a White space, how to effectively navigate such a White space, and a contextualization of more recent enactments of whiteness within these spaces. To explore and define Black individuals’ racialized experiences and movements as NASCAR fans from their perspective, this article uses a qualitative approach as grounded in narrative inquiry. Thus, findings demonstrate how Black fans make meaning of whiteness within the geographies of NASCAR, which advances theoretical understandings of how whiteness is perceived and represented in the Black imagination. Informed by Southern regional identity and the navigation of White space, these representations of whiteness as exclusive, fearful, and possessive are made salient through NASCAR’s attachment to racialized cultural values.
... Corporate voice is studied in many fields, but here we assess it as part of neoliberal rhetoric that emphasizes freedom, choice, and individuality while effacing the entrenched systematic imbalances that elevate an elite few. Newman (2007) traces neoliberal discourse in the context of NASCAR racing, showing how that sport league aligns its fans with political ideologies in which "the government's 'role' is to facilitate 'economic growth', [with] a strong 'belief ' in trickle-down economics, American egalitarianism and meritocracy (although usually stated more concisely in terms of the 'American dream' and 'hard work'), and the seemingly natural 'place' of corporate capitalism in American society" (p. 294). ...
Women competing on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Tour recently began wearing clothing that diverted from historic norms. Some LPGA stakeholders found the attire to be distasteful, resulting in the implementation of a dress code dictating what participants could wear. LPGA members and outside stakeholders were somewhat taken aback by the dress code, declaring that the guidelines were essentially policing the women’s bodies and that the LPGA was showing a lack of trust that players will wear athletically appropriate attire. Our findings uncovered divergent reactions to the dress code and indicated the female athlete paradox still significantly impacts women’s professional golf.
... In this formulation, scholars can study how people maintain traditions as well as how they invent them; and they can study how people show communities as well as how they imagine them. They can study, along with other sport practices, including spectating (Newman, 2007), social media (Norman, 2012), and newspapers (Falcous, 2007;Falcous & West, 2009), all those techniques that collect bodies to be national, including surveys (Igo, 2007) and border security (Sparke, 2006), and even mundane technology, such as roads (Schouten, 2013). ...
Athletes, their bodies, and their sport performances validate and vivify the nation by lending physical form to an imagined community. For bodies to express and enact so consistently as to constitute a coherent nation, they must be assembled, defined, and motivated within a complex arrangement of culture, civil society, and institutions. Aihwa Ong called this arranging of people with national objectives cultural citizenship. In this article, I write autoethnographic vignettes of my experiences as a migrant and rugby player from Aotearoa/New Zealand playing in the U.S. South, which I use to demonstrate and add to Ong’s theories on embodiment, cultural citizenship, and the nation. I argue that a nation is an unlikely achievement dependent on its members; members, such as athletes, enact their nation in by augmenting its affects, most notably by making the nation capable of having a physical encounter. I recommend qualitative scholars and sport sociologists study instances where athletes and other members fail to embody the nation, because this is where scholars can best observe and study the contingency of nations.
... 9 In 2003, Loughborough PhD graduate Mark Falcous, whose research focuses on sport migration, media and social theory (Falcous, 2007;Falcous & Maguire, 2005;Maguire & Falcous, 2011) joined the Otago group undertaking teaching in the sociology of sport. In 2005, following the departure of John Hughson (Hughson, Inglis and Free, 2004;Sam & Hughson, 2011), who taught courses in sport history and sport film, to the University of Central Lancashire, University of Maryland PhD graduate, Josh Newman (2007;2010;Newman & Beissel, 2009;Newman & Giardina, 2011) took up the position at Otago in 2009 teaching both the sociology and history of sport until 2011 when he returned to the United States to a position at Florida State University. ...
The subdiscipline of the sociology of sport heralded its arrival on the
international scene with an agreement in Geneva in 1964 to establish an
International Committee for Sport Sociology (ICSS), and the setting up of
this committee took place in Warsaw the following year. Over the past 50
years the subdiscipline has grown significantly and New Zealand has
certainly featured prominently. In this article, we (a) provide a general
overview of some of the early scholarly writing on sport that pre-dated the
subdiscipline, (b) discuss how the field emerged within and between
physical education and sociology, (c) highlight the social significance of
sport in Aotearoa New Zealand, before (d) tracing the past and present
state of the sociology of sport in this country, and finally (e) consider the
future challenges facing the field both globally and locally.
... Lawrence, McKay, & Rowe, 2001;Newman, 2007;Silk, 2002) whose collective contribution has conclusively affirmed the importance of a dialectic sensibility. ...
WNBA uniform politics in 2016 coalesced around three distinct voices: corporate sponsor logos, sanctioned pro-LGBTQ demonstrations, and an unsanctioned black Lives Matter player protest. We argue that uniform politics reveals a cautious, commercially linked, single-issue approach to social engagement in the WNBA.
This chapter focuses on the relationship between sport, the dominant modes of production, and how the body, when placed within sporting contexts, (re)produces modern capitalism's social class hierarchies. It outlines how scholars have conceptualized tensions arising from the relations of industrial capitalism, the body, and sport. The chapter specifically focuses on power, the sporting body, and social class politics. As counter-capitalist revolutionary thinking and action began to spread across much of the developed world, in many nations sport emerged as a site for confronting the dominant capitalist order of social and economic life. In this tradition, supporters of sport and critics of capitalism around the world established worker sport movements: in Britain, in France, and in the United States. The living bodies of the global free market are united in and through the economic and cultural formations of neoliberal sport.
Critical interventionist ethnography has recently come into vogue within the Sociology of Sport. More specifically, many in our field believe that merely studying and writing up studies on physical culture is not enough, and that work within the field needs to be more impactful, meaningful, and exact various forms of social justice. As such, in this paper Twill discuss how the turn to social justice has had a profound effect on my research agenda. In so doing, I will outline the difficulties and challenges inherent in such a political project by critically reflecting on my first ethnographic research project on the Little League World Series an admittedly failed attempt at critical intervention. I hope to help foster better and more successful research projects within the field by looking back at some of the key mistakes I made at this site while simultaneously encouraging others to be public pedagogues.
Over the past 30 years Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) (Andrews, 2008) has grown in the United States. This form of radical inquiry has been heavily influenced by the British Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. PCS research has focused on the various ways the corporeal has been a/effected by, and, indeed, (re)informs the contemporary socioeconomic context. However, while theoretical rigor has long been the norm in American PCS, I argue that the critical (public) pedagogy that radically contextual Cultural Studies has always called for has been a little slower in developing. As such, I will demonstrate how Henry Giroux's influence in, on, and for critical pedagogy has more recently become and should be an essential component of PCS-particularly in our classrooms. As such, I will provide examples outlining how critical pedagogy informs my classroom practices to begin the dialogue about what constitutes good pedagogical work.
Since the nineteenth century the USA has served as an international model for business, lifestyle and sporting success. Yet whilst the language of sport seems to be universal, American sports culture remains highly distinctive. Why is this so? How should we understand American sport? What can we learn about America by analyzing its sports culture? Understanding American Sports offers discussion and critical analysis of the everyday sporting and leisure activities of 'ordinary' Americans as well as the 'big three' (football, baseball, basketball), and elite sports heroes. Throughout the book, the development of American sport is linked to political, social, gender and economic issues, as well as the orientations and cultures of the multilayered American society with its manifold regional, ethnic, social, and gendered diversities. Topics covered include: American college sports the influence of immigrant populations the unique status of American football the emergence of women's sport in the USA With co-authors from either side of the Atlantic, Understanding American Sports uses both the outsider's perspective and that of the insider to explain American sports culture. With its extensive use of examples and illustrations, this is an engrossing and informative resource for all students of sports studies and American culture. © 2009 Gerald R. Gems and Gertrud Pfister. All rights reserved.
This article explores the relationship between popular representations of soccer and the rise of neoliberal discourse celebrating a new individualism in Japan at the turn of the millennium, a time when the country experienced sharp economic decline and consequent economic restructuring. Examining dominant vocabularies and practices present in coaching discourse, on soccer fields, and in media portrayals of Japanese men's and women's professional leagues, the author argues that rather than a coincidental, coeval mirroring between two seemingly unrelated realms-sports and economic transformations-these relationships point to the positioning of soccer over the past 20 years in Japan as a site to educate and physically train individualistic sensibilities and perspectives suitable to and reinforcing of a neoliberal labor market and governmental system.
This article investigates the paradoxes of communicative liberalization. We explore the ways in which something as seemingly banal as backyard basketball—by being incorporated into the realm of Internet communication—is at once “opened up” to the media consuming public and yet invariably constrained by the corporate and spectacularizing technologies that have come to define the era of free market communication. Drawing upon an extensive case analysis of the “trick shot” enterprise known as Dude Perfect, we illustrate how even the most homespun forms of mediation are thrust into the imperatives of neoliberal accumulation whereby the “homemade” cyber-spatial media-sport production becomes aligned with, if not overdetermined by, the processes of corporatization, spectacularization, and marketization.
Despite the growing popularity of NASCAR stock car racing throughout North America, it has remained largely ignored in the sport management research literature. This article suggests that unlike other major spectator sports, which formed cartel systems based on the principles of industrial Fordism, NASCAR organised within a capitalist system more characteristic of Harvey's theory of flexible accumulation. Using NASCAR as a case study, we describe its organisation within an ideal type methodology. The unique characteristics of NASCAR include fragmentation of production systems, new dimensions of labour practises, new consumption processes, and geographical manipulation and re-configuration. Because of its economic system, NASCAR is better positioned than other North American sports to break free from geographic constraints and exploit emerging markets. However, approaching NASCAR within the framework of flexible accumulation reveals that the sport may be more vulnerable to future crises than other major North American spectator sports.
This paper develops theoretical arguments accounting for the broad spectator appeal of the Winston NEXTEL Cup automobile racing series and its dramatic growth in popularity and subsequent expansion in North America. We suggest that this spectacular spectatorship phenomenon is a reflection of economic and cultural forces that have shaped it and which are symptomatic of a more generally intensified corporate infiltration into the sporting realm. Our arguments take extant sociological explanations for the generalised popularity of contemporary spectator sport as their point of departure. Demographic shifts in the socio-economic and gender backgrounds of the developing fan base are then juxtaposed with features of stock car racing which make it attractive to both live audiences and those viewing the event on television. NASCAR, the organiser/owner of the Winston/Nextel Cup racing series, it is suggested, is symptomatic of broader trends within the sport-media nexus within which the financial logic of consumer capitalism supersedes the cultural roots of the sport as it was originally constructed. We conclude that the socially constructed structure of the race events themselves cannot be extricated from the economic logic of the media production values which drive the spectacularisation of the sport's development as a major sport brand.
This article offers a series of autoethnographic reflections on suffering from physical symptoms associated with a paradox of praxis. More specifically, it mediates on the musculoskeletal pangs that come with a raised critical consciousness—or what Paulo Freire refers to in his teaching as conscientização—that stands as directly incongruent to living (in) the embodied politics of an incessantly aspirational working class habitus (and various machinations of social mobility).
This article offers a reflexive [re]discovery of my own Whiteness, my own Southern-ness, and my own masculinity through ethnographic engagement with the “New Sporting South”; reporting on the juxtaposition of my new [critical performance scholar] self onto the spaces and social relations once inhabited by my old [working class, parochial, “Southern”] self. Although this article is primarily a retrospective on my return to Southern sporting fields in Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina, it is also a critical inspection of the performative politics of engaged cultural studies research on the body. For mine is a political project, bent on contextualizing, and thus problematizing, the seemingly banal nature of Southern sporting fixtures such as college football and stock car racing. The more time I spent in these spaces of the New Sporting South, “observing” the sport cultures from which I sprung, the better I was able to trace a series of ostensibly inescapable patterns of oppression: (a) the cultures of racism, sexism, and patriarchy are still highly active within these local sporting spectacles; (b) my White skin, Southern drawl, “hillbilly” vernacular, and masculine deportment allowed access to the most exclusive/divisive of these social spaces (whereas others might have been denied); (c) to prolong engagement with various groups, I was forced to “perform” my “old” Southern self (laughing at racist jokes, admiring Confederate-flag emblazoned garb, and so on); and (d) in an effort to create change (through critical interrogation of the sporting empirical), I was most often “read” as a [re]productive agent of these regressive cultural politics. To this end, I argue that any politically-“progressive” outcomes from this type of qualitative research must be weighed against the symbolic violence created therein.
This article critically examines the emerging field of physical cultural studies, especially its contributions to our understandings of “the body” in and through its ongoing relationship with the research act. That is, a focus on the confluence of the embodied self and the [auto-]ethnographic self as it relates to the conduct of inquiry. It also addresses the politics of the body within a particular neoliberal condition, and the way the body and its health and well-being is leveraged as a pedagogical apparatus of neoliberalism. It concludes by arguing that we need to privilege bodily copresence within the theory, method, and practice of physical cultural studies.
The commodification of football has been the subject of substantial sociological debate but has received relatively limited scrutiny in terms of sustained comparative empirical research. This article draws heavily on interviews with supporter groups, journalists, and officials in Scottish football to examine a range of issues relating to fan experiences and understandings of football's commodification. The author examines how fans respond to their labeling as customers and considers whether they are alienated or marginalized from football in economic and cultural terms. The author explores how the game's commodification can be at the expense of themost deserving supporters and undermines the future reproduction of fan communities. The author concludes by arguing for a nuanced sociological reading of supporters in regard to commodification, which appreciates both the fans' market pragmatism and their normative critiques of distributive justice in the game.
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
The August 2005 Hurricane Katrina media spectacle put on display the glaring inequities of race and class that define the United States in the new millennium. The inability of the federal government to respond to the catastrophe called attention not only to the failures and incompetence of the Bush administration but also to the crisis of neoliberalism whereby the market alone cannot provide for the needs of citizens and deal with crises. Katrina also called attention to a "politics of disposability" whereby certain people are deemed disposable and not worthy of care and help. The biopolitics of inequality and disposability was put on full display in the Katrina spectacle and may be one of the most important aftereffects of the tragic episode.
The author offers some developing thoughts on a domestic White cultural nationalism that emerged from the ashes of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. More specifically, the author reads the November 10, 2003, National Review cover story and the media spectacle made of Pat Tillman’s death in 2004 while serving in President Bush’s war on terror in the Afghanistan theater as expressions, and producers, of a reactionary White cultural nationalism that emerged in post-9/11 America. In articulating this National Review cover story about NASCAR with the media spectacle made of Pat Tillman’s death and life, one will be able to see how sport—particularly media discourses about sport figures and formations—is being mobilized in post-9/11 America to express, naturalize, and garner public consent for this reactionary form of White cultural nationalism.
This short paper seeks to explain the activities of Scottish fans in Genoa and Turin, during the 1990 World Cup, by drawing on some key concepts offered by contemporary writers in the field of post-modernism and post-structuralism. These writers include Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and Baudrillard. All emphasize a re-empowerment of agency, evading more conventional forms of domination: Foucault within the domain of enabling discourse, Derrida on the open interpretation of the sign's apparent meaning, Barthes on the ‘nature’ of jouissance and the body principle, and Baudrillard on the public toying with their media representation. It is argued that Scottish fan behaviour in Italy was structured by two opposing forms of ‘self-knowledge’, relating to either expressions of violent machismo or instrumentally ambassadorial conduct. The eventual triumph of the latter is most clearly shown through an application of Goffman's conception of ‘impression management’, as the social interaction of Scottish fans with other ‘teams’ in Italy is detailed chronologically. The paper concludes with some recommendations aimed at the relevant authorities, with a view to maximizing the internationalism of Scottish fans at future competitions.
This paper argues that racing for innocence is a discursive practice which functions simultaneously to disavow accountability for racist practices at the same time that everyday racism is practiced. Drawing from both fieldwork and interviews in a corporate legal department over two different time periods (in 1988–89 and in 1999), I explore the meaning and consequence of this race in my interviews with white and African-American lawyers. Further, I follow the trajectory of one African-American lawyer, Randall Kingsley, and tell his story along with the stories constructed by the white men who still work there about Randall's departure from the company. I do so to make an argument about why these white men, by virtue of their social location, cannot see how they contributed to the unfriendly climate that forced Randall out of the department. Further, I argue it is through such everyday practices that whiteness is reproduced as a structural relationship of inequality in workplaces.
Introduction: Cultural Studies after 9/11
- N K Denzin
- M D Giardina
The American People Cannot Be Trusted
- T Miller