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Sports
Book chapter

Sports

Thomas P Oates
A Companion to Popular Culture, pp.265-283
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
05/17/2016
DOI: 10.1002/9781118883341.ch15

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Abstract

This chapter looks at the history of the athletic icon, emphasizing the shifting presentational strategies employed by the mainstream media, which disseminate and promote sport. It maps some of the subtle discursive adjustments made to the ideology of White masculine domination in and through sport. This project builds on feminist scholarship that understands the spectacular body as a site of power and foregrounds the role of power in representational practices. It also emphasizes the interwoven and inextricable relationship between race and gender. The chapter identifies three crises of White male domination. Each of these crises transcends sport. The first crisis attended the development and early growth of elite sport in the United States around the turn of the last century. The second helped shape the postwar ascendency of sport, and the third is producing new forms that extend and deepen fans’ connection with an expanding and increasingly crowded sports marketplace.
Black dominance feminist scholarship gender race sports United States White male dominance

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