“Office Hours” is a column by nikki thomas that follows the major themes of her graduate research on sports, new media and parasocial phenomena.
Let me set the scene.
I’m taking my qualifying exams this semester. In the communication PhD program here at Annenberg (and in most PhD programs), you have to prove your expertise by taking these exams. The hope is that I emerge from the cocoon of this semester a wise and knowledgeable butterfly who can confidently call herself an expert of issues in communication and sport.
One of the topics in the research that’s really piqued my interest is the athletic/sporting body. Scholars have argued that the sporting body is complicated because of its relationship to masculinity and power. We arguably use our bodies to define and perform masculinity and, in doing so, negotiate identity and power in relation to others around us.
But the American sporting body is even more complicated because of the country’s relationship between the body, race and physical capital. American racial histories have screwed up all of our ideas about which bodies are acceptable, which are taboo and even which are property. The American athletic body is undeniably the racialized American athletic body because our history gives us no other choice.
We do this funny thing in the realm of sports, though, where we try to pretend we live in a raceless and apolitical bubble. Professional sport is often mistaken for a colorblind, meritocratic terrain where anyone can hypothetically bootstrap themselves up through the ranks of the social hierarchy and achieve their hoop dreams.
But not only is racial ‘colorblindedness’ impossible, it’s also too simple a framework for understanding how the world works – and particularly the world of American sports. Think about, for example, the Black quarterbacks in the NFL who have taken issue with being classified as ‘running quarterbacks.’
There’s a very real history behind their concerns because of the deep roots of eugenics and scientific racism in this country. Though Black athletes are typically lauded for their strength, other qualities are called into question, like their intelligence, cognition and leadership – traits desired in quarterbacks and other team leaders. When we pretend sport is colorblind, we miss out on that history and its continuing impact.
If things weren’t complicated enough already, the American sporting body is also increasingly datafied as our technologies advance and sports spectators engage in more diverse sports fan practices. The explosion of American internet usage at the end of the twentieth century brought new practices like fantasy sports into the mainstream, and the hyperanalysis and hypersurveillance of athletes’ bodies transitioned from a fringe activity to a widely accepted norm.
Somewhere along the way, too, analytics became irreplaceable in our modern sporting landscape. Our widespread adoption of sporting analytics has been revolutionary in shaping the way we perceive, treat and talk about the athletic body. We have used sport to datafy human performance in ways that have never been done before.
The world of American sports further changed in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of state-sanctioned sports betting in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. Now, commodification of athletes via gambling is extremely commonplace. Athletic performances are broken down into their most minute pieces and intertwined with capital. Part of what I want to figure out through my research is how having ‘skin in the game’ has changed our relationships to athletes and their bodies.
All of these changes in our new media environment have made it easier than ever before to objectify athletes. I think sports fandom is really crucial to this conversation about race and the sporting body because sports fan spaces are widely accepting of objectification. Fantasy sports and sports betting in particular offer fans an illusion of ownership that adds extra tension to their relationships with athletes.
I’ve said a lot about the complications surrounding athletic bodies in America, and since we’ve established that those bodies don’t exist in a vacuum, it makes sense to talk about them in relation to the fandoms that surround them. I hope to explore sports fandom at length and more specifically in future columns, but for now I want to clarify the role of fandom in reinforcing our social understandings of the physical bodies around us.
I remember when Kevin Durant decided to leave Oklahoma City, Thunder fans dressed dummies up in No. 35 jerseys, lined them up in firing squads and gunned them down (Poe Johnson breaks this phenomenon down particularly well in a 2020 piece on fandom violence). Sports fandom is excessively corporeal. It’s an embodied practice. And now that we know some of the complications presented by politics of the body, we as sports fans should be wary of engaging the athletic body in a harmful way.
We can’t untangle the histories of the athletic body from issues of masculine performance, race, objectification and datafication. We can’t unscramble the egg. What we can do is engage with issues of sport and the body more critically from this point forward – and maybe create a more tenable sporting environment in the process.