Resistance In Sports

Sports of old were merely competitive activities rooted in heroism and romanticism. Sports activities today, however, have no such innocence or simplicity. Currently in America, the activities that make up our sports culture is not only the competitive events themselves but the processes and issues that underlie and surround them. Entwined in our sports culture is the giant business of mass broadcasting. Indeed, sports and the media go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly, like Mickey and Minnie, Darth Vader and Luke. They are intertwined and depend on each other to continue to grow. Sports media includes television, radio, magazines, newspapers, books, films, and, now, most importantly, social media devices provided by the

For these reasons, the sociological study of access and equity in sport looks primarily at social attitudes and expectations that create barriers to participation—in particular, how such barriers are formed, how they are reinforced, how they influence individuals’ behaviour

Over the last decade, the prominence and relevance of sports has permeated the social fabric of American culture. As a sociological construct, sports have helped create a new sense of identity for millions of Americans by appealing to their personal and physical needs and by subconsciously influencing the manner in which they interact with one another. When analyzed through a sociological framework, sports have the capacity to transcend racial, political and socioeconomic barriers making it one of the world’s most powerful community-building institutions.

In a sprawling neighbourhood filled with building dedicated to consumption and the perpetuation of the capitalist system, there are very few spatial scenarios that can serve as places of protest or productive discussion and debate for the citizenry. The increasing cynicism the citizenry holds toward political realities has led to a culture of apathy and disengagement. Recent events have also demonstrated that fear, whether it be of change or of ‘the other’ have altered the political landscape. In a reality where citizens are spread out and distant from one another and are not confronted with people of different backgrounds, as frequently as one may be in a dense urban centre, prejudice opinions and views can remain unchallenged and continue to grow. The spontaneous and immediate galvanization of people in late January of 2017 suggests a higher level of political engagement and participation is imminent. Previous movements such as Occupy Wall Street have demonstrated how small scale, temporary architecture can derive from political action and protest. I am interested in how a similar form of political assertion and representation can take place in a suburban setting. In such a potent political climate the ability for citizens to assert their views and debate, discuss and challenge their fellow citizens in a

They were never aloud on the street in the first place” says Deanie Parker during her interview. That quote stuck with me for some time and led me to dive deeper into the politics of public space and how it could relate to this piece. The final component to this piece is the definition of place and lens within the city’s legacy and youth culture. The concept of youth having autonomy in public spaces is nonexistent in american culture. Youth are trained from a young age that adults control their use of public spaces. Children are welcome in public space as long as an adult controls how the child interacts. For instance, an adult of teacher is in control of how a child interacts in the sandbox, the playground and during recess. Once the child enters middle school and teen years, some autonomy develops which puts adults on edge as they want to control how youth behave in these spaces. Our culture dictates to youth that they are not allowed to enter spaces without the accompaniment of an adult. Social order dictates that groups of teenagers are something to be fearful of. Place is crucial to the development and well being and of young people. When youth have no public spaces to gather or perform without the risk of being questioned by police this becomes an issue in the health and vitality of

By looking at the cultural aspects of sport, one can learn about class struggles, politics, and religion. When studying the formation of football in Victorian England, William Baker takes a Marxist view. In his article “The Making of a Working-Class Football Culture in Victorian England”, he focuses on the class divide that football created during this time. In this article, the main focus in on the lower working class, and how football affected them. In Alan Metcalfe’s article “Organized Sport in the Mining Communities of South Northumberland”, he focuses on the creation of different sports in isolated mining communities.

Occupied spaces often reveal complex gender boundaries and societal norms. For example, Jacquie Smyth states in “Transcending Traditional Gender Boundaries: Defining Gender Roles Through Public and Private Spheres” that the traditional Western-European role for the status-holding male was in the public sphere (28). On the contrary, women were “instructed to remain home” in the domestic sphere (Smyth 28). These two distinctions outline how society perceived gender roles in terms of space, which exposes how the binary creates an uneven power dynamic. Smyth’s definitions of these spatial boundaries provide a framework to analyze texts for representations of spatial-gender roles.

In America, sports are synonymous with popular American culture. Sports have ties to the everyman, capitalism, and patriotism. However, according to Andrew Moore’s article, “Opera of the Proletariat: Rugby League, the Labour Movement and Working-Class Culture in New South Wales and Queensland”, across the ocean in Australia, there is a strong connection between the creation of the Australian Rugby League and the Australian Labor Movement. This paper will analyze Moore’s claims regarding the connection between the Australian Rugby League and not only the Australian Labor Movement, but socialist philosophy in general.

In Jeff Ferrell’s “Tearing Down the Streets Adventures in Urban Anarchy”, it introduced themes of image of the city, rights to the city, and given different examples of anarchist activities in urban environments. In my opinion, I enjoyed the book’s narratives on urban cities trying to clean the streets of unwanted acts and people; along with the collective movements attempting to retake the open space and streets. However, Ferrell’s actions in his daily life to retake space are questionable. Ferrell considers cities are changing their images by undergoing “Disneyfication” (Ferrell, 2001, p. 8) with unnecessary security, planned entertainment and making it ‘beautiful’. Ultimately, it forces authorities to restrict and isolate unwanted acts

Over the course of time, sports have come to signify masculinity; athletics such as football and basketball easily having come to deem where one fits in terms of societal norms regarding gendered bodies. One could argue that sports, in a modern context, have come to be synonymous with the idea of athletic and/or muscular bodies, which are those that are not regarded as the bodies of ideologically feminine ones given the intense and high pressure nature. In “Sports and Male Domination: The Female Athlete as Contested Ideological Terrain” written by Michael A. Messner in 1988 sheds light on the idea that traditional images of femininity have come to solidify male privilege through the construction and naturalization of gendered characteristics regarding women such as weakness, fragility and dependency .

While conceptualising a part of the sporting field as a subculture, we have inevitably stepped into the current debate on the nature of today subcultures. There, we defend the position of the post-CCCS subcultural authors, most notably Sarah Thornton (1995), Becky Beal or Belinda Wheaton (Wheaton and Beal, 2003) who adapted the concept of Bourdieu’s symbolic capital and applied it as a subcultural capital, in order to analytically grasp a subculture and its members. Unlike the most recent post-subcultural line of research (Bennett, 1999; Stahl, 2003; Weinzierl and Muggleton, 2003), this ‘middle’ generation of researchers promote subcultures as relatively stable entities or, at least, as entities with clearly defined borders, which have their

This essay will be an attempt to bring together the ideas from our class readings about the Marxist sociological perspective as well as insight from other readings to further my understanding of Marxism and its applications to sport. I will lay the groundwork for the theory then proceed with how his theory is applied to accessibility issues in sport, distribution of power in sport and commercialization of sport.

The period of 1865 to 1950 was critical to the formation of “Modern” sport that is recognized today. In an article by Allen Guttmann titled From Ritual to Record: the nature of modern sport, Guttmann outlines seven characteristics that played a central role in the development of sports. These concepts were created as a sociological history of sports and took into place both American and European competitions. Guttmann’s notions of secularism, rationalization, bureaucracy and quantification, among others, all advanced the culture of sports; yet the most important of the stated characteristics is equality.

The privatization and fragmentation of space in post-industrial urban America is a widespread social problem. As society becomes even more globalized as a result of technological advances, the rampant spread of a privatized public realm is ever-increasing. Public space is needed as a center in which to bring people together to share a common place. It is within public spaces that public life unfolds and without public spaces such as parks, streets, and buildings, the mixing of classes will become increasingly uncommon. Society is made up of two sectors: the private and public, and it is essential that both remain separate entities. However, through the use of fear tactics especially the threat of

The focus of this theory is based on the idea that society consists of patterns of interdependencies among individuals and group sports are exciting activities that alleviate boredom and that manages aggression. Research focuses on developing knowledge that presents valid pictures of reality. “Culture, Civilization and the Sociology of Sport”, centers around discussions of work that the author (Dunning, 1992) and a number of colleagues at the University of Leicester conducted on sports in relation to what their late Norbert Elias (1939) called the theory of the 'Civilizing process". It begins by outlining some of the basic assumptions of the figurational approach from (Mennell, 1989) which this work is