Sport, Gender and Politics: Moving Beyond the O.J. Saga

Abstract

Despite the way that sport has largely been accepted across political lines as a benign and even positive cultural practice, in this essay I argue that in fact, as a central institution for the rehearsal and regeneration of masculinity and masculinism, sport is a central institution for the regeneration of anti-social and, by direct extension, anti-socialist, values in contemporary society. Far from being the democratic and fraternal force its supporters have claimed, sport constitutes a master narrative of competition and domination - indeed a narrative of masters - through its inflection of gender, in an age when other master narratives are crumbling. As an embodied ideological practice, sport should be considered a central material and discursive institution that reproduces relations of inequality and strife. Because of the dominance of men's culture within mixed culture as a whole, and the dominance of sport within men's culture, sport's celebration of aggressive conquest has great influence and power, shaping personal and communal ideals and political reflexes. My aim here is to help motivate on the part of the left and progressive social movements precisely what the mainstream media discourse about O.J. Simpson has so assiduously avoided: a political examination of the role of sport in society today, within the context of still-neglected matters of gender relations, family arrangements and culture.