Skateboarding has boomed globally over the last decade, and researchers have been quick to examine how intersecting social markers like race, gender, and age can influence people’s participation in this action sport. Yet, little research has considered disabled people’s participation in skateboarding and adaptive action sports, such as wheelchair motocross (WCMX), despite increased uptake among disabled people. Considering this gap, I explored the emerging adaptive action sports of skateboarding and WCMX.

Adaptive skateboarding is a term used to encapsulate different forms of riding. While some riders make modifications to their sporting equipment or environments to facilitate independent participation for a disabled person, some riders make no modifications. Like skateboarding in general, adaptive skateboarding has grown in popularity. In fact, adaptive skateboarding events are now included in both the X Games and Dew Tour, and an adaptive skateboarding demo was recently showcased at the Street League Skateboarding international tournament series in Paris. In addition to these competitions, adaptive skateboarding programs, like the Skate Bats and Rad Skate School, have blossomed and illustrate a growth and interest in the sport and its potential.

WCMX fits loosely under the umbrella of adaptive skateboarding. In WCMX, participants perform tricks and stunts adapted from bicycle motocross (BMX) and skateboarding in customised wheelchairs. The sport was first development by Aaron “Wheelz” Fotheringham in the early 2000s and has since grown in popularity. While WCMX riders often compete alongside adaptive skateboarders, participants widely consider WCMX to be its own distinct sport, unique from skateboarding and BMX. In fact, separate WCMX World Championships exist, and a separate WCMX exhibition event was included at Dew Tour in 2022. Like adaptive skateboarding, WCMX programs like SIT‘N’SKATE and WCMX Great Britain have emerged in recent years.

The growth and popularity of both adaptive skateboarding and WCMX have even sparked conversations about these adaptive action sports being included in the Paralympic Games. Indeed, this inclusion could be monumental for the sports and disabled people. However, in my research, I was less concerned about the Paralympic potential of these sports and instead interested in learning about disabled riders’ experiences in these sports and the wider action sport community.

Using qualitative interviews, I spoke with 30 disabled riders from eight different nations. Twenty participants identified as adaptive skateboarders, nine identified as WCMX riders, and one identified as a wheelchair boarder (who attached their wheelchair to the top of an electric longboard). Impairments varied and included caudal regression syndrome, cerebral palsy, limb difference, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, spina bifida, spinal cord injuries, and visual impairments. Interviews gleaned insight into disabled riders’ experiences with these adaptive action sports while also drawing attention to some of the challenges they encountered. In what follows, I detail some of the key findings that developed from this work.

In general, disabled riders reported positive experiences participating in adaptive skateboarding and WCMX, noting how they felt included in the wider action sport community. Disabled riders noted how participation in the sports can not only enhance one’s physical and mental health but also provide a greater sense of community, belonging, and identity. Moreover, findings highlighted how participation in adaptive skateboarding and WCMX may be used to challenge the stigma and negative social perceptions about disability.

Against this potential, however, findings also highlighted how economic, material, and sociocultural forces may impact disabled riders’ participation in adaptive skateboarding, WCMX, and the wider action sport community. Though academics have touted skateboarding as being a “relatively cheap sport” to participate in, discussions with disabled riders illustrated a different narrative and outlined how both sports can be expensive, which presents participation barriers. Disabled skateboarders noted how the costs of skateboarding equipment (i.e., boards, shoes, and protective gear) and the constant need to replace this equipment can be costly and influence their participation. Financial constraints were even greater for WCMX riders who noted how WCMX chairs can cost between $6,000 and $15,000USD. Thus, significant economic constraints exist for those wanting to participate. Such economic barriers are particularly pressing when you consider that these costs are often not covered by insurance and that, on average, disabled people make less and are given fewer employment opportunities than those without disabilities.

Findings also illustrated how material barriers, such as inaccessible skatepark designs, can influence the extent to which disabled riders participate in certain sporting spaces. Though disabled riders recognised the difficulties of creating accessible skateparks “for all riders,” many acknowledged the importance of having accessible pathways to and from skateparks and the importance of having accessible amenities like washrooms, water fountains, and hangout areas in these built environments. According to participants, these pathways and amenities may not only allow greater access to disabled park users but may also allow greater access to disabled individuals from the community who may want to engage with these spaces.

Conversations with disabled riders also detailed how gender may influence riders’ participation in adaptive skateboarding, WCMX, and the wider action sport community. Disabled women riders noted how, although they felt supported by adaptive riders and able-bodied skateboarders, they tended to receive less recognition, support, and opportunities than disabled male riders. One reason for this lack of support, according to disabled women riders, could be the dominant gender ideologies that circulate in the skateboarding world that frame girls and women as “not as impressive,” “skilled,” or “willing to take risks” as boys and men. However, another reason for this gender discrepancy, according to participants, could be because most positions of power in the action sport landscape (i.e., owners, board members, judges, and media personnel) are occupied by able-bodied men, who may not have full understandings about disability or gender, which, in turn, could shape and fuel who is prioritised and given more opportunities within the skateboarding and action sport worlds.

As this work has highlighted, adaptive skateboarding and WCMX offer a huge untapped potential for disabled people, disability sport, and action sports. Regardless of whether adaptive skateboarding and WCMX enter the Paralympic Games, disabled people will continue to participate in adaptive action sports. Therefore, it is important for academics, participants, stakeholders, disability sport organisers, and those from the action sport industry to consider and actively address how to make these sports, their sporting spaces, and the wider action sport industry more inclusive and welcoming to all riders. While potential remedies could include increased funding, consultations with disabled people throughout the planning and design process of skateparks, or carving out space, opportunities, and leadership positions for disabled girls and women riders, there are numerous ways that these adaptive action sports can be made more inclusive to different riders and riding styles.

Author Biographical Note:

Nikolaus A. Dean is a postdoctoral research fellow in Te Kura Aronui School of Social Sciences at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand). Nikolaus’s research interests lie in the sociology of sport where he uses (digital) qualitative methods and critical social theories to explore topics related to disability, pain, injury, and risk in action sports. His current research is exploring the “push” for adaptive skateboarding and WCMX to join the Paralympic Games.

Funding:

This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

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“…you begin to see how it’s all connected and the importance that we give these opportunities for Indigenous youth and Indigenous girls to be our future” ~Ryan Francis

On lands claimed by Canada, the ongoing project of settler colonialism targets Indigenous lives, languages, ways of knowing, connections to territory, and more. Settler colonialism is the claiming of lands already occupied by Indigenous peoples for the purposes of building wealth. It involves destroying Indigenous institutions and ways of knowing, while building what Daniel Heath Justice calls a “new social order” that is geared toward eliminating Indigenous peoples as Indigenous peoples. The violences of settler colonialism in the Canadian context include, for example, the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and how anti-Indigenous racism is embedded in institutions such as child welfare, the justice system, and higher education. As Tuck and Yang highlight, the violence of settler colonial invasion “is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.”

One vital part of the destruction referred to above is that the settler state attacks Indigenous systems of gender and perpetuates Euro-Western gender structures. As Tricia McGuire-Adams asserts, “As a result of Indigenous women’s connection to land… [they] are seen as credible threats to ongoing settler entitlement to Indigenous territories and are actively targeted for silence, and even death.”

Sport and recreation constitute vital spaces of both settler colonial violence and, importantly, of Indigenous strength, resurgence, and world-building. In this entry, I center and value Indigenous strength, vitality, and resistance as I engage with the Indigenous Girls Hockey Program (IGHP) and Indigenous Girls Hockey Jamboree (IGHJ) as vital world-building projects in the face of gendered colonial violence. Ryan Francis, founder of both initiatives, is a Mi’kmaq hockey organizer and coach with experience as both a player and coach of competitive hockey, including formative experiences at the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships. Francis is also the creator of the Genevieve Francis Memorial Fund, initiated in honour of his late Grandmother to support opportunities for Indigenous girls and women to participate in sport and recreation and to draw awareness to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. I draw here on a life history interview with Francis to consider the importance of the IGHP and IGHJ.

In recent years, a body of literature on Indigenous hockey has flourished as researchers have taken up the ways mainstream hockey is structured by and reproduces the violences of settler colonialism and how Indigenous peoples, teams, organizations, and Nations have negotiated, resisted and refused these violences. Building on this work, I focus here on a vital grassroots initiative in the context of girls’ and women’s hockey in order to contribute to emerging conversations about the intertwining of settler colonialism, gender, and sport and physical culture.

The IGHP and IGHJ are two related initiatives offered in Mi’kma’ki, on lands claimed by Nova Scotia (IGHP) and the Maritime Provinces of Canada (IGHJ). A key aim of both programs is to marshal “the power of being able to experience hockey with your peers” (Francis), something rarely available to Indigenous girls and women, especially. Both initiatives are hockey-centered and both – and particularly the IGHJ – build in specific programming (e.g., ceremony, Mi’kmaq crafts, language acquisition initiatives) to (re)forge connections between Mi’kmaq girls and their lands, language, and culture, vital acts of world-building. It is a program guided, in Francis’ words, by the ethos to “do hockey different.” Francis expands on this idea, noting: “This can’t just be a program that gets Indigenous women and girls in mainstream hockey. It’s gotta be something that lets them navigate their journey of hockey on their terms, it’s gotta be responsive to what that needs to be.”

The IGHP has been offered in four different Mi’kmaq Nations. As Francis has explained it, this is not a program that organizers simply take into these Nations. Rather, organizers ascertain the key needs and barriers at both the community and participant levels, then work to remove those barriers to participation. As Francis explains, this centers “the diversity of Indigenous people from person to person, …recognizing that barriers from one participant might not be a barrier for another, but removing it entirely allows the program to be fully accessible (which requires trust in the community to not take advantage of the program, which mainstream sport really struggles with).”

In addition, the program explicitly works to build capacity among Indigenous girls and women, recruiting them to be on-ice leaders in the program, focusing, in Francis’ words, “on the reduction of potential barriers [its] leadership might face. Things like providing equipment if needed, honorariums (a very rare practice in privileged volunteer-driven mainstream sport) all contribute to further validation/commitment to our leaders that they indeed do belong in this space.”

What the work of Francis’ team powerfully illustrates is a refusal of the dominant logics of hockey and of youth sport generally. In a moment in which we see leagues and elite sport schools charging extraordinary fees and promising improved odds of “making it” at the college and professional levels, youth sport is often accessible only to those with sufficient financial and social capital. In this context, Francis and the other leaders of the IGHP and IGHJ are, indeed, doing hockey differently.

Doing hockey differently is a radical act in settler Canada. Heralded as “Canada’s game,” ice hockey (men’s elite hockey in particular) is celebrated as the most Canadian of pastimes, and becomes part of the process Moss Norman and colleagues identify, wherein hockey serves as a “site of Canadian nation-making, where ongoing embodied acts of settler occupation in the game serve to naturalize settler belonging on, and entitlement to, the land.” The IGHP, then, both refuses the particular articulations of belonging so deeply embedded in mainstream hockey spaces and acts as a vital space in which organizers support and foster belonging, connections to culture and language, and generative forms of embodiment and subjectivity for Mi’kmaq girls and young women. Together, these initiatives are working toward answering the provocative question posed by Dallas Hunt: “If futures are not circumscribed by the parameters of settler colonialism, where, in fact, will we go?”

Author Biographical Note:

Jason (Jay) Laurendeau is a white, cisgender, settler scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge, in Lethbridge, Alberta, located on lands of the Siksikaitsitapii people, who are part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. His research interests lie at the intersections of sport and physical culture, gender, settler colonialism, and childhood. He is the author of Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography: Stories and Ways of Being.

Most brands, especially those that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue, don’t begin with a story about vomit. Yet, according to CrossFit, Inc. founder and former CEO Greg Glassman, the “eureka moment” of his now astronomically popular fitness program began just like that—with a teenage Glassman, having subjected himself to a grueling combination of barbell push presses and pull-ups, barfing on his garage floor. At the center of CrossFit’s origin story and its subsequent success is the human body at its most beautiful, its most playful, and its most grotesque. Indeed, in a previous article in Engaging Sports, Matt Crockett and Ted Butryn compellingly argue how CrossFit expresses a collective anxiety surrounding how our bodies atrophy in increasingly sedentary workplaces.

Other studies have examined the cultural and discursive dimensions of CrossFit in a similar vein—how Glassman’s business model, exercise regime, and community speak to the particular character of our times. Especially suggestive analyses describe CrossFit’s focus on individualism, competition, and self-sufficiency. These studies characterize the sport and its community as exemplary of what political theorist Wendy Brown refers to as the biopolitical imperative of “responsibilization,” whereby individuals are impelled to maintain and advance their own human capital via activities involving hygiene, self-care, and education. We are all entrepreneurial beings, hoping to maximize our human capital vis-à-vis market imperatives.

Yet, still understudied is one of CrossFit’s most palpable elements—its willingness to laugh at itself: the laughable team names, the multicolored socks, and the endless complaints about workouts. Given that humor, whimsy, and ironic self-awareness are central elements to our historical moment (a period evocatively labeled by some as “late capitalism”), it is surprising that such factors have been largely ignored in research on CrossFit. Dating to roughly the year 2000, Glassman’s now famous exercise routine has been around for almost a quarter of a century. But the emotions, celebrations, and jokes associated with CrossFit largely remain overlooked.

As an avid CrossFitter but also a scholar, my perspective on the sport is somewhat unique: informed by literary criticism, cultural studies, and critical theory. Specifically, I propose that Mikael Bahktin’s concept of the carnivalesque, as it is detailed in Rabelais and His World, serves as an ambitious and accurate toolkit with which to understand CrossFit. Born in Russia, Bahktin (1895-1975) was a philosopher and literary theorist who has had wide-ranging influence on various forms of cultural analyses—especially academic disciplines like communication studies, linguistics, and sociology. In Rableis and His World, Bakhtin forwards a notion of the “carnival” as joyfully ribald, profoundly democratic and ultimately, transformative. During a celebration, time stops, identities are upended, and social hierarchies are, at least for a fleeting moment, overturned. Like CrossFit, these carnivals are meant to include everyone. Bahktin explains:

Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators…Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.

As an activity that promotes an extraordinary care for the self, CrossFit strikes a balance between agony and ecstasy, body and spirit—even soul and vomit. The culture associated with the sport challenges us to accept personal responsibility for the condition of our minds and our bodies—our health status and particularly in opposition to an inadequate healthcare system.

In this way, CrossFit aims to balance the earnestness of responsibilization with the ludic self-awareness of our ironic times. How can we crack a smile even while confronting serious health concerns, and finding ourselves abysmally alone in the world? As an early client of Glassman’s described the experience, CrossFit is “agony coupled with laughter.” Bahktin himself couldn’t have said it better.

CrossFitters expend their sweat, tears (and sometimes, even blood) in order to transcend the humdrum of everyday life. Workouts delineate a fleeting moment when we can leave behind our stultifying workplace lives. Like Bakhtin’s carnival, CrossFit, too, is understood as deeply democratic and barrier-breaking: it challenges both elite athletes and underdogs so that we may transform ourselves into something uniquely human. The most “advanced” or high-tech equipment found in so-called “globo-gyms” (namely, Universal Fitness equipment) is rarely used. Rather, CrossFitters seek excellence via everyday items lying around the house. As CrossFit legend Rich Froning Jr. explained in his 2013 autobiography, “One of the beauties of CrossFit—and one of the big reasons for its incredible surge in popularity—is that anyone can watch a video of CrossFit athletes doing a workout and then go do the same thing.” The fact that CrossFit has been so successful and has such devoted followers, too, adds to both its equalitarian and ritualistic character. As an anonymous CrossFitter explained in the 2009 Crossfit documentary Every Second Counts: “Fitters tend to only associate with other CrossFitters. Now, is it a good cult? It’s a fitness cult—it’s making you better. Is it a cult? Yeah, it is.” As ritual acts, Bakhtin’s carnivals remind us that structures can be questioned and (perhaps) even toppled. His ambitious toolkit (again, the carnivalesque) challenges us to make fun of institutions—to understand their transitoriness and vulnerability. Appropriately, in his biographical documentary The Fittest Man on Earth, five-time CrossFit Games champion Mat Fraser recounts the first time he stepped inside a CrossFit gym, with its “chaos going on, with the loud music.” Previously, as he describes it, he had only exercised in traditional weightlifting gyms (think Gold’s Gym) where the heaviest lifts demanded solemnity and seriousness on the part of gymgoers.

Like Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, CrossFit suggests the power of metamorphosis, while risking a type of death—when former selves are sloughed off and a new being is born. Every workout thus constitutes a celebration of life. Bakhtin asserts that the carnival is characterized by “a naked posing of ultimate questions on life and death.” Furthermore, for the Russian philosopher, death is not a negation of life but part of life as a whole—an indispensable component, the condition of life’s constant renewal and rejuvenation. Even death, Bakhtin explains, “becomes pregnant” within the carnival.

For both CrossFitters and Bakhtin, these birth-death processes happen through a type of initial degradation. As CrossFit’s founder, Glassman, tells it, his workouts were developed to leave gym goers “flat on [their] back, staring up at the sky, wondering what the hell happened.” Like Bahktin, CrossFit—with its focus on the squat as a staple movement—charges us to consider the lower stratum of the body, the belly, and the buttocks. To degrade something does not imply merely hurling it into the garbage, but also rescuing it from oblivion. In CrossFit-speak, this might be understood as a deep dive into the travails of a “butt-wink” in hopes of acing the perfect squat. Indeed, as claimed by George Bataille—a fellow philosopher and, tellingly, a contemporary of Bahktin’s—the body’s lower half, the bowels, and the viscera are all deeply associated with death. These nether regions are also central to CrossFit.

In order to gain life, CrossFitters risk death. As the community has known and debated for a long time, the programmatic breakdown of the body during exercises may even cause rhabdomyolysis. In an appropriately sarcastic (even rogueish?) way, CrossFit has embraced a buff, vomiting clown named “Uncle Rhabdo” as an unofficial mascot.

Recently, gyms have stepped away from being associated with zany, protein spilling cartoon jesters. Yet, as a CrossFitter myself, I wouldn’t count on tomorrow’s WOD—that is, the “Workout of the Day”—being any less challenging, less Bahktinian, or less low-minded. In an almost wholly non-ironic way, I believe that nothing tests my body more than getting up at 4:45 AM to lift odd objects. As I have proposed here, I also surmise that CrossFit explains much about how playful and focused on the body our historical moment really is.

Author Biographical Note:

Dr. Kevin M. Anzzolin, Lecturer of Spanish, arrived at Christopher Newport University in 2021, where he teaches a wide range of classes. His scholarship, mostly focused on Mexican cultural studies, can be found here, and his monograph on Mexican journalism will be published in 2024. He has been an avid albeit amateur CrossFitter since 2018.

Ignorance is an activity, it isn’t simply not knowing but a form of knowing supported by the socio-political system. –Lisa Slater

It is well documented that youth sport teaches young people life lessons – about themselves, the importance of teamwork, etc. In this short reflexive essay (drawn from a larger book project), I consider another kind of education at work in youths’ encounters with sport in settler states – countries founded upon the theft of land from Indigenous peoples: it teaches young settlers, in particular, about their place in the world, their “right” to live on stolen lands.

Here, I take up selected fragments of my childhood and youth, interrogating how my encounters with sport (as both a participant and a consumer) shaped my understandings of myself and my belonging on lands claimed by Canada. I consider, in the words of social scientist Lisa Slater, some of the “dimly lit memories” that provide clues to my developing sense of self.

1986 (Or ’85. Or ’90. Or it doesn’t matter when.)

I sit on the hard bleachers of McMahon stadium, bouncing my legs as fast as I can to try to generate warmth while we watch a Calgary Stampeders Canadian Football League game. As Dad and I drink hot chocolate from a thermos, the “Stamps” score a TD, and a horse and rider run the length of the field in celebration. I scream in joy, looking around at the thousands of mostly white boys and men doing the same. My “home team” is playing their perpetual rivals, now called the Edmonton Elk.

A snippet like this could just as easily have come from an NHL hockey game between the Calgary Flames and the team from Chicago. On one hand, then, I encountered tropes of Indigeneity such as Indigenous team names and mascots in these hyper-masculine professional sport settings, normalizing this as part of my childhood, teaching me what kind of person I should (want to) be. On the other, attending these games – or fervently following the Flames, in particular, especially as part of the “battle of Alberta” in the heydays of both the Flames and the Edmonton Oilers – produced a sense of belonging, tying me to this place, making it feel very much like home. It was my home, but was also produced as such in ongoing and banal ways.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s

I am playing a sport; I don’t even remember which one. Judging by the coaches I encountered in my high school years, I’d guess football. The coach is trying to get our attention: “Boys. Pow-wow over here!” He blathers on, something about putting in the work if we want to make it to the “top of the totem pole.”

1988

I am caught up in the excitement of Calgary hosting the Olympic Winter Games. I covet the Sun Ice jackets volunteers and others sport, follow the saga of Eddie the Eagle, attend a couple of medal ceremonies at Olympic Plaza downtown, getting choked up when I see Canadians atop the medal podium as “O Canada” plays over the loudspeakers. I collect pins, and consume many events, both in person and via the televised broadcasts.

As historian Christine O’Bonsawin articulates, the Calgary Olympics employed “Indigenous imagery” in numerous dimensions of the organization of the Games, marshalling the caché of the Calgary Stampede to garner international attention and construct the Games as of this place. Organizers, she notes:

utilized the international prestige of the Calgary Stampede and based their cultural programming around the Stampede’s symbolic use of the Mountie, the cowboy and the Indian… For example, the composition of the Olympic medals displayed winter sporting equipment protruding from a ceremonial headdress, an enormous teepee at McMahon Stadium supporting the Olympic cauldron, and the Calgary Stampede Board’s suggestion that an ‘Indian attack and wagon-burning’ be a part of the opening ceremony (this was ultimately rejected).

The Olympics, then, mobilized and marketed “Indigenous imagery” while, at the very same moments, hailing me – producing me – as Canadian, as rightfully belonging on these lands. Think here of the anthem, for instance, the notion of “home and native land.” (Also consider Jully Black’s recent act subverting these lyrics.)

Conclusion

Part of the ideological “[sleight] of hand” of settler colonialism is the illusion that it is a process that is finished as opposed to one that requires constant nurturing and reproduction. Similarly, my at-homeness as a settler was and is not simply a given, but one that was and is nourished in innumerable spaces and ways, not least through my encounters with sport as a youth. We are born into these positions, but we also encounter everyday teaching moments that shape our understandings of and relation to ongoing histories on these lands. Only if we recognize these teaching moments can we interrogate and, perhaps, refuse them as we come to understand, in the words of cultural studies scholar Mark Rifkin, “that the very terrain [we] inhabit as given has never ceased to be a site of political struggle.”

Author biographical note:

Jason (Jay) Laurendeau is a white, cisgender, settler scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge, in Lethbridge, Alberta, located on lands of the Siksikaitsitapii people, who are part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. His research interests lie at the intersections of sport and physical culture, gender, settler colonialism, and childhood. He is the author of Sport, Physical Activity, and Anti-Colonial Autoethnography: Stories and Ways of Being.

On March 6, 2023, video game company Electronic Arts (EA) announced the introduction of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) to their FIFA franchise. This inclusion, just like with the WNBA in EA’s NBA Live franchise, was initially celebrated as a step forward to gender equality in sport and the video game industry. However, this celebration faced pushback from many athletes about the (un)likeness of their digitized counterparts and how the game rates certain athletes’ performances. Subsequently, athletes’ public outcry drew pushback on social media, with some users urging NWSL athletes to stop making this a gender issue, arguing that it is just a technical problem because men, too, have been misrepresented in video games. In this article, we provide a different perspective on the misrepresentation of female athletes. Instead of saying “yes, the misrepresentation is about gender inequality,” or “no, it is merely a technical issue,” we want to argue, “yes, the misrepresentation may be due to technological limitations, but how these athletes are misrepresented can be a gender issue that hinders the good intention of advocating for equality.”

“Realities” in Sports-Themed Video Games

Though contemporary sports-themed video games (STVG) often use technology such as full-body scans to produce their contents, the resulting images are never simply duplications of reality. Rather, physical reality is translated and coded into a digital existence—a process called remediation. There are two parts to the remediation process: immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy makes mediation appear invisible and aims to make gamers feel like they are actually present in the game. For example, in a remediated basketball game, the sounds of crowds cheering, the basketball bouncing while dribbling, and shoes squeaking on the arena floor all contribute to a sense of immediacy; hearing these sounds when playing a simulated basketball game makes us feel like we are actually at the game. The use of face and body scanning to bring more authentic likenesses and kinetic movements of real-life athletes to STVG is another example of immediacy. This technology makes the gaming experience of playing with/against/as known athletes seem more lifelike and believable. Hypermediacy, on the other hand, gives visibility back to the mediation process and reminds us that the reality we are experiencing through the gaming platform is indeed simulated. For example, performing athletic movements by pressing buttons and arrows makes us aware that we are not actually experiencing those movements. Another example of hypermediacy is the omnipresent EA logo at the corner of the screen that constantly reminds gamers that they are the authors of this “reality.”

Seeing video game content through this remediation process can help us understand that critiques of “misrepresentation” are rooted in demand and expectation for immediacy in STVG. If we cannot really see the digitized Sydney Leroux as the real Sydney Leroux, how can we feel like we are actually playing an NWSL game? However, we can also read this misrepresentation as a manifestation of hypermediacy. It reminds us that we are not actually playing in an NWSL game, we are playing a video game (of NWSL). It also reminds us of the current technological limitations on authentically simulating athletic bodies in digital form for video games. So instead of asking why misrepresentations happen, perhaps the more important question, when faced with these limitations, is how are these bodies reimagined in digital platforms?

There are two parts to this question. First, in what ways are athletes misrepresented? In other words, how are they different from their physical counterparts? Second, based on what discourses or social norms are these misrepresented digitized bodies designed? Exploring these questions helps us understand the implications that misrepresentation of female athletes in STVG may have for inclusion and gender equality.

The WNBA in NBA Live 18/19

Let’s use an example of misrepresentations of WNBA athletes in EA’s STVG franchise to show how we can begin answering these questions. Since 2017, EA’s representation of the WNBA has been ambitious. In that year, they made a move to include the full roster of all WNBA teams in NBA Live 18 and continued this approach with its successor, NBA Live 19. As researchers who study sport, we observed several notable misrepresentations in the visual appearances and kinetic capacity of the athletes while playing the WNBA components of these two games.

In both Live 18 and Live 19, the digitized selves of some well-known athletes are fairly recognizable. Details of their physical appearances, such as hairstyles, hair and skin colour, and noticeable features like tattoos are replicated relatively accurately. However, any resemblance that does appear in the games is mostly limited to features above the neck, whereas the bodies seem to be created without much reference to individual athletes. For example, the athletes’ muscles are smoothed out. We also observed a fairly universal body shape: an hourglass shape where the bust is amplified and the waist narrowed.

We then compared representations of kinetics capacity—in other words, the overall flow and movement of the simulated athletes’ bodies—across the WNBA and NBA portions of the game, and found that the simulated WNBA athletes could only move slowly before crossing the halfcourt line. In contrast, the simulated athletes in the NBA mode were able to sprint across the court.

Historically, the hourglass body shape (narrow waist and amplified breasts) has been common for female characters in video games. Although WNBA players’ digitized athletic bodies are not depicted as unrealistically and disproportionately as characters like Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, it is revealing to see that the default female athletic body still corresponds to the stereotypical gendered and sexualized image of the female body. While the inclusion of the WNBA in a major STVG franchise was celebrated as a great step toward gender equality, the subtle undertone of normative, gendered discourse nevertheless persists. Against the backdrop of this gender discourse, we can understand the logic behind the smoothed-out muscles of these simulated women, even though they are elite athletes in a contact sport (how can they not have muscles?!). We can also see the circulation of gender discourse in the kinetic (mis)representations, where digitized WNBA players cannot sprint before passing the halfcourt line. This is not due to technological limitations, but rather to the game developer’s choice to cap WNBA players’ athleticism.

In a study analyzing fictional female characters in video games across 31 years, a group of media scholars found a correlation between the sexualization of women and the video game genres. Genres that usually aim toward a primarily male consumer market (such as fighting and action games) contain more gendered and sexualized female characters. Further, the researchers suggested that the sexualization of women in games could make women uncomfortable and deter them from playing. Along this line of thinking, we suggest that these milestones of inclusion in games like FIFA and NBA Live may fail to expand their target audience, and again, reinforce the stereotypical idea that women don’t play/belong in video games. This is why the misrepresentation of NWLS athletes is a gender issue, and why it matters.

Author Biographical Notes:

Judy Liao is an Associate Professor in Sport Study at Augustana Faculty, University of Alberta. Her research interests include gender and sport and diaspora sporting experiences and history in Canada. She is a big fan of the WNBA and has several publications on these excellent athletes.

Emily MacMillan worked as a research assistant for this STVG project while she studied at the University of Alberta. She has a BA degree in physical education and Indigenous study. Currently, she works as a Communications and Engagement Associate at First Peoples’ Cultural Council in BC, Canada, while also taking a Metis Women’s Leadership Program.

RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) is a reality television show where drag queens—performers, who are typically but not always men, that dress up as glamourous and often overstated women—contend for the title of “America’s Next Drag Superstar” and a $100,000 cash prize. In each episode, the queens compete in challenges that involve activities such as acting, sewing, dancing, comedy, and singing. The two queens who do the worst in the challenge that week compete in a lip-sync “smackdown” to a song chosen by RuPaul—the creator, co-producer and main judge of the show, who also is a drag queen—with the loser being eliminated from the show. The competition continues like this weekly until only four contestants remain, at which point they participate in a final challenge for the crown. The popularity of RPDR is evidenced by the fact it has spawned a variety of spin-offs in multiple countries.

Why Am I Writing About RPDR on a Sports Site?

RPDR is a pressure-filled competition with high stakes. The judges ask the contestants on the show to perform, labour, and risk their bodies in ways similar to athletes. The sport-like nature of RPDR is displayed prominently when we consider how the drag queens on the show are encouraged to play through pain and injury.

Athletes risk their bodies and play through injury because of a culture of risk in sport, where the sporting community (athletes, coaches, fans, management) rewards athletes who take risks and alienates those who do not. For instance, when athletes put their bodies at risk by making an impressive tackle on the field or hit on the ice, the fans erupt in cheer. The sporting community views injury as a masculinizing experience, where they tend to respect and idealize the athletes willing to play through injury and risk their bodies. In contrast, the sporting community will alienate and ridicule athletes who are unwilling to participate in this culture of risk. For instance, a study by researchers at McGill University who interviewed retired National Hockey League athletes who had left hockey due to concussions, reported that athletes were alienated and ridiculed by coaches and teammates for speaking up about their injuries or sitting out after a concussion. Given these cultural norms associated with sport, we see athletes risk their bodies and play through injury to maintain and assert the masculinity that the sporting community idealizes and values and to avoid alienation and ridicule. Notably, a similar dynamic exists on RPDR.

Risk and Injury on RPDR

On RPDR, the community (judges, contestants, fans) similarly idealizes and values the drag queens willing to risk their bodies and play through injury, while alienating and ridiculing those unwilling to do so. For example, on season 9 episode 2 of RPDR there is a cheerleading competition where the queens partake in a competitive cheer routine, which included tumbling, group choreography, and stunting. Notably, two major injuries take place on this episode. First, competitor Eureka O’Hara goes into a jumping split and tears her ACL, yet continues to get up and perform. In the voiceover of this moment, the audience hears Eureka say, “I feel my knee pop, but there’s no way I was stopping.” While RuPaul eliminated Eureka three weeks later because of the injury, Eureka is applauded for competing through pain: RuPaul invites her to come back the following season to compete, her fellow queens leave the stage in tears to say goodbye to Eureka after her elimination, and she has a significant fan-following on Instagram (584,000 followers). In this way, Eureka’s willingness to play through pain is rewarded and idealized by the drag race community.

The second injury on the cheerleading episode, meanwhile, happens to competitor Charlie Hides—when lifting up a fellow queen during practice, Charlie breaks her rib. The following week, Charlie made the decision to not “give it her all” during her lip-sync because of this cracked rib. Charlie is ridiculed by her fellow queens and RuPaul because she, unlike Eureka, refused to play through her injury. During a reunion episode, Trinity the Tuck compares Charlie to Eureka, highlighting the value of playing through pain in the competition: “I don’t like this bitch up here [pointing to Eureka], but she injured herself, and if she could do what she did after her knee injury, there’s no excuse for you [Charlie].” RuPaul also speaks directly to Charlie, “When someone doesn’t give it their all, I’m disappointed.” As this example illustrates, just like with athletes, the contestants on RPDR are expected to “give it their all,” which includes risking their bodies and playing through injury.

Scholars have often noted that drag is an opportunity for gay men to assert the masculinity typically denied to them in traditional sporting spaces. By playing through injury and risking their bodies for the competition, we see RPDR transform into a sporting space where contestants are able to assert traditional notions of masculinity in a queer space. Often, we hear discourses about athletes that claim the risk and injury are worth the reward (money, fame, contracts). A similar dynamic exists for the drag queens on RPDR, who receive international fame and fortune if they do well on the show and become a fan favorite. However, the problem is that this culture of risk is affective and circulates through sporting bodies and drag queen bodies. Drag is a beautiful art form and an opportunity for gender expression, but there is danger when a culture of risk teaches young queer generations that they need to risk their bodies and compete through injury to succeed.

Author Biographical Note:

Niya St. Amant is a Ph.D. Candidate at Queens University. Her research interests focus on risk and injury in sport, typically focusing on concussions and hockey. The full version of her article, where she expands on these notions by conducting a media analysis of season 9 of RPDR, is published online ahead of print in the Sociology of Sport Journal. You can follow her on Twitter @niyastamant.

For many people across the U.S., the summer of 2020 felt as if racial tension reached a fever pitch. The murder of George Floyd was met with anger, outrage, and a great deal of political banter among elected officials. Following the summer of 2020, there was a wave of discussion about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across the sporting/corporate world, along with a related “resurgence” of attention to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), with a particular focus on athletics. But please don’t call it a comeback, ‘cause HBCUs have been here for years. It is only now that the national sports media has shone a spotlight on decades of systemic financial and racial inequalities that have led to top Black students and athletes being lured away from HBCUs to predominantly white institutions (PWIs).

Once Upon a Time…When We Were “Colored”

Ask almost any Black kid who was in middle or high school during the late ’80s / early ‘90s, and they will tell you thanks to the popularity of NBC sitcom “A Different World” (a spin-off of “The Cosby Show”), they wanted to attend an HBCU – and I was no different. But instead of the fictitious Hillman College, I envisioned myself on the campus of Norfolk State University, my mother’s alma mater, hanging out with people like Whitley Gilbert and Dwayne Wayne. The rising popularity of HBCUs during the “Cosby Show / A Different World Era” corresponded with a 24.3 percent spike in HBCU enrollment.

Significant growth in enrollment at HBCUs post-segregation is noteworthy because prior to integration, such institutions of higher learning were, for the most part, the only options Black folk had to attend college, particularly in the South. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation (on paper), there was no immediate mass exodus of Black students “opting out” of HBCUs for the hallowed halls of their nearest PWI. For them, HBCUs were still their only choice for college, so that is where they went, including some of the best athletes – and coaches – the sport world has ever seen. The list includes historical figures like Althea Gibson, Larry Doby, Doug Williams, Eddie “Coach Rob” Robinson, Sr., Earl Monroe, and Clarence “Big House” Gaines, Sr. It was a time when HBCU athletics thrived and was a great sense of pride for the Black community. But those glory days would not last.

In 1967, Nate Northington became the first African American football player at the University of Kentucky, officially desegregating the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Soon after, other SEC schools followed, signing one or two Black football players. But it is what transpired in 1970 that was a watershed moment in college athletics for both HBCUs and PWIs.

Same Script, Different Cast

Much like the past decade, in 1970 the University of Alabama had a dominant football program led by a powerful and influential coach, William “Bear” Bryant. History seems to recall the Alabama vs. University of Southern California Trojans matchup as a transformative game in the integration of college football due to the storied nature of the two programs. Though the University of Alabama admitted its first Black student in 1956 amid protests and court orders, the football team remained segregated. However, after an integrated USC team (3 Black players) humbled the Crimson Tide in a 42-21 trouncing, Alabama started its first Black player, John Mitchell, the following year. More PWIs in the South would follow suit, incrementally diverting top Black athletic (and academic) talent away from HBCUs.  As the 1970s came to a close, so did a period of undisputed excellence in HBCU men’s basketball and football. Fast forward to 2020 and over 48% of NCAA FBS teams and over 52% of Power 5 men’s basketball teams were comprised of Black players. On its face, this may appear to be progress for the Black community, but dig deeper to reveal the loss it has been for HBCUs.

To those who lived, experienced, and have a deep appreciation for HBCU athletics’ “golden years”, the decline has been painful. It is akin to how we rightfully herald the iconic Jackie Robinson for breaking Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947, while also lamenting the fact that his move to the majors marked the decline of one of the most successful Black-owned enterprises of its time – the Negro Baseball Leagues. At a time when MLB dared not have a “Negro” dawn one of its uniforms, the Negro Leagues thrived with legends like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Hank Aaron.

With Robinson’s success with the Brooklyn Dodgers, other MLB teams began using the Negro Leagues as their personal draft pool. Aaron and Paige were drafted soon after Robinson, and countless others followed. The Negro Leagues held on as long as they could, but with a depleted talent pool and low ticket sales, this once booming Black enterprise ceased operations in 1960.

The Resurgence of HBCU Athletics

Save a few late-round NFL draft picks and a handful of “bracket busters” in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the past few decades of HBCU athletics have been relatively quiet with respect to national media attention. Following the summer of 2020, however, professional athletes and league administrators publicly spoke about social justice – calling out racism, demanding police reform, and protecting voting rights.  WNBA and NBA stars like Renee Montgomery, Chris Paul, Steph Curry, and LeBron James used their platforms to not only showcase and raise awareness about HBCUs, but also donate money to some of those institutions’ athletic departments. Even major corporations have sought to connect their brands to HBCUs, exemplified by Wells Fargo launching its “HBCU Legends Collection” of debit cards as part of their DEI strategy. But perhaps no event has brought more attention to HBCUs than the hiring of NFL Hall of Famer Deion “Prime Time” Sanders as the football coach at Jackson State University in September 2020. After being hired, “Coach Prime” brought national attention to Jackson State through countless media appearances, including Aflac® commercials alongside Alabama coach Nick Saban, the highest paid coach in college football.

In a recent appearance on the popular CBS news program 60 Minutes, Sanders unapologetically brought to the forefront the financial and structural crisis that has plagued HBCUs for decades. He has also sounded the alarm on ways in which HBCUs continue to be undervalued, figuratively and literally, with “money games” in which they are often outmatched by well-funded Power 5 programs. Probably most headline-grabbing was Jackson State signing the number one football recruit in the country, Travis Hunter in 2021. Additionally, Jackson State became just the second HBCU ever to host the popular ESPN College GameDay program in the 2022 season. With Sanders departing Jackson State after three seasons to take the head coaching job at the University of Colorado, the question now becomes “where do HBCUs go from here?”

As an HBCU alum, it would be amazing to see more top Black talent choose an HBCU over a PWI. Let’s face it, PWIs and their athletic departments have made big bank off Black bodies for decades, while HBCUs have struggled to keep their doors open. One can only hope this new interest in and resurgence of HBCUs into the national spotlight and larger conversations on racism, power, and exploitation of Black athletes in higher education is not a fleeting moment in time. Instead, this is a prime time (no pun intended) for HBCU leaders to chorale the sudden interest in HBCU athletics into a sustained commitment to restoring those institutions to a level of prominence they once held.

Author Biographical Note:

Dawn M. Norwood is an Assistant Professor and Sport Sociologist at Northern Illinois University in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education. Her research interests include strategies for overcoming constraints to swimming for African American women, social justice and activism through sport, and HBCU athletics. She is a proud alum of Grambling State University and former Assistant Professor at Florida A&M University. Follow her on LinkedIn or email at dnorwood@niu.edu.

Sex segregated sport is increasingly untenable. As sports authorities and politicians enact flawed attempts to regulate who can and cannot participate in women’s and girls’ sports, the shaky foundations of the current system reveal themselves. Yet gender-integrated sports are perceived as unthinkable to many because they confront taken for granted beliefs about women’s inferiority to men. Sport is the only remaining institutional realm where sex segregation is permissible and, as such, it maintains and reproduces gender inequality. More than any other institution, sport showcases the cultural system of binary sex difference and makes it appear natural. Even people who, on all other fronts, believe in women’s equality to men, find themselves compelled by the argument that men are athletically superior to women. Gender expansive athletes, including trans, non-binary, and intersex athletes, threaten our social, economic, and political systems with disarray.

There are many dangers in uncritically accepting the claim that women need to be protected from male competitors to experience success. First, it reinforces men’s dominance beyond sport, as evidenced by the disproportionate number of men who occupy leadership positions throughout society. Second, it insidiously reifies women’s weakness, denying girls and women the opportunity to develop in competition with boys and men, thereby putting false limits on their capacity to achieve physical greatness. Finally, modern sport turns ideology into reality: our societal belief in female inferiority is mobilized via sex segregated sport to deny girls and women equal opportunities to develop as athletes.

Sport’s role in perpetuating gender inequality is not accidental. The history of modern sport in the West begins with the deliberate exclusion of women. Although women have succeeded in gaining inclusion, the limits of their inclusion have been severely circumscribed by male-dominated leadership of various sporting bodies. The legacy of Western patriarchal ideologies that view women –  at least white women – as “the fairer sex” who are not supposed to be too fast, too strong, or too muscular, continues to shape cultural attitudes. Women who transgress ideologies about gender difference are often severely punished, particularly in sport.

Although the practice of questioning the gender of successful sportswomen occurred throughout the early 1900s, it was not until 1950 and 1968 respectively that World Athletics, (formerly IAAF) and the International Olympics Committee instituted so-called gender verification processes. These formal “sex controls” were intended to ensure adherence to cultural norms regarding binary sex difference and female inferiority. This surveillance began with subjecting women athletes to genital inspection via “nude parades,” was followed by testing sportswomen’s DNA to exclude those with “male” chromosomes, and, most recently, for only those women who appear “suspiciously masculine” to measure their hormone levels. Each of these tests is scientifically flawed: decades of gender verification testing by sports authorities have only proven that sex is not binary but instead expansive. While the practice began with track and field, gender verification extended to several Olympics sports including canoeing, gymnastics, fencing, field hockey, rowing, swimming, volleyball, handball, and luge. In effect, there is hardly a sport in which women are not subjected to this dehumanizing and unscientific practice.

The gender ideology which frames the claim that women’s sports require protection from so-called male pretenders is also a racialized ideology. After all, today’s sporting environments are an outgrowth of the European colonial project that positioned sport as part of a “civilizing” project that was white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal at its core. We see this colonial gender ideology in the heightened attention directed at sportswomen from the Global South who are accused of being too athletically powerful, too “masculine” in appearance, to qualify for female eligibility. Prominent examples are South Africa’s Caster Semenya, India’s Dutee Chand, and Uganda’s Annet Negessa, athletes who were subjected to sex testing because they do not embody Western feminine ideals. To our knowledge, this level of surveillance has not been directed at women from the Global North, except if they are transwomen.

Transgender women are swept up in sport’s gender panic not because they regularly outperform cisgender women – they do not – but because sport is the one realm where cultural beliefs regarding fundamental sex and gender differences continue to be institutionalized. In the past several years, bills designed to delegitimize and exclude trans people in various ways have been introduced in many US state legislatures. Within this larger anti-trans campaign, bills designed specifically to block trans girls and women from participating in “female” sport have been signed into law in many US states and proposed in many others. Backed by a constellation of white supremacist, conservative and hetero-patriarchal organizations and movements in collusion with so-called “gender critical feminists,” these campaigns are stoking a gender panic by targeting trans girls and women for surveillance and exclusion. Increasingly, trans boys, men, and non-binary athletes are also swept up in this panic, highlighting how sports is being mobilized as a tool to exclude transgender people from full inclusion in society.

It is no accident that sport is a site for contesting the inclusion of transgender people in society because meaningful inclusion for gender expansive people, including intersex, transgender and non-binary people, threatens to undermine the commonsense bases for the gender inequality that is pervasive throughout society. People who consider themselves to be gender progressive and egalitarian are being recruited to anti-trans campaigns in sport that have significant effects beyond the playing field. This recruitment is possible because of widely held, taken for granted beliefs about male superiority in sport. Presenting trans sportswomen to the public as “male” interlopers who are a threat to cisgender women and girls simultaneously denies transwomen’s claims to womanhood and entrenches binary ideas about sex and gender in ways that also harm intersex athletes and other sportswomen who do not conform to Eurocentric gender norms.

Given the historical and contemporary reasons for sex segregation in sport, there is a heightened need to challenge this practice. To undo such de facto segregation is to redress a longstanding gender inequality in society. Of course, intentional mechanisms are needed to ensure that the legacies of white supremacist heterosexual patriarchy that have reified women’s inferiority are carefully attended to. This effort is well worth it if we want to create a more just and inclusive organizational structure for sport and society more broadly.

Author Biographical Notes

Anima Adjepong is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies at the University of Cincinnati. They research, write, and teach about identity, culture, and social change and are particularly interested in how cultural struggles can bring about social transformation. Dr. Adjepong is the author of Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra. They are currently working on a project about women’s football, gendered nationalism, and state-sponsored homophobia in Ghana. You can follow them on twitter @animaadjepong

Travers is a Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University. Their recent book, The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution, situates trans kids in Canada and the US, white settler nations characterized by significant social inequality. In addition to a central research focus on transgender children and youth, Travers has published extensively on the relationship between sport and social justice, with particular emphasis on the inclusion and exclusion of women, queer and trans people of all ages. A current research program in this field focuses on gender equity in youth baseball. Travers is Deputy Editor of Gender & Society. You can follow them on twitter @DrBaseball

The increasing public recognition of direct links between sports, social issues, and politics poses a challenging question: what should we watch? If we watched the 2022 Beijing Olympics despite concerns about IOC policy and China’s human rights record and repressive surveillance, does that make us bad people? If we watch the 2022 World Cup in Qatar despite concerns about FIFA motives along with the rights of migrant workers and LGBTQ people, does that make us complicit?

Or might there be ways of watching, and ways of being a sports fan more generally, that allow us to engage directly with what sociologist Peter Donnelly calls the ‘Janus-face of sport’ — the reality that a love of sport can bring joy and social goods while simultaneously enabling repulsive behaviors and ideologies? While I’m not a moral philosopher or ethicist (though I enjoy reading philosophical takes on the morality of sport fandom), I have recently written a book that is in part an effort to promote just such engagement.

In Soccer in Mind: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to the Global Game I draw on sociology, psychology, and other related social science lenses to suggest that watching sports as a “thinking fan” is not only necessary in our heavily commodified and politicized world of sport, it’s also more fun. The book draws heavily on the sociology of sport to consider topics such as fandom, culture, talent development, mental skills, social impact, and sports for development in a way that makes clear any science of sport depends on social engagement — we have to watch with both curious and critical eyes. And while many students who’ve taken a sociology of sport class leave feeling as though the field is actively anti-sport, in its ideal form the sociology of sport should instead promote deeper and richer ways of engaging the games we love.

While my recent book is specifically about soccer, the way it explains “thinking fandom” can apply broadly:

I define thinking fandom as an approach that depends on a broad intellectual curiosity and an engaged critical consciousness. Thinking fandom is a natural outgrowth of the very social science of soccer. It is a way of thinking about the game with a scientific mindset while centering the messiness of human experience. It is something…anyone can use to enrich their own experience of soccer — and, just maybe, also as a way to make soccer a bit better for others…

Note first that when I refer to a “thinking fan” I’m referring loosely to anyone who cares about the game—whether players, coaches, administrators, or supporters. And care in this formulation means having concerns beyond profit. Global soccer in the twenty-first century is a heavily commercialized endeavor; many see soccer primary as a business concern. The commodification of soccer is also sometimes enabled by others who think of soccer as nothing more than a trivial pastime. Thinking fandom starts with a willingness to position one’s self in between soccer as a business and soccer as a triviality and to actively engage soccer as one of the world’s most broadly shared cultural forms with very social meanings.

The active engagement of thinking fandom is then primarily tautological: it is founded on thinking. This is not to question the aesthetic pleasure of watching players with special skills perform at their best. Nor is it to question the happiness that comes from seeing a team with which one feels a deep connection win, nor the elemental joy that comes from playing the game itself. In fact … thinking fandom dovetails well with play and can be complementary and deeply satisfying in its emphasis on learning and playing with ideas. Soccer can simultaneously trigger our most ancient as well as our most evolved instincts, providing us both reflexive joy and deliberate opportunities to better understand ourselves and our world…

Promoting some form of thinking fandom is certainly not a new idea. Ralph Nader was working on something similar in 1977 when he created an organization called “FANS (Fight to Advance the Nation’s Sports)” and explained to the Washington Post that he was prompted to form the group because of the “acceleration of greed, arrogance and fraud” in sports. While Nader’s group may not have quite stemmed the tide of greed, arrogance, and fraud, there is still a “League of Fans” legacy organization that sees leveraging a version of thinking fandom as a way “to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports.”

More recently, sports journalists such as Dave Zirin have promoted a more public sociology of sport that speaks directly to fans and their “inchoate fear about what sports has evolved into, and what it continues to become.” Likewise, other critical sports journalists, such as Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson, have explored the dilemmas of modern fandom with ideas for “Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.” These sports journalists are, in other words, promoting a new type of thinking fandom that both depends upon and represents the value of watching the games we love with a curiosity that goes beyond the scoreboard and critique that goes beyond the binary choice of whether or not to watch.

So what is a thinking fan to do with an event such as the upcoming World Cup in Qatar? It is reasonable to debate whether or not to watch — as long as that debate doesn’t devolve into a crude moral absolutism that suggests “we” are all right and “they” are all wrong. But if you do decide to watch, it is also reasonable to think about watching like a sport sociologist — asking questions borne of a genuine intellectual curiosity about what it means that this will be the first ever global mega sporting event hosted in an Arab nation, about what successful teams tell us regarding talent development and human development, about the ways globalization is simultaneously homogenizing and hybridizing sports culture, and about the many more social issues on vivid display at a World Cup. And it is worthwhile to remember that a crucial part of changing the global power dynamics of sport is the power of fans themselves to think critically about what they want from their games.

Author Biographical Note

Andrew Guest teaches sociology and psychology at the University of Portland in Oregon, where he also directs the University Core Curriculum. His research focuses on youth and community development, particularly as reflected in sports and activity programs.

Nneka Ogwumike, President of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, released a statement on August 8 asking for a resolution to the league’s ongoing travel issues. The seven-time league All-Star wrote the statement at 4 a.m. in an airport terminal.

Following a 79-76 win over the Washington Mystics the previous evening, Ogwumike and her teammates had arrived at the airport, learning at 1 a.m. that their flight back home had been rescheduled to 9 a.m. the next morning. Local hotels had limited capacity and could only accommodate about half of the team, leaving the other half stranded at the airport.

The idea of professional athletes sleeping overnight at an airport would be almost unthinkable in men’s major league sports, which, unlike the WNBA, use chartered private flights. This gendered disparity represents a serious health and safety issue, as scientific evidence suggests that sleep loss negatively impacts athletic performance and increases the likelihood of injury and illness.

In a moment when good sleep is increasingly recognized as a vital component of athlete health and performance, being denied full access to the conditions and resources that support this form of recovery is an injustice that should be challenged. While the WNBA has embraced sleep technology, as evidenced by an ongoing league-wide partnership first signed in 2020 with Oura, a digital health company that specializes in sleep and activity monitoring, such technologies cannot remedy the systemic imbalances that drive exhaustion in the WNBA and may even camouflage unsafe and exploitative working conditions.

The myth of load management

Debates about “load management,” or how to balance rest and labor for optimal performance, have raged for years in the men’s National Basketball Association, but these same concerns have rarely been extended to the WNBA—a workforce predominantly comprised of African American women.

This omission is remarkable given the travel and performance demands of the league. Twelve franchises compete in a compact 34-game summer season, with teams averaging two games a week. Headlines regularly report on dysfunctional travel, high rates of fatigue-induced injuries, relatively low salaries, and off-season overseas contracts that mean most players compete year round, including superstars like Brittney Griner, who is currently imprisoned in Russia.

In essence, the WNBA attempts to approximate the performance and profit models of men’s professional sport but with fewer economic and material resources. And as for WNBA players, they are under no illusions about their situation. As league All-Star Chelsea Gray explains, “for [WNBA players], there is no load management…it’s a myth.”

Monitoring athlete sleep

The WNBA’s grueling travel and competition schedule may make sleep technologies look enticing. A growing number of tech and mattress companies and sleep advocacy organizations market sleep as if it is the easiest and most effective way to offset the harms of elite sport.

But sleep technologies focus on fixing athletes, not their working conditions. Such technologies encourage individual players to become more aware and responsible for being well-rested, helping them find new ways of optimizing their “off” hours. Some may decide to go to bed earlier or adopt new sleep and wake routines, while others may be mindful of what they consume through the day.

These small personal adjustments are an effort to “fix” athletes while leaving their exhausting working conditions in place. Sleep has too often been devalued in American society, but when sleep becomes a way to cope with excessive workplace demands, it can mask exploitative and unsafe conditions and leave underlying capitalist expectations of endless performance and profits hidden.

Sleep monitoring also subjects WNBA players to invasive forms of corporate surveillance. A growing body of social science research shows that within and beyond sport, devices that record daily activities represent a more significant burden in the lives of African Americans, sexual and gender minorities, and poor communities.

Growing concerns about the sleep habits of WNBA players may create a climate of suspicion and renew sexist, anti-Black racism that has long shaped African American women’s experiences in sport and physical activity. Athletes who deviate from the norms associated with good sleep may elicit extra layers surveillance from coaches, medical staff, sports writers, and audiences.

Rest, recovery, labor

WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert continues to rule out chartered flights in the regular season, citing financial strain and the need for parity within the league. However, several team owners have requested to have their teams travel on private planes. In fact, Joe and Clara Tsai, billionaire owners of the New York Liberty, were even fined $50,000 after they personally paid for their team to avoid commercial flights last year. Players and their union have made their position clear against the requirement to travel via commercial flights, especially during a global pandemic.

Of course, canceled flights and sleep loss represent but one aspect of a larger and more complicated struggle to improve working conditions in the WNBA, a setting that remains proximate but unequal to the NBA. To improve the working conditions of the WNBA is to protect and value the athletic labor of African American women. It means countering long histories of exclusion and marginalization in sport. It means challenging mythologies about strong and resilient Black women that have sustained their exploitation in American society. At the very least, pay gaps need to be closed, year-around contracts offered, and chartered flights booked.

The WNBA reminds us that vulnerabilities to exhaustion are not evenly or fairly distributed in sport or society. Rest-related disparities often run along unequal racial, gender, and economic lines. The structural nature of exhaustion means that it cannot be remedied through individualized, market-based solutions. While sleep technologies are one way to approach to the problem of athlete fatigue, they are not sufficient to fully address the complexities of inequitable and exhausting sport settings. Collective bargaining and the voices of WNBA players are also necessary in the push for structural changes and protections related to pay, travel, and the collection of biodata that will ultimately create safer and more equitable working conditions in the league.

Author biographical note

Sarah Barnes is an Assistant Professor at Cape Breton University. Her research interests focus on sport and wellbeing in a rapidly changing society. The full version of Barnes’ recent study on sleep in the WNBA was published online ahead of print in Sociology of Sport Journal. You can follow her on Twitter @barnesarah