Sports, Power, and Resistance: An Introduction to Critical Sports Studies

"Power and resistance compose two key themes that animate and connect the study of sport across the humanities. Sport's capacity to showcase power relations constitutes perhaps its greatest significance as well as the most capacious avenue through which to explore its contours. Team owners, league executives, and elected politicians use leagues and franchises to promote political views, while players and fans use sport as a platform from which to oppose the status quo. Controversies over patriotic ceremonies, protests against police violence, and demonstrations for the rights of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people draw attention, sympathy, and backlash. Sport is, in short, an exceptional part of popular culture. It provides some of the few moments that are still collectively experienced in an increasingly fragmented culture. The Super Bowl, for instance, is routinely the most watched annual TV program in the United States, and it is the second most commonly celebrated event after New Year's Eve. Super Bowl LIX, which the Fox Network broadcast as part of its $2.2 billion annual contract with the NFL, drew 127.7 million viewers to become the most watched television program of all time. It broke the record held by the previous year's Super Bowl broadcast, which broke the record held by another Super Bowl. While exceptional in this sense, sport is also utterly banal in others. It constantly surrounds us in advertisements, clothing, bumper stickers, and so on. But these quotidian objects also illustrate how sport constantly sits in dialogue with power and resistance. Wearing a Caitlin Clark, Shohei Ohtani, or Patrick Mahomes jersey is-whether intentional or not-a statement about identity and politics. This anthology focuses on the intersections across sport, power, and resistance. The approach is humanistic, critical, and interdisciplinary. It is humanistic and situates sport as an institution that has no inherent meaning or value outside of the social, cultural, a