Journal of Sport & Social Issues recent issues

Taiwanese Baseball: A Story of Entangled Colonialism, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism

Wang, S. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:48:57 PST

This article is about the development of baseball in Taiwan, and how it has been connected with Taiwan’s entangled history of Japanese colonization, the Chinese Nationalist’s authoritarian rule, the ethnically stratified social structure, and the emergence of the Taiwanese identity. Baseball was foreign to Taiwan when it was first introduced to the island. The sport then crossed the ethnic and class boundary between the Japanese colonizer and the Taiwanese islander in the 1920s, later the Taiwanese natives and the Chinese mainlanders in the 1970s, and in turn became a symbol of Taiwanese nationalism. This article argues that baseball does not circulate a fixed meaning as it travels to different places. The story of Taiwanese baseball indicates the interpenetration of colonialism, class, ethnicity, and nationalism.

America's Baseball Underground

Ring, J. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:48:57 PST

America’s national pastime has long been associated with masculinity and more recently has acknowledged its problems with racial exclusivity. Yet from the time it was professionalized in the 19th century to the aftermath of the Little League Lawsuits of 1973, baseball has excluded girls and women, regarding itself as "too strenuous" or "too violent", in spite of American girls’ and women’s post-Title IX participation in other more violent contact sports. The contrived exclusion of girls and women ignores their long-abiding affection for and participation in baseball from the early 19th century onward. What explains sequestering baseball for boys only? What are the civic implications of the insistence on masculine exclusivity for the game associated with American national identity?

The Difficult Dialogue: Communism, Nationalism, and Political Propaganda in North Korean Sport

Lee, J. W., Bairner, A. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:48:57 PST

North Korea is arguably the least understood and the most reclusive country in the world. This article discusses the use of sport in the country as a vehicle for political propaganda and, in particular, the role of nationalism within the communist sporting culture. Although most nation states have become increasingly interdependent politically and economically in the so-called global era, relatively few countries have an official relationship with North Korea. Sport may be one of the few arenas in which the world can glimpse North Korean people and their culture because North Korean athletes consistently participate in international sporting competition, both inside and outside of the country, regardless of political and economic isolation. In this article, an attempt is made to paint a picture of North Korean society by exploring the country’s sport culture. Particular attention will be paid to the political, and specifically the nationalistic, dimension of sport in North Korea. To this end, three case studies— football, taekwondo, and mass gymnastics—are explored. This study of North Korean sport offers useful insights into the political and nationalistic elements embedded in the country’s cultural practice, and, more generally, insights into the problematic relationship between communism and nationalism.

Something Less than a Driver: Toward an Understanding of Gendered Bodies in Motorsport

Pflugfelder, E. H. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:48:57 PST

This essay argues that the gendered body is not accounted for in the physical conditions of motorsport but instead through the discourse of the sport. Specifically, women’s bodies signify as different in three main ways: beyond vehicles (navigating the space filled with other bodies and their respective vehicles), with vehicles (coordinating with the technology of the vehicle), and inside vehicles (operating in the space of and interacting with the technology) but situated by their gender’s discursively constructed characteristics. For women drivers in motorsport, these locations of identity formation offer embodied experiences mediated through discursive constructions. This article examines these articulations of the female body in motorsport, focusing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donna Haraway, and Iris Marion Young.

Adolescent Girls' Involvement in Disability Sport: Implications for Identity Development

Anderson, D. — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:48:57 PST

The social institution of sport reflects a society that presupposes the values, mores, norms, and standards of the majority and subsequently determines who can participate in sport and who can be identified as an athlete. Recognizing the growing importance of disability sport to people with disabilities, the purpose of this study was to use the construct of symbolic interactionism to examine the identity development of adolescent girls with physical disabilities who participate in organized wheelchair sports with a specific focus on athletic identity development. An understanding of how the girls’ interaction with various socializing agents through a wheelchair sport program to develop an athletic identity was developed through interviews. Results are presented utilizing Keliber’s framework for identity development through leisure participation, including sport.

Bodies of Nature: Politics of Wilderness, Recreation, and Technology

Mincyte, D., Casper, M. J., Cole, C. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:11:55 PDT

Environmental Sporting: Birding at Superfund Sites, Landfills, and Sewage Ponds

Schaffner, S. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:11:55 PDT

This article describes birding as an example of what I call environmental sporting, an ostensibly green category of sport that relies on both environmental protection and degradation. Three competitive forms of birding are explored in relation to three toxic sites: the birding event called the World Series of Birding and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund sites, big-year birding and landfills, and the competitive practice of listing and sewage ponds. At each site and in each competitive instantiation of birding, birders seek birds in close proximity with potent environmental toxins. The presence of active birds and birders at such sites works to make toxicity seem both hospitable and harmless. By discussing how birding relies on and ultimately masks the perils of toxic sites, the article suggests contradictions that arise from the relationship between sport and environmentalism.

"Everybody Wants to Pioneer Something Out Here": Landscape, Adventure, and Biopolitics in the American Southwest

Barnes, B. A. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:11:55 PDT

This article analyzes a controversy that emerged when the first Eco-Challenge^® race was held in southern Utah in 1995 and sparked resistance from environmentalists who saw it as overly commercial, likely to inundate the region with tourists, and damage lands and wildlife. In an analysis of the controversy, I argue that the problem was partially rooted in notions of "wilderness" as naturally empty, and as nationally symbolic. Though stake-holders disagreed on "correct" uses of the land, they all imagined the desert as an empty space of freedom and equality, which, mirrored 1990s understandings of markets as free and level-playing fields. Adventure sport thus presented a logical environment for making the citizen bodies demanded by 1990s neoliberal cultures: flexible, free, and constantly self-improving. But "wilderness" is made in symbolic material ways that reflect cultural exigencies as much as physical characteristics of place. Though such constructions efface human and nonhuman histories, I ask whether wilderness adventure can be imagined through more historical complexity.

Risking Bodies in the Wild: The "Corporeal Unconscious" of American Adventure Culture

Jaquette Ray, S. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:11:55 PDT

At the heart of American adventure sports is the appeal of personal challenge that has roots in 19th-century "wilderness cults." Preserving wilderness and testing oneself against it were part of a search for moral, physical, and even national purity. But, as critics have begun to argue, racism, expansion, and exclusion underpin the wilderness movement. Although these exclusions have been identified, there has been less attention to these exclusions in contemporary adventure culture and environmental thought, which borrow values from the early wilderness movement and suggest that an environmental ethic arises from risking the body in the wild. By examining adventure culture through disability studies, this article exposes the relationship between environmentalism and ableism. It argues that disability is the category of "otherness" against which both environmentalism and adventure have been shaped and revises environmental thought to include all kinds of bodies.

Traversing the Matrix: Cyborg Athletes, Technology, and the Environment

Butryn, T. M., Masucci, M. A. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:11:55 PDT

Despite the growing body of sport studies literature engaging cyborg theory, and notwithstanding the significant amount of work within sport sociology interrogating sport and space, few scholars have attempted to situate the lived experiences of cyborg athletes both within the wide range of indoor, often more technologized settings, and outdoors in what have been considered "wilderness" environments. Furthermore, little work has examined the relationship between sport identities, sporting environments, and environmental politics. Therefore, this study qualitatively examined the lived sporting experiences of 12 competitive athletes who trained and competed both indoors and outdoors while using an array of sporting technologies. Results showed that athletes negotiated the boundaries between human, technology, and nature in complex, often contradictory ways, and made moderate connections between their cyborg identities and their impact on the environment.

An Exploration of the Co-production of Performance Running Bodies and Natures Within "Running Taskscapes"

Howe, P. D., Morris, C. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:11:55 PDT

This article explores the interrelationship between particular "natural" spaces and the production of middle- and long-distance performance running bodies. It argues that running bodies and nature are actively co-produced, thus blurring the commonly made distinction between the "social" and the "natural". In doing so, the article extends the geography of sports literature by adopting a "post-constructivist" perspective on nature as elucidated in Tim Ingold's concepts of "dwelling" and "taskscape". This illuminates the (re)production of sporting bodies through the materiality of nature and in turn contributes to research on embodiment within sports studies that highlights the importance of space and the natural environment. The article draws on ethnographic material and textual sources to illuminate the running taskscape associated with the production of performance running bodies and highlights how three forms and functions of nature are co-produced through this mode of dwelling.

Finding the Kieran Way: Recreational Sport, Health, and Environmental Policy in Nova Scotia

Pitter, R. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:11:55 PDT

Environmental and health issues top the political agendas of all levels of Canadian government. Environmental groups are most concerned about climate change and reducing related anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Health advocates are concerned about Canada's growing rate of obesity and ensuing health problems. In this era of lifestyle politics, Anthony Giddens suggests governments and community groups need to collaborate to address these issues. In Nova Scotia, however, the government's collaboration with off-highway vehicle groups to develop a trail system is under attack from an active transportation group, the Kieran Pathways Society. By identifying social, political, and economic discourses, this case demonstrates how lifestyles politics have not only supplanted emancipatory politics but also neglect ecocentric values. Thus, Giddens' "Third Way" may not resolve today's environmental issues.

Sports, Environmentalism, Land Use, and Urban Development

Mincyte, D., Casper, M. J., Cole, C. — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:53:13 PDT

Sports and Environmental Justice: "Games" of Race, Place, Nostalgia, and Power in Neoliberal New York City

Sze, J. — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:53:13 PDT

This article examines a contemporary and unfolding conflict in downtown Brooklyn in New York City where the siting of a professional sport stadium intersects with the politics of race, class, and the built environment. The Atlantic Yards project is a $4.2-billion project to bring housing, retail, open space, and most significantly (for the developers in their public relations campaign), a professional basketball franchise, the Brooklyn Nets. The author uses an analytic frame drawing from environmental justice studies through which to analyze the cultural and representational politics of the controversy. In doing so, this case complicates and further illuminates environmental justice and the sports and siting literature in the context of the geography of neoliberalism.

Spots of Spatial Desire: Skateparks, Skateplazas, and Urban Politics

Vivoni, F. — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:53:13 PDT

This article examines the intersection of alternative sport practices and spatial regulation ideologies in urban environments through an analysis of skateboarding terrains. It forwards skateboard spaces as contradictory sites for both practicing and contesting urban governance. These urban spaces span the gamut from do-it-yourself struggles for public space to public—private partnerships and corporate brand-building theme parks. Skatespots, skateparks, and skateplazas conform locations of exhilarating desire that frame skateboarding within a landscape of social control. The article surveys the found and purpose-built sites to demonstrate the political potential of skateboarding within variations on the themes of accommodation and resistance to spatial regulation.

Life in the Fast Lane: Environmental, Economic, and Public Health Outcomes of Motorsport Spectacles in Australia

Tranter, P. J., Lowes, M. — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:53:13 PDT

The article explores links between sport and health, focusing on a range of health outcomes of staging motorsport megaevents in significant public spaces in Australian cities. The article argues that an oversimplification of the links between sport and health produces a cultural filter that diverts attention from the negative health outcomes of sport. A major contribution of this study is the consideration of economic health and environmental health as well as public health. The interactions between these types of health are considered in a more holistic assessment of links between sport and health. The article concludes that the symbolic location of motorsport events in Australian cities both reflects and reinforces societal values that have important implications for health, both now and into the future.

Parkour, Anarcho-Environmentalism, and Poiesis

Atkinson, M. — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:53:13 PDT

As innovated by French "free runners" David Belle and Sébastien Foucan in the1990s, Parkour is a physical cultural lifestyle of athletic performance focusing on uninterrupted and spectacular gymnastics over, under, around, and through obstacles in urban settings. Through the public practice of Parkour across late modern cities, advocates collectively urge urban pedestrians to reconsider the role of athleticism in fostering self—other environment connections. This article taps ethnographic data collected on Parkour enthusiasts in Toronto (Canada). For 2 years, the author spent time in the field with "traceurs" (i.e., those who practice Parkour) and conducted open-ended interviews with them regarding their experiences with the movement. In this article, the author explores Parkour as an emerging urban "anarcho-environmental" movement, drawing largely on Heidegger's critique of technology along with Schopenhauer's understanding of the will to interpret the practice of Parkour as a form of urban deconstruction.

Oscar Pistorius's Aftermath

Cole, C. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:40:09 PST

Virtually Normal: Mark Bingham, the War on Terror, and the Sexual Politics of Sport

King, S. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:40:09 PST

This essay explores media narratives about Mark Bingham, the gay, rugby-playing Republican and successful businessman, who is believed to have played a key role in the struggle with the hijackers of United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. The analysis reveals that, with few exceptions, both lesbian and gay and mainstream publications mobilized Bingham's story in ways that lent tacit support to the intensified militarism and imperialism that have characterized the post-9/11 period. By focusing on the deployment of narratives about Bingham's athletic abilities, the argument points to the ways in which antihomophobic and gay-positive discourses about sport participation and prowess can operate in ways that bolster regressive political agendas and reproduce, rather than challenge, exclusionary norms of subjectivity.

Lennox Lewis and Black Atlantic Politics: The Hard Sell

McNeil, D. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:40:09 PST

Very little has been written about Lennox Lewis, an athlete who won the Olympic gold medal for Canada in 1988 but who was widely hailed as Britain's boxing savior when he unified various world titles in 1999. This article begins to address some of the gaps in our knowledge by placing Lewis alongside intellectual debates arising from Paul Gilroy's work on a Black Atlantic. It argues that some of the major themes of Gilroy's work—nationalism, double (or poly) consciousness, Americocentricity, and Black masculinity—are extremely useful tools for us to plot Lewis's career and to contend that a brief description of his career reminds us of the Canadian gaps in Gilroy's attempt to chart Black identities that are not just African, American, British, or Caribbean.

"Please Don't Fine Me Again!!!!!": Black Athletic Defiance in the NBA and NFL

Cunningham, P. L. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:40:09 PST

This article examines the contentious relationship between contemporary Black professional athletes and organizational authority, particularly in the National Football League (NFL) and National Basketball Association (NBA). It considers the rationalization given by both leagues for the rise of stringent guidelines regarding appearance and sportsmanship. The article then focuses on how some Black athletes contest these guidelines, particularly through acts of defiance and an adherence to hip-hop and street culture. The essay concludes by considering the current and possible effects of these players' defiance both for the players themselves and the leagues in which they play.

Young Men's Physical Activity Choices: The Impact of Capital, Masculinities, and Location

Lee, J., Macdonald, D., Wright, J. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:40:09 PST

This article draws on data from an Australian longitudinal study into the place and meaning of physical activity and physical culture in the lives of young people. The aim of the national study is to add meaning to the statistics based on quantitative surveys that suggest a declining participation rate and satisfaction of young people in organized sports, recreational physical activities, and exercise. Frequently, socioeconomic status, gender, and geography are used as explanatory variables. In this article, the authors aim to provide an alternative reading of the statistical patterns by exploring how differences in capital (economic, social, and cultural) are played out in the lives of four young Australian males. The authors argue that schooling, geographical location, and access to capital play important roles in the intersection among masculinities, participation in physical activity, and engagement with physical culture.

The Role of Gender Identities and Stereotype Salience With the Academic Performance of Male and Female College Athletes

Harrison, C. K., Stone, J., Shapiro, J., Yee, S., Boyd, J. A., Rullan, V. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:40:09 PST

An experiment was conducted to examine factors that moderate the experience of academic identity threat among college athletes who represent a stigmatized group on most college campuses (Yopyk & Prentice, 2005). It was hypothesized that because they are more engaged in academics, female college athletes would be especially threatened by the prospect of confirming the "dumb-jock" stereotype. As predicted, female college athletes performed more poorly when their athletic and academic identities were explicitly linked, but only on moderately difficult test items. The results also revealed that male college athletes performed significantly better (see stereotype reactance and self-affirmation) on more difficult test items when only their athletic identity was primed prior to the test. This is an important finding as there is little research on the impact of positive stereotypes on performance. The discussion focuses on the different motivational processes (i.e. self-affirmation) that impact the academic performance of male and female college athletes when aspects of their campus identity are primed within a classroom context.

Cycling's "Fix"

Fouche, R. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:40:09 PST