Mary G. McDonald

Dialogues on Whiteness, Leisure and (Anti)Racism

Abstract This essay offers one response to recent calls for leisure studies scholars to more effectively integrate race into their analyses. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship within ethnic studies, cultural studies, and gender/womens studies the article initiates a broader dialogue about the possibilities and dangers of analyzing whiteness within leisure contexts. The article outlines several studies that demonstrate ways in which whiteness operates to advantage white hegemony. It suggests how the concepts of power evasiveness, normalization and intersectionality might be applied to leisure settings and concludes with a discussion of some problems associated with the study of whiteness. The ultimate aim of the essay is to provoke further dialogue as a step toward documenting and overturning inequitable social arrangements in the movement toward justice.

THE MARKETING OF THE WOMEN'S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION AND THE MAKING OF POSTFEMINISM

Grounded in feminist cultural studies perspectives, this article criticizes the marketing of postfeminist ideologies in the Womens National Basketball Association (WNBA). While seeking to create new consumers, WNBA accounts construct the league and its advertisers as advocates for gender justice. It is argued that this strategy also reinforces a neoconservative project based on the advocacy of personal responsibility and self-help as antidotes to social problems and inequities that have been magnified via late capitalist economic arrangements.

Rethinking Resistance: The Queer Play of the Women’s National Basketball Association, Visibility Politics and Late Capitalism

Abstract This article employs the methodology of contextual cultural studies to explore the protest strategies of ‘Lesbians for Liberty’, a group of fans who staged a ‘kiss‐in’ during every time‐out of a nationally televised game between the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA) New York Liberty and Miami Sol. Designed as a way to challenge homophobia and lesbian invisibility sanctioned by the New York Liberty management, this article suggests the fans’ kissing activism promotes visibility and single‐issue identity politics as strategies for change. While the fans’ actions make lesbian bodies intelligible in a sporting and leisure space that too frequently imagines heteronormativity, a closer analysis reveals the rhetoric of Lesbians for Liberty and the WNBA’s marketing strategies are both complicit with ideologies and shifting processes characteristic of late capitalist profit‐enhancing practices. This article concludes by offering a discussion of queer and feminist writings that attempt to again theorise resistance in light of late capitalist marketing strategies, which have co‐opted the rhetoric of equality in the service of capital. The ultimate goal of this analysis is to join broader dialogues about the efficacy of identity‐based models of resistance by using the Lesbians for Liberty’s desire and actions as productive sites from which to rethink bodies, pleasures and resistance differently.

Dressed for success? The NBA's dress code, the workings of whiteness and corporate culture

This paper explores the constitutive power relations and representational politics produced through the advent of a dress-code policy instituted by the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 2005. Using the methodology of contextual cultural studies this analysis suggests that far from a simple policy that requires a particular style of dress, narratives and practices surrounding the policy are embedded in an economic rationale frequently embraced in corporate cultures that also reproduce whiteness. In recontextualizing the dress code this paper maps out and makes visible the complex processes which both venerate and demonize the athleticism and entertainment value of the leagues black masculine bodies, and simultaneously deny the salience of political, social and economic processes that produce discourses of a commercialized white normativity. The ultimate aim of this analysis is to generate broader public pedagogical interest in these contexts in order to promote new understandings of the dress code in the quest for social justice.

Break Points: Narrative Interruption in the Life of Billie Jean King

This article explores intertextual representations of Billie Jean King, focusing on the announcement of her relationship with Marilyn Barnett in 1981 as a disruptive moment that occasioned remedial narrative work on King’s part. Media framing of the incident is examined through three mainstream newspapers, U.S. magazines, television interviews, and King’s autobiography. Analysis of the coverage reveals that at first glance King was quite successful in overcoming the potential rupture to her life story by controlling the narrative, for example, through the staging of a very public apology, relatively supportive public interviews, and the timely release of her second autobiography. Framing the analysis within the context of theories of intertextuality and narrative disruption, and heteronarrativity, we argue that King’s success came at the expense of a more radical statement regarding the fluidity of sexual desire.

A different contender? Barack Obama, the 2008 presidential campaign and the racial politics of sport

Abstract This paper explores popular representations of Barack Obamas relationship to sport during the 2008 US presidential campaign. It delineates how white normativity framed the candidates passion for basketball and his participation in a highly publicized bowling game. We argue that Obamas athletic activities became key vehicles for reading his body and by extension his identity and his politics. The question that could only be asked in a white supremacist context – is Obama too black or not black enough to be President? – mirrored long-standing tensions in Americas affective relation to black male athletes. Representations of Obama bowling further illuminate the complicated ways in which whiteness operates. The essay concludes with a brief discussion suggesting the importance of analyses of sport for ethnic and racial studies.

Thinking through sport, analyzing whiteness

Abstract In the lead article of this issue, ‘Sport as Contested Racial/Ethnic Terrain: Processes of Racialization in Dutch Sport Media and Sport Policy,’ Jacco Van Sterkenburg and Annelies Knoppers offer a cogent analysis of racialized sporting discourse in the Netherlands demonstrating to a wider audience the important role that sport plays in promoting contemporary meanings and practices regarding race/ethnicity. This commentary points out some key issues raised by Van Sterkenburg and Knoppers, notes some gaps in their argument while also discussing questions that the authors raise for those interested in challenging the power of whiteness in and beyond the world of sport.