Reading Sport Critically

By Dr. Spencer

The assigned reading for Tuesday, September 23 is entitled "Reading sport critically: A methodology for interrogating power" (McDonald & Birrell, 1999, p. 283). The blog entry below is revised slightly from an entry that I posted for a previous Sport & Society class.

Birrell & McDonald wrote above
book based on this article.

This reading provides the foundation for doing textual analysis, which we will read more about in subsequent articles about Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, the Williams sisters, and other celebrity athletes. The idea of doing textual analysis (or reading sport critically) is borrowed from literary theory and has frequently been used in cultural studies. In British Cultural Studies, Graeme Turner (1990/2002) detailed the concept of textual analysis as it fits within the rich tradition of cultural studies. The notion of "reading texts" also stems from semiotics or semiology, which is the science of signs. It can be compared to what movie critics such as Siskel and Ebert did when they analyzed meanings of films.  

While the idea of being a film critic may seem fairly straightforward, the methodology of reading sport critically is complicated by multiple theoretical perspectives that inform its scholarly practice. As McDonald and Birrell (1999) explain, the reason for employing this methodology is to produce "counter-narratives" which are "infused with resistant political possibilities" (p. 283). In order to do that, we need to see how "power" operates, and we can do that by "reading narratives" that circulate throughout popular culture. We might not immediately recognize the operation of power without being informed by critical theories that enable us to see in ways that would not otherwise be visible to us. Now that the social media has become so pervasive in our culture, there are multiple sites through which narratives are produced - ranging from Twitter (consider how quickly the story about the Hudson River plane crash traveled through Twitter) to facebook, and other popular sites.

In order to fully appreciate what McDonald and Birrell (1999) outline in this article, it would help to be familiar with tenets of cultural studies, postmodernism and poststructuralism. However, assuming that you may not be familiar with these disciplinary areas, I advise you to take what you can from this reading. For the textual analysis assignment, you will be asked to focus on a specific incident or personality (examples include the Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan incident; Wayne Gretzky's trade to the L.A. Kings; more recently, we could examine the dynamics of power surrounding domestic abuse amongst players in the NFL and in women's soccer, for that matter). Underlying our analyses, McDonald and Birrell (1999) suggest that we should try to see the "nexus of power that helps produce their meanings" (p. 284). Among the relationships of power we are particularly interested in uncovering are those related to "race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and nationality" (p. 284). It is important to examine intersections of multiple "axes of power" (p. 284) rather than individual axes, as in the example of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. For example, if we focused only on the racial aspect, we might lose sight of the allegations of physical abuse (a gendered narrative). So, we are encouraged not to 'privilege' one axis over another.

What we ultimately want to be able to "say as cultural critics is that at this historical moment, in this particular place, these discourses on race, sexuality, age, ability, and nationality are produced around this particular incident" (McDonald & Birrell, 1999, p. 284). 

What do we mean by power?
Most of us have an idea of what we mean by "power." We may think of the power that "states" or "nations" or "political parties" have. During the Cold War, the super powers appeared to be the countries with the greatest political power. So, hegemony (dominance) was contested between these super powers. We may also think of "power" in terms of "prestige." Celebrities seem to have the greatest supply of "cultural currency" that can be thought of in these terms (Think: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, or Beyonce and Jay-Z). However, the theory of power that McDonald and Birrell utilize is one that was articulated by Michel Foucault, a French philosopher who said that power is not "locatable." In other words, we could not go to a building where "powerful people" ruled and blow up the building and expect to destroy power. An example could be taken from the "War on Terror." If we could destroy power, then shouldn't the killing of Bin Laden have provided the death knell to terrorism (at least as understood by citizens of the U.S.)? Yet, it appears that it did not. Likewise, can we really expect to diffuse the threat of ISIS by bombing?

Foucault's vision of power stemmed from Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.

Instead, Foucault conceived of power as in the Panopticon (above) wherein a jail was structured with a tower in the middle where the guards kept watch. Because of the lights that were always on, and which provided visibility into the cells, the guards could always see into the cells, but the lights kept prisoners from seeing the guard - or even whether a guard was in the tower. This type of surveillance (not knowing if the guard was even present or watching) led to a type of self-surveillance, much like we see with "Big Brother." So, reality TV provides an example of how power operates in modern society. In McDonald and Birrell's reading of Foucault, "power is not possessed by a dominant class or the state, nor imposed coercively from above. Instead power is diffuse, ubiquitous, and capillary, permeating all aspects of social life" (p. 288).

Hopefully this blog entry helps to explain what we mean by "reading sport critically." If you have specific questions about the assigned reading that you would like to discuss in class, please feel free to post them before Tuesday's class.