Joshua I. Newman

Physical Cultural Studies and Embodied Research Acts

This article critically examines the emerging field of physical cultural studies, especially its contributions to our understandings of “the body” in and through its ongoing relationship with the research act. That is, a focus on the confluence of the embodied self and the [auto-]ethnographic self as it relates to the conduct of inquiry. It also addresses the politics of the body within a particular neoliberal condition, and the way the body and its health and well-being is leveraged as a pedagogical apparatus of neoliberalism. It concludes by arguing that we need to privilege bodily copresence within the theory, method, and practice of physical cultural studies.

Army of Whiteness? Colonel Reb and the sporting south's cultural and corporate symbolic.

This article contributes to an already vibrant discussion on the politics of race and ethnicity as mobilized through the semiotic embodiments of sporting mascots. Grounded in a poststructuralist theoretical framework, guided by the political thrust of cultural studies, and informed by a range of qualitative modes of inquiry, this study more specifically mediates on how the University of Mississippis (“Ole Miss”) sporting mascot, Colonel Rebel, constitutes an important discursive space through which (a) the corporatized academic institution accumulates sign-valued capital and (b) the power/knowledge relationships formed under a localized spectator/fan subjectivity—constructed out of a parochial, conservative, “Old South” Whiteness—become incontrovertibly bound to the symbolic territories of a localized sporting neo-Confederacy.

[Un]Comfortable in My Own Skin Articulation, Reflexivity, and the Duality of Self

This article offers a reflexive [re]discovery of my own Whiteness, my own Southern-ness, and my own masculinity through ethnographic engagement with the “New Sporting South”; reporting on the juxtaposition of my new [critical performance scholar] self onto the spaces and social relations once inhabited by my old [working class, parochial, “Southern”] self. Although this article is primarily a retrospective on my return to Southern sporting fields in Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina, it is also a critical inspection of the performative politics of engaged cultural studies research on the body. For mine is a political project, bent on contextualizing, and thus problematizing, the seemingly banal nature of Southern sporting fixtures such as college football and stock car racing. The more time I spent in these spaces of the New Sporting South, “observing” the sport cultures from which I sprung, the better I was able to trace a series of ostensibly inescapable patterns of oppression: (a) the cultures of racism, sexism, and patriarchy are still highly active within these local sporting spectacles; (b) my White skin, Southern drawl, “hillbilly” vernacular, and masculine deportment allowed access to the most exclusive/divisive of these social spaces (whereas others might have been denied); (c) to prolong engagement with various groups, I was forced to “perform” my “old” Southern self (laughing at racist jokes, admiring Confederate-flag emblazoned garb, and so on); and (d) in an effort to create change (through critical interrogation of the sporting empirical), I was most often “read” as a [re]productive agent of these regressive cultural politics. To this end, I argue that any politically-“progressive” outcomes from this type of qualitative research must be weighed against the symbolic violence created therein.

Neoliberalism’s Last Lap? NASCAR Nation and the Cultural Politics of Sport

This article examines the ways in which cultural and political intermediaries have endeavored to systematically reorganize the spectacles of North American stock car racing to reinscribe and re-present the hegemonic order of free-market capitalism. To this end, the authors draw from a complex synthesis of economic, social, and cultural theory to interrogate the political and corporate dimensions of “NASCAR Nation.” More specifically, they offer a critical investigation of the dialectic relationship between the expanding regimes of capital accumulation brought forth by neoliberal economic policy, its political imperatives and operatives, and the cultural politics that actively shape consumer experiences within the sport. They likewise interpret how corporate capitalism acts as a prevailing fixture within these spectacular spaces and fan-spectator praxis. In sum, they argue that the commercial precepts of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) present a twisted contradiction, whereby NASCAR fans laud the same neoliberal market forces that both mesmerize their consumer sensibilities and simultaneously decimate their own postindustrial labor conditions.

This Pain in My Neck Living Conscientization and/as Paradox of Praxis

This article offers a series of autoethnographic reflections on suffering from physical symptoms associated with a paradox of praxis. More specifically, it mediates on the musculoskeletal pangs that come with a raised critical consciousness—or what Paulo Freire refers to in his teaching as conscientização—that stands as directly incongruent to living (in) the embodied politics of an incessantly aspirational working class habitus (and various machinations of social mobility).

The MRSA Epidemic and/as Fluid Biopolitics

This article offers a series of critical theorizations on the biopolitical dimensions of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), with specific attention to what has recently been referred to in the United States as the ‘MRSA Epidemic’. In particular, we reflect on the proliferation of biomedical discourses around the ‘spread’, and the pathogenic potentialities, of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). We turn to the work of Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy to better make sense of how, during this immunological crisis, the individualized fleshy and fluid body is articulated to dimensions of community and corporeal proximity; the body is thus conceived in popular biopolitical framings as a site of transmission, inoculation, and isolation – as a living ecological and pathological vessel. We give emphasis to the spatial relations of flesh, namely in how biomedical ‘experts’ have sought to (bio-)technologize spaces of heightened communal bodily contact (such as playgrounds or gymnasia).

The Physical and the Possible

This article examines ‘the physical’ and ‘the possible’ as bound together in recent political engagements of and with professional athletes – for example, Rashard Mendenhall, Luke Scott, and members of the Phoenix Suns organization–who have recently become entangled with/in mainstream debates concerning the “war on terror” and Tea Party discourses. In so doing, it critically interrogates politics as consumer culture within the domain of sport. It concludes by outlining one potential ‘way forward’ for scholars of the active, moving, and mobile body to conceive of a politics of possibility in paroxysmal political times.

Of Victims and Markets: The Neoliberal University and the Spectacle of Civic Branding

This article addresses the market logics on display at Penn State University in response to the Jerry Sandusky scandal, especially with respect to the idea of civic branding and community formation. The intersecting vectors of the corporate university, neoliberalism, and physical culture are highlighted to explain such a response. Responses to the scandal are also addressed in light of similar discourses of victimology present in the larger Wall Street financial sector.

The training camp: American football and/as spectacle of exception.

In this article, we use the theories of Giorgio Agamben to conceptualize the contemporary American football training camp as a material and metaphorical “camp”—a “space of exception” or a zone of indistinction where bare life is produced and the exception becomes the rule. Our aim is not to sportingly trivialize the horrors of those camps about which Agamben has written extensively (i.e., the concentration camps of the Third Reich), nor do we set out to hyperbolize the events, logics, or methods of the football training camp. Instead, we move to answer Agamben’s call to “learn to recognize [the camp] in all its metamorphoses.” In the process, we hope to address some of the criticisms leveled at Agamben’s work and move toward reconceptualizing a biopolitics of human movement, vitality, potentiality, and action. It is our contention that “the camp” provides an important site through which to understand the (corpo)realities of contemporary American football as hyper-physical and hyper-commodified body spectacles defined by protective equipment turned into damaging weapon, players as “hitmen” with bounties on the heads of opponents, and “heterotopias of survival,” which produce exceptional and measurable bodies, silent bodies, broken bodies, bodies that die the most banal, unheroic, and (un)acceptable deaths.

Full-Throttle Jesus: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Stockcar Racing in Theocratic America

God is watching over the super speedway. Or at least it can be surmised by both believer and nonbeliever alike that, within the imagined community of ‘‘America’s fastest growing sport’’ (Huff 1997; O’Keefe and Schlosser 2007), there exists a pervasive, if not inveterate, devotion to Christian orthodoxy—as well as a steadfast belief in the ideological precepts that give material ‘‘credence’’ to such Biblicized public pedagogies. ‘‘Nowhere in sports,’’ observed PBS anchor Bob Abernethy, ‘‘is there more unself-conscious expression of religion as there is at NASCAR races’’ (quoted in ‘‘NASCAR and Religion’’ 2001). Indeed, as numerous commentators have suggested (Hagstrom 1998; Menzer 2001; MacGregor 2005; Rhee 2007; Lipsyte 2006; Thompson 2006; Clarke 2008), the 120,000 or more spectators who flock to weekly NASCAR events are regularly greeted by a palpable, omnipresent faith-based revival, which has come to permeate all aspects of the sporting spectacle: from the bevy of trackside crucifix-emblazoned revival tents, to the multitude of Jesus-endorsed stockcar insignias, to conspicuous performances of ‘‘sharing the gospel,’’ to the panoply of symbolically christened RVs and SUVs, which pack the race track The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 32:263–294, 2010 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2010.495254