As the furor over NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem rekindles, the full power of the players themselves has not yet come into play. Presidential politics and U.S. culture wars combined to make the issue a dominant subplot of the 2017 NFL season. In late May, the league’s team owners reopened the debate by deciding to create a policy requiring players on the field during the playing of the national anthem to stand, under penalty of fines and on-field penalties, though players can also stay in the locker room.

The policy was made and passed unilaterally, without consultation of the players or their labor union, the NFL Players Association. Unusually, the owners didn’t even conduct a formal vote, and at least two owners abstained from the informal vote that was taken. President Donald Trump responded favorably and injected fresh criticism into the process by suggesting that NFL players who choose to stay in the locker room during the anthem “maybe … shouldn’t be in the country.”

Having made their moves, the teams and the president have three months before the 2018 season begins, in which to wait for players to respond. What happens next is uncertain, but my background as a sports and social media researcher tells me it could be both surprising and unexpected for those who have traditionally wielded the most power in the NFL.

Why is this happening now?

The timing of the owners’ move is both calculated and politically savvy for the NFL. The announcement did generate significant backlash from many sports media commentators, as well as current and former players and the players’ union. The long Memorial Day holiday weekend didn’t do much to blunt those criticisms, but it’s likely that the most negative reactions will dissipate by the middle of the summer.

If and when the issue is reignited, it will likely be viewed as the players creating the issue, rather than the owners. For instance, the players’ union is considering whether and how to respond – including potentially claiming violations of the collective bargaining agreement under which football players work.

How effective their actions are will depend largely on how the players present themselves on social media – what communications scholars call “framing.”

Framing the controversy

The controversy began in the 2016 NFL preseason with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick protesting structural and institutional racism and bias in the U.S., particularly in American police practices.

The NFL’s initial reaction supported Kaepernick’s right to protest, saying “Players are encouraged but not required to stand during the playing of the national anthem.” The 49ers organization was even more direct: “In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem.”

There were initial complaints about Kaepernick’s choice not to stand for the anthem – including feedback that led to him taking a knee rather than just sitting on the bench. But the protest didn’t become a public lightning rod until President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence created a new frame around Kaepernick’s kneeling in protest against injustice. They proclaimed he was disrespecting the country and its military.

The effect was immediate and stunning. Before Trump objected, more than 60 percent of his supporters viewed the NFL “somewhat or very favorably.” In less than a month after he first spoke out against the NFL for allowing Kaepernick’s protests to continue, that plummeted to near 30 percent. That drop no doubt played a part in the NFL owners’ recent action to block on-field protests.

Regaining control of the narrative

As the players determine how to respond, they’re starting from a difficult position. Historically, NFL owners have almost always won their public relations battles, whether against players in collective bargaining negotiations or against government watchdogs in public stadium funding battles.

However, the players have a tool they can use to try and reframe the protests, and keep the focus on their message: social media. With Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, they can communicate directly with fans and provide sports media observers nationwide with cogent and reasoned justifications for their actions.

https://twitter.com/JOEL9ONE/status/999408653445795840

Some players have already began to reframe the protests as a First Amendment issue, which current Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Chris Long did on May 23. In general, Americans support free speech and object to attempts to limit it – even in the workplace.

Other players have pointed out that having players stand on the field for the national anthem is a relatively new phenomenon in the NFL, dating from 2009. That point could also connect with a growing backlash against payments from the U.S. Department of Defense for overt displays of national pride on the football field, such as staged family reunions for soldiers returning from overseas.

There is no guarantee of success with either approach. The hyperpartisan nature of the current political environment may mean that public opinion won’t change. But NFL players have to try and seize control of the narrative, and social media provides a better platform than any other to attempt that.

Connecting directly with fans is important, and venues like Facebook and Snapchat provide that opportunity. It’s perhaps even more important to connect with media members across the country, because they can influence coverage and public discourse; Twitter gives players a direct line to reporters and columnists.

It seems unlikely that the public debate over the protests will disappear quietly, despite what the NFL owners want. For players who find themselves in an increasingly perilous public relations battle, it will be important to control the framing, using social media to assist them – and perhaps even bringing the discussion back to where it started, with police shootings of African-American men.

Galen Clavio is an Associate Professor of Sports Media and Director of the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana University. His research focuses on the influence of electronic and new media on the interactions between sports media, sport organizations, and sport consumers. Some of the specific areas he investigates are sports journalism, online sport fan communities, sports blogs, sport video games, and social networking.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Muslim sportswomen are too often read and represented as the oppressed “other” needing saving from their backward culture/society. However, my research on the digital lives of Muslim sportswomen reveals the multiple and nuanced ways they are taking matters of representation into their own hands, and in so doing, are challenging dominant portrayals of Muslim women in the mass media. Mainstream media coverage of Muslim women tends to focus on the hijabi athlete, while other Muslim sportswomen are often overlooked. The overrepresentation of the “oppressed” hijabi athlete obscures the multiple ways that Muslim women are participating in sport, as well as the cultural differences and diversity within this group. For example, the image below of a beach volleyball match between teams from Egypt and Germany, dubbed by some as the “clash of civilizations,” was circulated widely on social media. Many of the conversations and images centred around the hijabi athlete and rarely mentioned her Egyptian teammate who did not wear the hijab.

Such depictions, through text (describing Muslim women as passive and oppressed) and/or images (focusing on the hijab/niqab), create narratives that adhere to the Orientalist view, which distorts non-Western cultures in comparison to European cultures, implying the “other” culture is backward, uncivilized, and exotic. This type of media discourse may continue to reinforce problematic and limited representations and understandings of the lives of Muslim women in the world today.

Over the past decade, researchers have increasingly explored the important role of social media in contemporary sport. Some feminist scholars have examined how sportswomen are using social media for self-branding and marketing, online self-representation, or digital activism. However, Muslim sportswomen are not necessarily using social media in the same ways. To better understand how Muslim sportswomen are using social media in their everyday lives, my PhD research draws upon the work of critical feminist digital media and sports scholars, applying an intersectional approach to consider the ways in which different aspects of participants’ identities (e.g., race, gender, religion) combine to influence their experiences. Specifically, I have conducted interviews with 20 Muslim sportswomen from around the world in an array of different sports (e.g., mountaineering, fencing, basketball, CrossFit, mixed martial arts) and different sporting backgrounds (elite, competitive, and recreational). Prior to interviewing the sportswomen, I conducted an eight-month digital ethnography. This involved overt observations (with permission from participants) of the online lives of 26 Muslim sportswomen’s social media accounts across four different platforms (SnapChat, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). For the Muslim sportswomen in my research, rather than being stereotyped into mainstream media’s perspective of the oppressed “other,” they are subtly and at times overtly bringing in the complex nature of their offline lives into digital spaces and offering alternative representations of sportswomen.

As an example, a participant in my research, Dina (name changed for anonymity) is a 30-year-old mountaineer from the Middle East and North Africa. Dina, who does not wear the hijab in her day-to-day life, stated: “I like to give the mysterious element on Instagram that maybe I am covered or maybe I am not.” The control of her social media posts is not just for the “mysterious” element, but to get local sponsors (keeping in mind cultural norms of her society) and importantly influence other girls/women to take up mountaineering. In other words, she is strategic and conscious with her posts so she can share a different narrative about herself, her sport, and her society.

Muslim sportswomen are more diverse and their lives are more complex than typically depicted in mainstream media. For the Muslim women in my study, their identities do not rest solely on religion, gender, race, or nationality, but rather on individual interpretations and experiences at the intersection of such identities in relation to sport. For example, some participants didn’t want to be known as the first woman to compete in a particular sport from a Muslim country; rather, they wished to be recognized for their skills as athletes. In sum, social media allows the Muslim sportswomen in my research opportunities to reimagine and promote counternarratives to dominant media representations, as well as adding further complexity to understandings of digital embodiment.

Nida Ahmad (na105@students.waikato.ac.nz) is a PhD Student in the Faculty of Health, Sport and Human Performance at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. She also is on the executive board of the Muslim Women in Sport Network, which launched in 2018. Her research focuses on Muslim sportswomen’s uses of social media. She has published in the International Journal of the Sociology of Sport, Routledge Handbook of Youth Sport, Routledge Handbook of Sport for Development and Peace, and International Journal of Communication. You can follow her on Twitter: @NAicha11

For most of January 2018, one of the worst sexual abuse scandals ever in sports dominated the news cycle, as former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to life in prison. During the trial, more than 100 sexual abuse victims testified about the predatory environment Nassar had created. Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman delivered an awe-inspiring 13-minute testimony that received national praise. Raisman, who identified herself as a powerful voice and advocate for all victims of sexual abuse, embodied the persona of feminist advocate and champion for abuse victims. However, Raisman’s credibility as a feminist advocate has come into scrutiny in light of her decision to pose – for the second time – for the 2018 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. This case raises several questions: Can Raisman still be considered a feminist advocate in light of her choice to pose for a sexist, white, heteronormative, and objectifying magazine feature? Where is the line between empowerment and objectification? As a rhetoric scholar, I am interested in how both Raisman’s traditional form of activism (public address) and her embodied rhetoric are compatible feminist discourses. My purpose is to explain Raisman’s multi-modal activism through the lens of feminist rhetorical criticism – highlighting the concept of “power feminism” – in order to complicate what feminist sports scholars and hosts of the Burn It All Down podcast call the “Sports Illustrated swimsuit conundrum.”

Modes of (Feminist) Rhetorical Activism and Power Feminism

Feminist rhetorical activism takes many forms. Traditionally, rhetorical activism has been defined as “public protest,” “confrontation,” or other forms of verbal, deliberative discourse.  However, communication scholars Sowards and Renegar advance a more pluralist view of rhetorical activism. In addition to public address, they argue, feminist rhetorical action may manifest as creating grassroots models of leadership; using strategic humor; building feminist identity both on- and off-line; sharing stories; resisting stereotypes and labels; and other visual or embodied forms of protest. Such forms of protest have been used for centuries. Images of women cycling in nineteenth century magazines functioned to resist dominant cultural frames of the “frail” female body whose reproductive parts needed to be preserved. In the twentieth century, second-wave feminism introduced consciousness-raising activities where women could gather to share, listen, and organize. Finally, in our current century, SlutWalks have attempted to reclaim the kinds of clothing traditionally associated with “promiscuity” and resist the rape culture logic that blames assault victims. Such victim-blaming discourse proliferated after the release of Raisman’s Sports Illustrated feature, as exemplified by a tweet directed at Raisman reading, “How can you complain that you were molested?”

Contemporary rhetorical activism is not limited to one of these forms; rather, most activist discourse is multi-modal as well as multiply-mediated. Further, there are competing forms of feminist thought. I argue that Raisman’s rhetorical action is in line with “power feminism,” which focuses on working within the system or “using the master ‘s tools” to affect  change in society. Media studies scholar Rebecca Hains has criticized “power feminism” in her analysis of television content, which revealed that “power feminist” characters adhere to normative standards of femininity, making them successful commodities in the marketplace. While such criticisms are indeed necessary, I argue that “power feminist” rhetorical action is still important, even if it is imperfect.

Aly Raisman as “Power Feminist” and Multi-Modal Advocate

During Raisman’s testimony, she said, “I have both power and voice and I am only beginning to just use them.” I argue that both her verbal testimony and her Sports Illustrated swimsuit feature are complementary forms of feminist rhetorical activism. Both demonstrate Raisman’s transformation from a passive victim into an active agent in the form of a survivor/advocate. In her testimony, she chronicled the story of her objectification and abuse. Her direct confrontation (“Larry, it’s your turn to listen to me”) demonstrated Raisman’s reclaimed voice and agency. In the case of her embodied rhetoric in Sports Illustrated – both the traditional poses and the “In Her Own Words” feature – Rasiman displays, rather than hides, her body. She transforms from victim to survivor. This is a “power” move, which stands in contrast to what Naomi Wolf called “victim feminism.”

It is still important to maintain critiques of the patriarchal media landscape we inhabit. Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue is certainly not the epitome of women’s empowerment or feminist discourse; it is unfortunately one of the only times women appear in Sports Illustrated at all. Further, “power feminism” is not without its criticisms. As radical feminists have argued, “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.” However, this does not undermine Raisman’s feminist activism, and we should not revert to ideals of purity that demand women be passive and modest. In Raisman’s own words (written on her naked body), “Women do not need to be modest to be respected.” That simple assertion says so much. Aly Raisman is no victim – she is a powerful survivor. Raisman’s multi-modal activism depicts a survivor who has claimed her body, her power, her agency, and her voice. For Raisman, both speaking and posing make her a “power feminist” because she both acknowledges the power she has as a woman and a high-profile athlete (the role-model persona), and she participates in an institution (the swimsuit issue) that caters to patriarchal and heteronormative ideals. However, her public testimony and her embodied rhetoric should be viewed as compatible and complementary forms of activism. Rhetorical action can be simultaneously progressive and regressive. Advocacy – and any communication, really – is never just an either/or. It can be, and usually is, both/and.

Rebecca Alt is a doctoral candidate in Communication (Rhetoric and Political Culture) at the University of Maryland. She is interested in the communication of elite sport culture, organizational rhetoric, and advocacy. You can follow her on Twitter at @rhetorbec.

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that media coverage of the Olympics often perpetuates nationalistic and ethnocentric ideas. While the Olympics are popularly touted for “bringing people together,” Olympic media coverage may also reinforce and naturalize problematic ideas about gender, race, nation and culture. With these concerns in mind, one storyline to be mindful of is the qualification of a women’s bobsled team from Nigeria, the first from the African continent to appear in the Olympics.

In my book, The Black Migrant Athlete, I argue that the simplistic ways in which these athletes are discussed work to obscure the immigrant experience and keep black immigrant communities invisible in the United States. These shortcomings, for the Nigerian women’s bobsled team, are highlighted when we come to learn that each member the three-person team (Seun Adigun, Ngozi Onwumere, and Akuoma Omeoga) was actually born, raised, and educated in the United States. This fact is not obvious from much of the coverage so far, as it is often stated that they are simply “from Nigeria.” This description tends to be a feature in coverage of “African” athletes—even if they are born in or naturalized to Western citizenship, they are rooted firmly in Africa by Western media and thus rendered exterior to the West. If black African athletes are often kept foreign by the media, what else might we expect to see in the coverage of the Nigerian women’s bobsled team?

A few indications are captured in a recent article by Dennis Dodd on cbssports.com entitled, “How culture, passion and genetics are fueling a Nigerian takeover of U.S. sports.” Per the title, Dodd argues that the success of Nigerian athletes can be attributed to culture, passion, and genetics. Certainly, the number of athletes with Nigerian backgrounds in the U.S. has increased over the years, but simplistic explanations, such as those offered by Dodd, do little to help us understand their success.

First, let us take the assertion that Nigerian success is a matter of “culture.” Without seeming to realize it, the article collapses first generation immigrants (those born in Nigeria) and second generation immigrants (those born in the U.S.) in a simple fashion. There is little recognition of how these different immigration statuses bear on the experiences of the respective groups. It is assumed that the “Nigerian culture,” something which is never clearly described, is transported easily and effortlessly into the receiving communities of Nigerian immigration.

Even putting aside the difficulties first generation immigrants often face, the second generation immigrant experience can be drastically different from their immigrant parent(s), as they must grow up navigating their host culture from childhood. For example, their experiences of being black in the U.S., but not African American, comes with their own negotiations of identity that are not easily captured by “Nigerian culture.” While many second generation African immigrants profess strong country of origin identities, we rarely receive any analysis as to why that is so. Often it is assumed to be more or less a matter of “natural” affinity and not the result of feeling like an outsider.

With culture not being adequately explained, we are left to assume that the heart of “culture-as-success” lies in Dodd’s second assertion—“passion.”  Dodd sees this passion on full display for Nigerians in the realm of education. However, that an immigrant population puts effort into education is nothing new, as many immigrant groups to the U.S./West have stressed education to some degree. The problem that Dodd runs into is in assuming that Nigerians are somehow unique in this aim or do not have certain advantages, such as higher levels of cultural capital, that other groups might not have. Articles like Dodd’s position Nigerian immigrants as a “model minority,” portraying them as highly motivated, successful, and worthy of social advancement.

The problem is that model minorities in the United States, whatever their race or national origin, have long been positioned against African Americans in various ways. The reasoning goes that if “Nigerians” are able to succeed in sport and gain high levels of education via athletic scholarships, then certainly African Americans can as well. This state of affairs ignores the fact that black immigrants often present to white Americans as a “model minority” because they do not immediately reflect the country’s history of racist oppression back at itself. In this way, the position of black Africans in the U.S. is sustainable in so far as black Africans adhere to the standard of the model minority—meaning that, most importantly, they do not question the racial order or their place in society.

The final assertion by Dodd for the success of Nigerians is the most overtly racist—“genetics.” Arguments about black athletes having genetic or biological advantages have been discredited at least since Montague Cobb in the 1930s, and even more recent claims, such as “fast twitch” muscles or “speed genes,” do not pass scrutiny. What is more telling of the operation of race in the U.S. is that black African immigrants seem to be limited to sports (football, basketball, athletics) dominated by African Americans instead of being represented in a wider range of sports.

If Dodd’s article is any indication, we should expect the Nigerian women’s bobsled team to receive simplistic media coverage emphasizing their Nigerian culture or identity, ignoring the presence of Nigerian communities in the U.S., and perpetuating stereotypical assumptions of genetic or biological athleticism. Instead of an opportunity to reflect about how immigration and sport can challenge national borders and the racial hierarchies they maintain, we will likely be presented the opposite. The Olympics and accompanying media coverage offer a version of sport that hides the very real complexities of identity, belonging, culture, and diaspora. That some nations/races/cultures are thought to have particular natural/genetic/biological predispositions to certain athletic qualities or playing styles reinforces white supremacy, as, historically, ideas about racial differentiation have been used to maintain the place of whiteness atop the racial hierarchy. We deserve better.

Munene Mwaniki is an assistant professor of sociology at Western Carolina University. He is the author of The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sport (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). His work has appeared in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Communication & Sport, and an upcoming anthology on sport in Africa (Routledge, 2018). His research broadly focuses on the intersections of race, immigration, and sport.

While a record number of countries and athletes are expected to participate in the 2018 Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, the Winter edition of the Olympics remains an exclusive event. South Korea will be just the 12th country that has ever hosted the Winter Olympics, a quadrennial event that was inaugurated in France in 1924. Only a few countries have the geographic and economic conditions to host the event, which accounts for the fact that only 6 percent of the 206 recognized National Olympic Committees have ever done so. Further, a majority of countries still do not participate in the Winter Olympic Games. At the 2014 Sochi Games, 89 countries participated. This number increases to 92 in PyeongChang (plus the “Olympic Athlete from Russia” category), which still leaves 55 percent of countries out of the Games. According to the organizing committee website, 31 nations are participating with just one athlete (18 countries) or two athletes (13 countries). Seven of the eight participating African countries will send only one or two athletes to PyeongChang, while Nigeria has the largest African delegation with three athletes. For comparison, the United States of America is participating with 242 athletes.

Many developing countries participate with athletes who grew up abroad, which distracts from the fact that there is little winter sport infrastructure in the country they are representing. For example, Bolivia will return to the Winter Olympics after not participating since 1992. This return is happening at a time when Bolivia’s only ski resort is significantly affected by global warming. One Bolivian participant will be Simon Breitfuss Kammerlander, an alpine ski racer who grew up in Austria. The other will be Finnish-born cross-country skier Timo Gronlund.

Once the Winter Olympic Games have started, the media attention, which is currently focusing on the joint Korean team and the doping allegations against Russian athletes, will shift to the question “Which country will win the Olympic Games?”, with medal rankings published in media outlets around the world as an indicator of success and failure. In all of its history, only 45 nation-states have won a medal at the Winter Games – about 22 per cent of all National Olympic Committees. For sports such as curling, ice hockey, and skating, the necessary infrastructure could potentially be established in countries without favorable winter sport conditions, but this requires costly investments that are not possible in many nations.

In Sochi 2014, 26 countries won a medal – about 30 percent of participating countries – and of these, 19 (representing 73%) were from European nations, reflecting the prevalent Eurocentrism of the Winter Olympics. The concentration of success among such a small number of nations has meant that numerous events at the Winter Games have little competition. This is the result of a strategic approach by countries, as I have argued in my recent book Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games (Routledge 2016). Focusing on medal-promising sports has become a key strategy in Olympic policies around the world, and countries that do not introduce such a targeted approach are often left behind in the medal rankings. Countries usually specialize either by promoting sports where they have a historical comparative advantage or by heavily supporting new sports that were recently added to the Olympic program. An interesting example is speed skating in the Netherlands. In four speed skating events in Sochi, the Netherlands won all of the available gold, silver and bronze medals. The country also leads the all-time Winter Olympics speed skating ranking.

Since it is very difficult to compete with the Netherlands in speed skating, 2018 Winter Olympic host South Korea has successfully focused on the short track skating events. Whereas speed skating has been part of the Olympic program since 1960, short track was added in 1992. As a relatively new winter sport nation, South Korea (similar to China) has decided to focus on short track speed skating, and has so far been very successful, winning 21 of the 48 gold medals in short track since it became a medal sport (China has won 9 gold medals).

Germany, meanwhile, has largely dominated the sport of luge. About 58 percent of all medals in luge have been won by German athletes (including East Germany, West Germany, and the reunified Germany). If one includes Austria, 73 percent of all Olympic luge medals have been won by German speaking countries. Moreover, since the Italian luge team is usually recruited from South Tyrol, a majority German-speaking province in Italy, Olympic medal winning in luge is nearly an entirely ethnic German domain. Germany’s dominance, however, should not give the impression that luge is popular in the country. According to the BSD,  the association responsible for luge, bobsleigh, and skeleton sports in Germany, the association has only 6,500 members in around 100 clubs in a country with a population of more than 82 million inhabitants. Hence, even within Winter Olympic powerhouses, medal events with limited global spread, such as luge, remain exclusive sports.

Danyel Reiche is an Associate Professor for Comparative Politics at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. His research examines sport policy and politics from a comparative perspective, with recent publications on the role of developing countries in international sport, the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, and the Arab sporting boycott of Israel. His current research is on the regulation of athletic citizenship in international sports. His work has been published in journals such as International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, The International Journal of the History of Sport, and European Sport Management Quarterly. His book Success and Failure of Countries at the Olympic Games was published with Routledge in 2016.

In North American professional sports culture, parades are typically organized by cities and organizations after a major team accomplishment, such as winning a league championship. On Saturday, January 6, 2018, however, thousands of Cleveland Browns fans, in response to their team’s failure to register a win during the National Football League’s (NFL) 2017 regular season, congregated near FirstEnergy Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio to “celebrate” the Browns’ “perfect season” record of 0-16. The fans braved frigid January temperatures, creating satirical floats, signs, and costumes to publicly mock team owner Jimmy Haslam—CEO of the Pilot Flying J truck stop chain, a company embroiled in an FBI investigation concerning rebate fraud—and the team’s consistent lack of success in the NFL. Parade organizer Chris McNeill described the event as a protest expressed through “macabre-humor”: “I think we have every right,” McNeill said, “after this organization has given us nothing now for how many years.” The parade, thankfully, benefitted the local community in ways other than creative celebration, as event promoters raised over $17,000 and collected perishable food donations, all of which were subsequently donated to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

The parade was met with disdain from other local fans, journalists, and Browns players, unsurprising given the centrality of competitiveness and virtues of “winning” in modern American sporting ideology. Multiple Browns players publicly expressed their opposition to the parade, with defensive lineman Emmanuel Ogbah declaring on Twitter, “That parade is a joke don’t call yourself a true Browns fan if you go to that thing!” Local fans buttressed Ogbah’s scorn, with their perceptions of fandom implicitly separating the parade goers from “true fans” who presumably devote their full financial and emotional support to the professional franchise regardless of outcome. Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board member Ted Diadiun criticized the parade’s objective via a subtle jab at fans who associate the success of professional sports team with their sense of identity: “[U]nlike a lot of folks who were out there, I don’t measure my sense of self-worth in accordance with whether the team on the field…wins or loses.” Others sided with the parade goers as part of a condemnation of the team’s overall performance, with Cleveland.com columnist Bud Shaw declaring “if people who’ve had so little to smile about want to get together as a community and protest a team that has offered them so little to cheer about since 1999, I get it.”

Whether in support and condemnation, local media commentary on the parade defined Browns fandom in relation to athletic and team success. Thus, the discussion centered on whether parade goers should protest the lack of cultural status or “compensation” the fans have received from supporting the Browns, and whether such protesting was indicative of being a “true fan.” Is a true Browns fan one who gets angry at the franchise’s management, impatient for team success? Or is a true fan one who has an undying financial, social, and emotional support for the team and its players? Both definitions, however, assumed an individual’s productive loyalty to the team brand, whether in anger or support.

Lost in the coverage was how the parade served as a locally meaningful, creative form of fan expression and celebration—a potential method of crafting a sporting social identity that expresses team loyalty, yet mocks team owners and operates peripheral to corporate and league-sanctioned business. Alternative forms of expression are more common within European and global sports fan (sub)cultures, but are relatively rare in North American pro sports where consumerism and fan identity are increasingly interwoven. In Cleveland, however, fans organized a parade unaffiliated and disassociated with the Browns organization, congregating in each other’s company for reasons unrelated to the NFL’s revenue generation streams. No tickets or officially sanctioned fan apparel was needed, only a fan’s ability to parody Browns ownership. This is not to romanticize the parade as a radical form of fan expression challenging the hegemony of the NFL or the Browns organization—the organizers were not seeking to boycott or end their support of the team, and many were still season ticket holders and consumers of Browns-related products. Moreover, the event reproduced the gender and sexual politics prevalent within American sports by holding a contest for a parade queen.

Yet, by openly mocking team ownership through a locally organized event disconnected from the team’s and NFL’s methods of revenue generation, parade-goers re-shaped their definitions of Browns fandom in a way that allowed them to have a locally meaningful expression of their sporting identity while publicly parodying team owners and management.

By focusing on questions of what constitutes a “true Browns fan,” much of the media coverage prevented a more critical conversation on how such events illuminate the common interests between fan and player, and the irony that team owners continue to accumulate enormous wealth regardless of team performance. “Owners got fat checks from the league’s television revenue sharing plan,” Cleveland columnist Mark Naymik wrote. “Fans got…an 0-16 season.” Moreover, as Browns players criticized the parade as a “joke”, they inadvertently reinforced a definition of “true fandom” based on brand loyalty and seeing athletic labor as a sporting commodity. Meanwhile, the NFL and its teams continue to poorly protect players from head trauma (despite continual revisions to concussion “protocol”), and oppose player activism and social justice efforts.

We should remember that player protests were booed by stadiums of fans, illuminating the enduring racial tension between largely white fan bases and national sporting pastimes predominated by African American athletes. We should not romanticize the values of fan bases and conflicts between the owners and consumers of sporting capital without close attention to the racial, gender, and social politics involved. Nonetheless, the path towards a more inclusive, equitable, and humane national sporting culture requires the ability for fans to construct alternative forms of sporting identity that do not necessarily reproduce the values and logic of consumer capitalism. We should encourage fan bases to find locally significant ways of mocking the owners of professional sports and use those moments to foster critical conversations on the politics of professional sporting fandom and common interests between fan and player.

Samuel M Clevenger earned his PhD in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on the colonial politics of modern sport in American history, as well as the cultural and environment politics of modern urban planning. His research has been published in Urban Planning, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, and Sport, Education and Society.

For our book Doping in Elite Sports: Voices of French Sportspeople and Their Doctors, 1950-2010 (Routledge, 2018), Christophe Brissonneau interviewed 55 former dopers who competed in a variety of different Olympic sports. At the end of one interview, “Pascal” concluded with a story illustrating the life of an elite cyclist. As he told the story, his face lit up with an expansive smile. One morning during training, Pascal woke up as usual, except he could not move. He was paralyzed. He could not even get out of bed to call his father for help. The next day, Pascal’s father checked in on him and Pascal was still paralyzed in bed. Brissonneau asked what had happened. Through a peel of laughter, Pascal confessed that he had injected himself with a drug a friend gave him, but it turns out the drug was meant for snakes! After the interview, Brissonneau wrote in his research journal that Pascal’s story was extraordinary. Who in their right mind injects themselves with snake medicine they got surreptitiously from a friend and then laughs about almost dying from it?

Brissonneau realized that he and Pascal lived in different worlds. How does an intelligent person come to see something so irrational as injecting yourself with snake medicine as reasonable and even good? Doping in Elite Sports attempts to answer that question by looking at the social process through which top amateur athletes join the elite ranks of sport and the medicalized training regimes they must embrace in order to succeed there. Ultimately, this social process produces professionalized athletes who consider taking a range of pharmacological products that will increase their physical performance as a normal, everyday aspect of “doing the job”. We also discovered that sports medicine’s mission to constantly push the frontiers of human performance has led to the development of performance technologies with applications not only for sports, but also for civilian and military uses.

To understand the process by which people become elite athletes, we draw on the sequential model of deviance employed by Howard Becker (1963) in his classic study of marijuana smokers. Becker theorized a succession of phases through which people adjust their behaviour in relation to changes in their self-perception as users. Similarly, we identified five phases in elite athletes’ professional careers. Their careers begin as amateurs in what we call the “ordinary world” since it is a social space that makes up the lived reality of most people. From the ordinary world, athletes advance to the professional ranks that form an “extraordinary world,” a sort of bubble, disconnected from the social reality that most people share. In each phase, the time that is dedicated to domestic and academic activities decreases in equal proportion to increased time allotted to the exclusive practice of the sport. Primary group actors (families, classmates) become less central to the athlete’s life as those bound to performance (other athletes, sports directors, doctors) become more central.

As athletes advance in their careers, they change doctors in each phase. As amateurs, athletes see a general practitioner to treat pain and injuries (1st phase). But as they advance in their sports, athletes will need more advanced and specialized medical services, so they begin to see a sports doctor (2nd phase), followed by a performance-physiologist (3rd phase), and finally a specialist in biology or biotechnology (4th phase). The cycle concludes with retirement (5th phase) in which athletes may begin to see addiction specialists to help manage their drug use.

As athletes progress through the phases, the norms that guide their beliefs and actions change through contact with other athletes, trainers, and doctors. An understanding of health conceived of as the absence of illness gradually begins to fade as a conception of health synonymous with performance emerges. As athletes move across the career phases and their training intensifies, they begin to use more and stronger medicine. In the first phase when starting their athletic careers, athletes do not use any substances. When they progress into the second phase, athletes start using legal products (vitamins and iron) taken as intramuscular injections. In the third phase, they use corticoids and anabolic steroids “to look after” their hormonal imbalance and “to do their job.” Athletes that reach the fourth phase and decide to break away from the pack in an attempt to become champions begin using peptide hormones, such as erythropoietin (EPO) and human growth hormones (HGH), under the direction of a biotechnologist.

It is not through only the physical but also the mental transformation of the athletes that we can understand the phases of an athlete’s career. Throughout the phases, athletes gradually revise the standards of ethics used to assess their actions. What remains constant throughout is the sport’s scale of values, which includes an expectation of training long, hard hours and enduring tremendous suffering. The products used during the third phase, such as anabolic steroids, are not considered cheating by elite athletes since they are consistent with sports’ scale of values. Anabolic steroids speed up recovery and thus allow an athlete to work harder and suffer more. The products used in the fourth phase, peptide hormones, are far more powerful. Athletes that use these drugs are considered cheaters since they do not respect sports’ scale of values. Peptide hormones endow athletes with performance gains even if they do not work for them and they force other athletes to use those potentially deadly products to remain competitive.

Our key takeaway from Brissonneau’s more than 10 years of ethnographic research is that doping describes a set of practices governed by the logic of the workplace; elite sport. This produces profound misunderstandings for journalists, sponsors, fans, sport governing bodies, and sports doctors, who often frame doping as a moral issue. However, most athletes who are labelled dopers (and their doctors) do not see themselves as cheaters. They see themselves as competitors doing what is a necessary and normal component of their job. Their bodies are machines built for maximal performance. Increased regulation of athletes’ bodies and sanctions can limit doping, but will not remove doping from contemporary medicalized sport. As long as sport is guided by the logic of elite performances and winning, the medical model and pharmacology will remain.

We also conclude from an extensive study of medical talks, scientific articles, and medical symposiums that what has driven research on doping since the 1960s is the development of a new stage in medical research: a medicine of human enhancement. By creating and developing the concept of doping, physicians gained access to the elite sports world. They conducted studies to understand how bodies could be improved, the pathological phenomena that limit the body’s functioning, and they developed new repair techniques. There is then a transfer of medical knowledge between the sports world, the ordinary world, and the military. The sports world provides medical knowledge for the ordinary world on obesity, cardiovascular dysfunction, and cancer, while it provides the military world with knowledge on how to create, as one exercise physiologist told us, “a super soldier who can walk 40 km, with 40 kg on his shoulders, in 40 °c [104 °f] for seven days without sleeping in Afghanistan” as well as how to support human life in space. Ultimately, we agree with other researchers concerned with the “weaponization” of sports knowledge and call for more research into this important topic.

Christophe Brissonneau is a researcher in the sociology department of the University of Paris Descartes, France. His research interests include sociological theory, socialization, deviance, health, and ethics. His recent work has focused on elite sport, its medicalization, and different types of doping careers in France from 1950 to 2000.

Jeffrey Montez de Oca is an Associate Professor in the sociology department at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, USA. His current research focuses on NFL marketing. His monograph Discipline and Indulgence: College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life During the Cold War won the 2014 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Outstanding Book Award.

In mass media and popular culture, sport is often presented as a level playing field where the most skilled and committed athletes rise to the top. The racial composition of American football is often presented as evidence of the supposed meritocracy of sport. While 13.2 percent of the U.S. population is black, 47.1 percent of NCAA Division I football players and 68.7 percent of National Football League (NFL) players are black. Thus, if black men are more commonly from poor and working-class backgrounds compared to white men, yet are overrepresented in football, one might conclude that factors such as race and social class play little to no role in player development and selection.

Research in sociology of sport, however, tells a different story. The cultural glorification of black athletes, racial bias and discrimination in social institutions like education, racial ideologies of black physical superiority, and strong social support for sport in families and communities may lead many black men to over-identify with sport. While just 1.6 percent of NCAA football players will play professionally, one study of Division I college football players found that 85 percent of black players and 39 percent of white players aspired to the NFL.

Player selection may also be influenced by racial ideologies. Some NFL coaches and scouts buy in to a “Friday Night Lights” myth where football is perceived to be “king” in small, rural towns that are often heavily black and working class. As a result, coaches and scouts may give greater consideration to players from these backgrounds.

Questions about the roles of race and social class are important to consider when examining the extent to which sport is meritocratic. Considering race and class also sheds light on several recent controversies in football, including college and professional leagues’ handling of injury and concussion protocols and protests of racial injustice and police violence. The consequences for players participating in protest, arguing for improved injury protocols, or leaving the sport altogether may be distinct across racial and socioeconomic lines.

Yet we know little about patterns that may exist with respect to the backgrounds of players and where, exactly, they come from. The places young people grow up are important in the opportunities they provide to develop athletic talent and in the social support they provide for sports participation. With my colleagues Adriene Davis and Raymond Barranco, I asked, what hometowns are most likely to pathways into elite football? Do black and white players come from similar or different backgrounds?

To answer these questions, we compiled data from ESPN’s top-ranked incoming college football recruits over the past 10 years. We included white and black athletes for a sample of 929 players. ESPN lists each athlete’s hometown as the city of the high school the athlete attended. For each recruit, we matched the listed hometown with data on the town’s socioeconomics and demographics from the 2000 U.S. Census.

We measured per capita income, median household income, median family income, percent of the population living in poverty, percent of persons 25 years of age and older with less than a high school education, percent of vacant houses, percent unemployed, total population, housing density, and the percent of white, black, and Latino residents. We considered these to be rough measures of cultural factors related to sports participation, such as familial and community support, and structural factors like opportunities and infrastructure. We compared hometown indicators by race first for the entire sample of incoming college players and then only for the 183 players who were drafted into the NFL. We also compared against national averages on each measure.

We found that black football players come from hometowns that are more socioeconomically disadvantaged than the national average and that have a higher percent of black residents. In contrast, white players’ hometowns are smaller, less dense, less socioeconomically disadvantaged, and less black and Latino than black players’ hometowns.

These patterns intensified when we compared players who were drafted into the NFL with those who were not. Drafted black players come from hometowns that are more black and socioeconomically disadvantaged than black players who were not drafted, while white drafted players come from hometowns that are less socioeconomically disadvantaged than white non-drafted players. In summary, hometown socioeconomic disadvantage and a higher proportion of black residents are associated with black men’s participation and selection into elite football, while less hometown socioeconomic disadvantage and a higher proportion of white residents are associated with white men’s participation and selection into elite football.

While we cannot definitively explain our findings, it is likely that player development and selection in football are shaped by both race and social class background. Places with more resources tend to have more opportunities and better facilities for sport. As we show, such places increase the likelihood of white men developing their athletic skills and making it to the top echelons of football. In contrast, socioeconomic disadvantage presents fewer and lower-quality opportunities and facilities to black men. Yet socioeconomic disadvantage also limits the number and quality of opportunities for education and employment. A lack of opportunities in these areas, combined with persistent racial bias and discrimination, may make certain sports, such as football, seem like the most likely pathway to upward mobility for some black men.

By implication, if black NFL players are disproportionately from poor and working class families and disadvantaged hometowns, the financial necessity of participation in the NFL is higher for black than white players. Recent debates in football over head injury protocols and protests of racial injustice, among other issues, cannot and should not be separate from consideration of the groups of players who have the most at stake.

Rachel Allison is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate of Gender Studies at Mississippi State University. Her research examines the gender, racial, and class politics of U.S. professional sports. Her book, Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women’s Professional Soccer, is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press.

College sports fans probably weren’t surprised to learn that the University of North Carolina (UNC) had been engaged in academic fraud for decades. In this particular instance, students, predominately varsity athletes, were enrolled in classes with few (if any) academic requirements. They almost always received high grades.

The UNC scandal is just one of many recent examples where universities have prioritized athletic prowess over academic integrity.

And where was the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in all this? Amazingly, it essentially shrugged off the apparent transgressions, even after UNC admitted to them. Is the NCAA abdicating its oversight responsibilities?

Critics of the NCAA, such as Bloomberg News’ Joe Nocera, have long argued that the organization has zero credibility as a regulator of college sports. Nocera and others tend to view the NCAA as either hypocritical or corrupt.

But without appearing sympathetic to the NCAA, I believe it is not the prime offender in the UNC case. It is simply doing the bidding of a higher education system that has gone off the academic rails. If the NCAA is Oz’s projection on the wall, a profit-oriented higher education system is behind the curtain pulling the levers.

The athletic arms race

In my recent book, I link higher education’s misplaced priorities to the explosion of costs associated with intercollegiate athletics and youth sports.

This research, along with studies by the Knight Commission, the Drake Group and the Association of Research Libraries, shows that university spending on intercollegiate sports has vastly outpaced spending on instruction and research over the past two decades.

This spending spree has led to an arms race, or what sports sociologist Howard Nixon II calls an “athletic trap” that ensnares universities in incessant funding of high-visibility sports programs.

Contrary to popular belief, very few college sports programs operate in the black. According to data from the NCAA and U.S. Department of Education, fewer than 25 of the more than 300 NCAA Division I programs earn more than they spend. Athletic department deficits at some schools run upwards of US$20 million per year.

Whenever athletic expenses exceed revenues, schools must make up the gap through other means.

At state schools, this could include more public funding, although that is becoming quite rare. More likely, schools will try to address the deficit through increasing tuition, implementing generic “student fees” or soliciting alumni for more money.

Paying for what, exactly?

On the surface, none of this seems logical. Why pour so many resources into athletic programs? If students end up bearing the financial burden and education programs suffer, where is the return on the investment?

More than 100 years ago, sociologist Thorstein Veblen first identified the “corporatization” of higher education, with university presidents as “captains of solvency” who focus their energies on “principles of spectacular publicity” that will impress current and future donors.

Not much has changed in the last century. Higher education has become more about cultivating a school’s “brand” than cultivating critical thinkers, more about alumni checkbooks than about student notebooks. Is it any wonder that college presidents are increasingly referred to as CEOs and are being recruited from the corporate world?

If we think about college sports as a marketing venture rather than an educational venture, all of this spending makes perfect sense. Think of players as walking advertisements – each branded with the school’s logo – who appear before millions of viewers on ESPN and ABC. Large schools are especially concerned with brand development and revenue streams, which come from a combination of dedicated alumni, fans and corporate sponsors. Meanwhile, smaller Division I schools and Division III schools use athletics not just for brand recognition but to manipulate their enrollment statistics and improve their “selectivity index.”

Generally, varsity athletes are admitted through an early decision process that operates somewhat independently from the regular admissions process. But only the regular process figures into calculations of a college’s acceptance rates. Athletes who are admitted early reduce the number of acceptances offered to the regular applicant pool. This lowers the school’s acceptance rate and raises its perceived selectivity – all without any substantive educational improvements.

Like their Division I counterparts, Division III schools also believe that visible and successful sports programs will spawn increased alumni contributions. The supporting data for this, however, are mixed. Most schools end up treading water (or slowly sinking) as increased spending doesn’t keep pace with increases in alumni contributions.

The empty ‘student-athlete’ slogan

Officially born in 1910, the NCAA has always had trouble balancing its dual mission of promoting and regulating intercollegiate sports. Part of this promotion has been cultivating the “amateur” status of college sports, and how it is “purer” than commercialized professional sports. Nothing represents that marketing scheme better than the “student-athlete” concept.

Former NCAA president Walter Byers first coined the term in the 1950s while fighting a worker’s compensation claim by the widow of a college football player who had died during a game. “Student-athlete” has since becoming something of a mantra among those who work at any level within intercollegiate sports.

As a result, the NCAA postures as a de facto defender of academic integrity, even while its bylaws state otherwise. Rules approved by the NCAA in 2016 state that colleges should set their own academic integrity standards, with the NCAA intervening only when those internal rules are violated.

In the UNC case, the NCAA is refusing to second-guess the school’s determination that no internal rules have been violated, despite what appears to be serious academic misconduct.

Following the NCAA’s statutory logic, universities would crack down on athletics-centered academic fraud if they really wanted to. Instead, as my research and the work of others show, schools have become organizationally and ideologically addicted to intercollegiate sports.

Universities are convinced that they only need one more “fix” to reach intercollegiate sports nirvana: just one more new facility, one more high-profile coach, one more no-work course and one more entertainment complex to attract top recruits. But the athletics arms race keeps spiraling, and higher education keeps moving farther away from its educational mission.

The NCAA is a convenient scapegoat, but the problem lies much deeper. Is “college education” itself becoming an oxymoron? Was long-time college sports critic Murray Sperber correct when he said that universities were more about “beer and circuses” than about teaching and research?

Perhaps Thorstein Veblen was also right when he originally subtitled his book on higher education “A Study in Total Depravity.”

Rick Eckstein, a professor of sociology at Villanova University, is a nationally recognized expert on the commercialization of youth sports and the economics of higher education. His recently published book, How Intercollegiate Athletics are Hurting Girls’ Sports: The Pay to Play Pipeline (Rowman and Littlefield), draws a causal connection between the corporatization of higher education and the rampant commercialization of youth sports. This relationship has detrimental impacts on college costs and the increasingly class-exclusive landscape of youth sports that systematically excludes poorer, darker, and non-suburban families. Families that can access the “pay to play youth sports to college pipeline” are regularly mislead about the chances of receiving athletic scholarships and admissions advantages. The American Library Association recommends this book for all readers, and the research has been regularly featured in the national media.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

CrossFit, the popular group fitness regimen that members half-jokingly call a “cult,” is much more than the latest get-ripped-quick fad, according to a recent study my colleague Ted Butryn and I conducted out of San José State University. CrossFit’s massive growth from one gym in Northern California in the early 2000s to over 13,000 worldwide in 2017 has sparked fierce debate about the program’s safety and efficacy, and disrupted an industry that has for decades been built on selling the superficial aestheticism of bodybuilding and aerobics. Instead of wading into the ongoing debate about CrossFit’s methods, our study sought to understand the social significance of CrossFit in a moment when work is becoming increasingly sedentary and technologically dependent, especially in the Silicon Valley area where I spent five months as an ethnographer in two CrossFit gyms. Our results showed that CrossFit portends a deeper angst about the purpose of physical bodies in a world that is rapidly devaluing physical labor, particularly for a well-educated white-collar workforce.

Although CrossFit uses the same class-based structure of recent fitness trends such as Zumba and yoga, CrossFit does not adhere to any single type of exercise but rather achieves results – and a fiercely loyal membership base – by encouraging competition during each unique “workout of the day,” or WOD. These intense sessions, which may last as much as 45 minutes or as little as two, mix and match exercises from different athletic disciplines, including weightlifting, running, and gymnastics. Some of the more memorable WODs are even given feminine names (a practice CrossFit’s originator has likened to the weather service’s naming of severe storms), or named after fallen law enforcement officers and soldiers as a form of honor. For example, arguably the most infamous CrossFit WOD is called “Fran,” a deceptive workout composed of 45 total reps each of 95-pound barbell thrusters (a squat-press movement) and pull-ups, which may take a trained athlete only a few minutes to complete but perhaps an hour or more to recover from.

All WODs are timed or scored by accumulated repetitions, with some gyms even instituting penalties of extra exercise should members forget to count their reps or check the clock when finishing a WOD. Coaches record these scores publicly on whiteboards in the gym or on social media sites, providing members a real-time ranking of their performance across different classes in the same gym. Although the exercises here are not necessarily new to the fitness industry, they have been repackaged to capitalize on an emerging desire for exercise to produce something more meaningful than bulging biceps and toned buttocks.

For example, most CrossFit exercises typically embody what coaches call “functional movements”—whole body complex movements that mimic real-world actions. During my stint as a CrossFitter, the other participants and I performed “farmer’s carries,” tire flips, sledgehammer swings, and other movements that felt more like construction work than recreational exercise. Compounding this mimicry of manual labor was the fact that both gyms inhabited defunct industrial warehouses, and thus our faux work in the gym’s parking lot often impeded actual work—tow trucks and delivery vehicles trying to reach neighboring auto repair shops. Additionally, CrossFit shuns most technologies found in larger commercial gyms: exercise machines, mirrors, saunas, Pilates equipment, wearable activity trackers, and demarcated rooms for specific exercise methods.

However, one would be remiss to think these gyms’ neo-Luddite tendencies predict a similar disdain of consumerism; in 2010, CrossFit Inc. signed a long-term marketing deal with Reebok as part of the apparel company’s strategy to return to its fitness roots. At the gyms I visited, post-WOD conversations often gravitated toward the latest CrossFit gear, including camouflaged Reebok shoes, ball-bearing jump ropes, sophisticated training gloves, and other usually expensive must-haves. One of the coaches I met wore a shirt featuring a caricature of a person on an elliptical machine with a bolded “FAIL” written underneath. The implied failure was not that the elliptical is inherently dysfunctional, but that a mindless hour of television while gyrating on an exercise machine robbed the body of its own machine-like autonomy.

Participants I spoke to echoed these sentiments, labeling their previous experiences at bigger commercial gyms as pointless and boring, even though those gyms provided more amenities than did the CrossFit gym and at a fraction of CrossFit’s nearly $200/month cost. Participants explained that CrossFit gave exercise (and their bodies) a functional purpose beyond merely fitness and health. After CrossFit, participants felt their bodies could run, jump, and lift more effectively, even though they may never need that increased ability in the normal course of their life and work. The gym also provided daily accountability through shared suffering, as every participant in a class exercised together, regardless of gender, age, or ability. Thus, the real driver of achievement was not an authoritarian coach barking orders, but a sense of social coercion diffused among participants and reinforced daily by the gym’s leaderboard.

Our study relied on work by German sociologist and historian Henning Eichberg, who sadly died in April at the age of 74. In his many writings on sport, he argued that the adoption of new methods like those of CrossFit indicated an underlying shift in social behavior that precipitated the change. In other words, while CrossFit is a reactionary movement to the aestheticism of the 80s and 90s, it also manifests a deeper anxiety about the disappearing utility of the body in an increasingly technologized society.

The postindustrial CrossFit space allows for the reclamation of the body’s raw physical ability in a moment when individual physicality has never mattered less. Thus, once occupied by hard labor for economic gain, these gym spaces now peddle a surrogate industrial experience to a clientele who regularly avoid physical labor outside the gym.

Matt Crockett (matt.crockett@sjsu.edu) is a lecturer at San José State University, where he teaches physical fitness and nutrition, stress and health, and sport sociology.

Dr. Ted Butryn (theodore.butryn@sjsu.edu) is the Interim Director of the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society, and Social Change (ISSSSSC) at San José State University, where he is a Professor of sport sociology and psychology. He is also the Graduate Coordinator for the university’s Department of Kinesiology.