Week 3: Sport

Ingham, Alan G. “The Sportification Process: A Biographical Analysis Framed by the Work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Freud.” in R. Giulianotti (ed.), Sport and Modern Social Theorists, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. pp. 11-32.

Hargreaves, J. “The body, sport and power relations.” In J. Horne, D. Jary, & A Tomlinson (Eds.), Sport, Leisure and Social Relations. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1987. pp. 139-159
King, Samantha and Mary G. McDonlad. “(Post)Identity and Sporting Cultures: An Introduction and Overview,” in Sociology of Sport Journal, 24 (1). pp. 1-19.

King and McDonald’s intro to the 2007 special symposium issue for the Sociology of Sport Journal grew out of a 2004 NASSS conference panel that addressed the topic of (post)identity and sporting cultures because questions of identity and inequality remained at the center of debates in social theory since the founding of NASSS 25 years earlier. The authors outline three basic theoretical and methodological approaches to research within the sociology of sport: an “identity politics” framework that seeks to discern injustices done through sport to particular groups based on their identities; a Marxist or Neo-Marxist approach; and a hybrid approach that seeks to combine the two previous approaches. Within each approach are post-modernists who question the notion of a self-identical sporting subject as well as modernists who see agency and resistance possibilities in a politicized identity. Their own article attempts to identify and examine some key moments in the identity debate through the lens of feminist theory while focusing on sporting culture.
King and McDonald identify that feminists examined identity and inequality through a Marxist lens, investigating the sexual division of labour. Standpoint epistemology proposed to wed Marxism to feminism by understanding how women are constructed as subordinate, but also how male sport structures operate to keep them that way. Feminist thinkers were also influenced by the politics of antiracism and identity that championed personal experience. This led to intersectional analysis that investigated how subjectivities are produced within intersecting matrices of domination and subordination, inclusion and exclusion, etc. The authors show the small influence of psychoanalysis on feminist conceptions of sport before moving on to queer theory. Queer theory was heavily influenced by Foucault who thought that power should be understood as the mechanism that produces identities, both normal and deviant.
In their short concluding section King and McDonald state that their intention was not to declare a winner in the debate on the place of identity within feminist theory. But, for our own fun, can we declare any winners? I can’t help but think that issues surrounding identity or (post)identity serve only to confuse the main problem of capitalism – that it functions by constructing and re-inforcing inequalities. I think capitalism is instrumental in creating identities. Marx showed us that 150 years ago and perhaps we have muddied the waters ever since. Feminist theory, whether influenced by queer theory (or vice versa), insectionality, critical race theory, etc., has helped us understand identity, but I still struggle to understand the connection between identity politics and the inequalities within capitalism. I believe that everything is reducible to money and material, and creating divisions in society based on identity just gives those with money and material (capital) the ability to hang on to that capital based on racism, sexism, etc. I would love to hear what others think about this.
Hargreaves starts with a familiar problem to this class so far, the dualism of mind and body that has served to eliminate the body from the social sciences. He discusses the body’s relationship to power in the modern era to show that the dominant form of control is an expansive system of self discipline and surveillance based on stimulation and satisfaction of desire that is clearly identifiable in the way the body is deployed in consumer culture. Hargreaves seeks to show how the body, deployed in sporting activity and physical recreation, relates to this transformation towards a consumer culture. He traces the historical connections between the body, sport and power to show a developing tension between how the body was deployed in a repressive disciplinary mode epitomized by athleticism, the philanthropic strategy, and respectable sport activity on the one hand, and the hedonistic, disorderly deployment of the body epitomized by disreputable sports and sport as commercialized entertainment on the other. According to Hargreaves, this tension was resolved in favour of deploying the body in sport as a means of individual expression. Consumer culture and sport have a rosy relationship because they are both concerned with using the body in the constitution of the normal individual.
Hargreaves states that “the image of the body in sport does not coincide in every respect with those circulating in consumer culture.” (p. 152) He goes on to add that sports culture is enabled to articulate with consumer culture precisely because as an “autonomous cultural formation” it can make a unique contribution to cultural production in general. Is categorizing sports culture as “autonomous” problematic? Does it not assume that all sport can be seen as “purely sport” and separate from all other forms of cultural production? Is it? I think that sport is connected to so many other areas of culture and studying it as something separate, something that exists on its own, is problematic.
Ingham engages in a “synthetic exercise” in which he takes one key theme from Marx (valorization), Weber (rationalization), Durkheim (collective representation), and Freud (repression) to explain the sportification of play and agonal games as they intersect our biographies. (Not 100% sure what he means by “biographies” here) According to Ingham, this exercise will help us understand social relations in the contemporary institution of sport. The institution of sport offers particular resolutions to the contradictory relations between our selves and the broader social order. After initially disliking this article because I did not understand what he was really trying to do as I read, I came to enjoy it by the end of the reading (especially the Durkheim section in relation to my own research and writing). In the conclusion he indicates that he sought to demonstrate that these classic social theorists have gone unsurpassed in theorizing social development. I think he hits the nail on the head here, sort of. But what do we think about his insistence on reading the classics and using them in your own work? I tend to think that going back to these theorist’s original texts and thinking that the answers somehow lie in their work is somewhat dangerous. Freud, Marx, Durkheim, etc, were all people just like everyone else, as opposed to the gods that Ingham tends to say that they were. I see no harm in reading updated versions of their work by modern theorists. I’m curious to know what others think of his idea on that.