Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity
PROSPECTUS
Sport is perhaps the most important social phenomenon of which academic philosophers and
theorists are, as a group, the most studiously ignorant. It is not difficult to multiply examples of the
reach of sports into our lives—even if we are not sports fans ourselves. From the excitement,
consumerism and nationalism of Super Bowl Sunday, to the political figure of the ‘Soccer Mom’, to the
funding and organizational structure of the University, to the construction and reinforcement of gender
roles in children, sports pervade our social worlds. And yet, philosophical attention to sport is scant—
even amongst thinkers otherwise attuned to the significance of social practices for the experience of
selfhood and the creation of value, such as feminist philosophers, and (to a slightly lesser degree) critical
philosophers of race. Meanwhile, the majority of the growing literature on the philosophy of sport,
while valuable, largely treats sport less as a social phenomenon, and more as an abstracted venue about
which we might have ethical or metaphysical debates (what constitutes ‘sport’ as such? Are
performance-enhancing drugs ever ethical?). Given the impact of sports on our lives together, though,
it is clear that feminist philosophers, critical philosophers of race and social theorists ought to devote
more considered attention to sports as phenomena that emerge within and exert considerable force on
our social world—and all that this entails, ontologically, politically, and so forth. So, in this book, I
present a philosophical approach to sport in its most saliently social dimension: sports fandom.
By “sports fandom” I have in mind the collection of habits, rituals and discursive practices that
constitute an active involvement and/or concern with the fortunes of a sports team or teams (on which
one does not play). I deliberately choose active terminology here, in order to contrast my subject
matter with the form of sports engagement that we hear about more frequently: spectatorship. A
spectator, on my account, is anyone who watches. She or he need not care about the game, know its
rules, or even know that it is a game—to spectators (as I conceive them), the game is mere spectacle. A
sports fan, by contrast, is invested. She follows a team, she cares whether they win or lose, she may
cheer, or wear lucky socks, or decorate her home in team paraphernalia, or engage in some combination
of active practices that make her a participant in the maintenance of the importance of sport as a social
phenomenon—despite the fact that she is not (insofar as she is a fan) an athlete.
I argue that sports fandom is a central cultural practice in the maintenance and reproduction of
identity, considered from multiple overlapping perspectives. Focusing primarily on the United States,
and particularly the American South, I articulate an interdisciplinary analysis of the concrete means by
which sports fandom functions to reinforce dominant conceptions of racialization, gender roles and
hierarchy, the policing of sexuality, and regional/national identity. However, rather than arguing that
sports fandom is thus ethically suspect and should be abandoned, I take a more Foucaultian approach,
taking seriously the extent to which each of us remains caught up in practices beyond our immediate
control, and which nevertheless make certain forms of agency and capacity possible, at the same time
that they are clearly oppressive. Drawing both on philosophical literature in the American pragmatist
and French poststructuralist traditions, as well as social science research on sports fans, race and
gender, I argue that philosophers interested in the local and situated character of selfhood, identity and
agency must take sports fandom into account when addressing such phenomena in the contemporary
American South. Ultimately, I conclude that while sports fandom in its current configurations is deeply
problematic, it has potentially subversive political uses—particularly that of fostering group pride in
marginalized communities—and thus that we ought not seek to eliminate sports fandom’s reach (as if
such a thing were possible), but to encourage different practices of sports fandom.
My overarching philosophical approach to the analysis of sports fandom is informed by the
methodologies and work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as well as the pragmatic philosophies of
William James and John Dewey. I follow each of them in my commitment to the importance of
beginning philosophy in the concrete world of experience, and the impossibility of doing adequate
philosophical work absent this local, contextual engagement. Moreover, I connect Foucault’s discussion
of disciplinary practices and technologies of self with Dewey and James’ notion of habit in order to offer
an account of the means through which sports fandom contributes to the shape of social and individual
bodies in particular contexts such as the stadium, the sports talk show, and the playground. Bringing
this analysis together with Butler’s re-imagining of speech-act theory, I suggest that the linguistic
practices of these contexts (such as cheering, analyzing, and naming) likewise contribute to the creation
of the communities and ideas they purport to represent describe. Still, I do not to dismiss or cast
suspicion on first-person experiences of sports fandom in favor of revealing the ‘real truth’ about it. On
the contrary, following the pragmatists, I take experience seriously--and explicitly draw on James’
approach to individuals’ descriptions of their religious experiences, treating the experience of sports
fandom as a particular form of religious experience. I do, however, argue that an analysis of these
experiences and the social practices through which we understand them illustrate the extent to which
their meanings and effects exceed us as individuals.
I also draw extensively on the insights of interdisciplinary articulations of feminist and critical
race theories, working with an approach to identity and the self that is steeped in the intersectionality of
theorists like Patricia Hill Collins, Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis and Linda Martín Alcoff. Social science
literature, particularly sociological and anthropological research on sports fans, masculinity and race in
the U.S., is likewise central to supporting the empirical claims that I make about the importance of
sports fandom in contemporary America. Philosophical and theoretical work in animal studies,
especially that of Kelly Oliver, informs my approach to the mascots and other animals that seem to pop
up wherever sports fandom does. Finally, I draw on feminist and Marxist critiques of mainstream
liberalism and deliberative democracy in arguing for the potential political value of certain forms of
sports fandom.
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN
Introduction: Sports Fandom Beyond Spectatorship
Opening with a first person account/phenomenology of my own experience growing up as an
LSU football fan in south Louisiana, I suggest that sports fandom is an experience of deep personal
interest, not a detached preference for the outcome of a game. I recount, likewise, observations of my
students’ investment in sports (particularly UK basketball fans and the riots in Kentucky), and ask why a
phenomenon with such clear significance for large numbers of people is not being addressed by
philosophers. It is clear that sports matters a great deal to individuals and communities alike—but why?
And what ought we, as philosophers and theorists, to do in the face of such investment?
I lay out here the scope of the project: an account of identity that is specifically localized to the
contemporary American South. I do not purport to make claims about the nature of sports fandom or
identity as such, but to offer a contextualized and situated account that prioritizes concrete particulars
over universalizations (believing, indeed, that this is the most responsible method of philosophizing).
Yet, I also argue that particular insights of my account are more widely philosophically significant: e.g.,
that the localized character of identity formation is illustrative of the contingency of categories like race,
gender, and sexuality; that the being-caught-up experience of being in a cheering crowd offers a helpful
way of articulating the relationship between individual agency and the socially-constructed self; that
philosophers ignore popular culture at their peril, since in doing so, we are likely to miss something
important.
I: “I Bleed Purple and Gold”: Sports Fandom as a Technology of Self
Social science literature on committed sports fans can be read to corroborate the sentiment
expressed on t-shirts and bumper stickers that sports proclaim that fans “bleed” their teams’ colors:
one’s own sports fandom is experienced as a truth about oneself, or one’s identity. Using a hybrid
Foucaultian/Deweyan approach, I argue that this we ought to understand this to show that sports
fandom functions as what Foucault calls a technology of self. That is, it is a means by which knowledge
of self is created and maintained. This technology of self, moreover, is effective by means of habituation
into situated patterns of interaction (to put it in Deweyan terms) that are variously describable as
physical or meaning-full (depending, for example, on whether our interest is in the bodily organism or
the notion of identity with which it concomitantly emerges). Already, though, it is impossible to ignore
that the interactions into which sports fans are habituated are marked by gendered, racialized, and
regionally located practices, which are not innocuous. As Foucault’s thought suggests, however, we will
find that those relations of power that hierarchize, normalize and oppress also give rise to new
capacities: the capacity, for instance to test the truth of our fandom, our masculinity, our team
dedication—or, what amounts to the same thing, our (local) patriotism.
This account has two major virtues: it explains how it is that sports fandom becomes so deeply
meaningful to individuals, and it lays the groundwork for explaining how it is that the cultural practice of
sports fandom does not remain purely “discursive.” That is, the combination of Foucaultian thought
and pragmatism makes space for a more detailed account of the means by which practices of sports
fandom literally give shape to bodies in their interactions, whether we categorize these as biopolitical,
habitual, or disciplinary. I develop a fuller account of the details of the bodily effects of sports fandom in
what follows.
II. Fans and Fanatics: Sports, Ritual and Religious Experience
The term “fan” is derived from “fanatic,” and for good reason: sports fandom has much in
common with religious experience. Taking seriously the widespread rhetoric of fans and marketers who
refer to places like Fenway Park as “temples” to baseball and dedicated fans as religious devotees of
‘their’ teams, I analyze two different forms of fandom experience as religious by drawing on James’
Varieties of Religious Experience. First, I detail the ecstatic experience of being caught up in the spirit of
a crowd of fans. Second, I analyze the more apparently mundane disciplines of everyday fandom (such
as learning to follow a team, to react in the right ways to particular sporting developments, etc.). I argue
that these experiences not only share deep commonalities with religious practice; they also make salient
the extent to which a clear distinction between active and passive subjective experience is problematic.
In other words, such experiences function as paradigm cases of a call for a nuanced account of the
relationship between individual agency and the social world.
I argue that the convergence of Jamesian pragmatism and Foucault is uniquely well suited to
navigate this difficulty. James reminds us to take seriously the first-person accounts of individual
experiences, and though certain readings of Foucault would view this move with suspicion, such
suspicion is unwarranted. A consistent Foucaultian outlook does not dismiss individual knowledge, but
asks questions about the conditions of its production; likewise, a truly pragmatic account refuses to rest
content with an un-interrogated strong individualism. Sports fandom as a form of religious experience,
when analyzed on my framework, brings into view the subject’s involvement in collective agency, in
which individuals are caught up—and yet, to which they contribute.
III. Sports Fantasies of Religion, Race and Nationalism
The quasi-religious narratives of sports fans about their teams and players are not innocuous,
but instrumental in reconsolidating narratives of community identity—which are, in many cases, clearly
racialized and nationalistic. In this chapter, I analyze and contrast two different examples of sports
fandom’s role in reinforcing dominant narratives of race and national/community identity: the
evangelical cult following of NFL Quarterback Tim Tebow, and the fraught relationship of Major League
Baseball fans with the increasing dominance of Latino and Caribbean players in what is widely touted as
the most uniquely “American” game. I argue that Tebow’s celebrity reveals the extent to which sports
fandom is invested in the reiteration of symbolic narratives—in this case, that of the lone heroic martyr,
a central figure in mainstream white evangelicalism in the U.S. We could describe the need to reiterate
these narratives in psychoanalytic terms as fantasies of identification, though with the important
Butlerian addition that such fantasies are collectively held and supported. Such collective fantasies are
crucial to the maintenance of nationalism.
In contrast with the cult of Tebow, white baseball fans reiterate a narrative of Americana that is
increasingly obviously precarious and untenable. In the face of an increasing influx of players of color (in
the professional sport that has remained the whitest in the U.S.), MLB seems to adopt a different
strategy to shore up the normative status of whiteness: reinvigorated practices of exploitation of
Caribbean people aimed at producing more and better players, who can be used or disposed of at will
(as documented extensively by sociologists of sport). The relationship thus effected between white fans
invested in the preservation of “America’s game” and the Caribbean players who play it is a new
iteration of Aimé Césaire’s account of colonialism. Meanwhile, the nationalist rhetoric of mainstream
baseball carefully ignores the existence of increasing numbers of Latino/a fans, tacitly engaging in a
racist nostalgia for a ‘lost’ America that never was.
IV. They’re Not Like Us: Mascotting, Racial Normalization and Animality
The difference between fans’ relations with Tebow and Caribbean players in the previous
chapter points to an important distinction that I unpack further in this chapter. The relationships of
white audiences to athletes of color tend not to be characterized by identification, but by a practice I call
“mascotting.” Drawing on the social science literature on mascots—which suggests that mascots
function by representing the violence, domination or supra-human in ways that can be appropriately
contained—as well as Kelly Oliver’s and Freud’s theoretical work on human-animal relations, I argue
that white sports fandom often functions by treating players themselves as mascots. This symbolic
relationship, and its concomitant disciplinary practices (in which, i.e., players of color are routinely
subjected to criminalizing surveillance, whereas white players are routinely praised for their intellect
and work ethic), is central to the maintenance of racial normalization in the U.S., especially in the South.
Paradoxically, this relationship of racial normalization is on most conspicuous display in the
aftermath of the dogfighting trial of Quarterback Michael Vick. I analyze the discourse around Vick by
drawing on Foucault’s account of “the dangerous individual” as a figure of criminalized deviance, and
argue that the dogfighting scandal shows not a concern for the well being of animals (as “pit bulls”
continue to be portrayed as equally dangerous as Vick himself), but racist outrage at the ‘failure’ to
contain the contagion-like danger of black masculinity. Thus, both mascotting and the rhetoric around
Vick illustrate the extent to which sports fandom’s relation to animality is wrapped up with racial
normalization—and indeed, the reproduction of whiteness, even when whiteness is not its ostensible
object.
V. Don’t be a Pussy! Sports Fandom and the Policing of Gender and Sexuality
The role of masculinity in the previous chapter’s discussion of race suggests that it is ultimately
quite difficult to talk about race in the abstract, without addressing gender. Similarly, it is impossible to
conceptualize the gender policing that much of sports fandom enacts without addressing homophobia
and heteronormativity. Although I will resist the claim offered by some feminists that the “sports
nexus” is primarily about the valorization of masculinity (this notion, I argue, is problematically
reductive), I do argue that mainstream sports fandom is instrumental in reconsolidating the otherwise
unstable concepts of normative masculinity and femininity, and in shaping bodies to approximate, as
much as possible, these idealized poles. This latter claim about the effects of sports fandom is at the
heart of my claim that feminists ought to pay close attention to sports.
I analyze the explicitly gendered patterns of interaction in mainstream sports fandom (men’s
basketball, football and baseball), in order to contrast this with women’s basketball fandom. Drawing
on extensive literature in the sociology of sport, I argue that two apparently different strategies of
women fans of mainstream sports--hyper-feminization (exemplified, for example, in the rise of ‘shrinkit-and-pink-it’ sports jerseys) and a one-of-the-guys attitude I’ll call femachismo—are simply alternate
(though, to be sure, modernized) instantiations of role of the “good (heterosexual) woman.” Moreover,
the extent to which each of these strategies leaves untroubled the hyper-masculine stance of the style
of rhetoric we see in heteronormative crowd-jeers like “don’t be a pussy!” suggests that these patterns
of interaction are of a piece in their reinforcement of the gender (and sexual) binary. Women’s
basketball fandom, by contrast, tends not to function in this way, which may account for the continual
struggles of the sport to be taken seriously in mainstream American culture.
Drawing on sociological and child-development literature, I argue that the gender- and
sexuality-policing I analyze above affects children from a very young age, as they learn to relate to the
bodies of athletes and one another. Again in a pragmatic vein, I suggest that this form of sexhabituation gives shape to the bodies of children and adults, creating a kind of normalizing feedbackloop, insofar as these gendered and sexualized bodies are thereby subject to and instruments of further
gender and sexuality policing.
VI. Rivalries and Dissent: Sports Fandom in Democratic Communities
Given what I’ve argued in previous chapters, it is reasonable to ask whether, in spite of sports
fandom’s role in local and national American identity, the practices of fandom have any place in
democratic society. In addition to concerns about the normalizing and oppressive effects of
contemporary sports fandom in the United States, we must also take seriously concerns that sports
fandom might problematically fracture the larger polity, if not promote a pseudo-fascist political affect.
Because sports fandom thrives on rivalries, and on us-versus-them-style group identification, there are
good reasons to be suspicious of it. For all its problems, though, there may be something worth
preserving in sports fandom: namely, its propensity to foster a pride of place or community—
particularly in the cases of marginalized or politically disempowered groups.
The pride of sports fandom is not inconsequential or obviously separable from life beyond
sports, I argue, precisely because of the extent to which sports fandom is in fact a technology of self, and
a discursive convention whereby communities construct and reinforce their narrative identities. The
affect sports fandom fosters, in this respect, isn’t likely to simply disappear when we leave the arena.
And although there are clearly instances in which this sort of in-group pride is politically dangerous, I
argue—drawing particularly on the work of Nancy Fraser, and other feminist critics of deliberative
democracy, as well as a critical rereading of Dewey’s The Public and its Problems—that the formation
and valorization of distinctly identified groups within the larger polity can in fact be democratically
valuable. Given the power disparities of actually existing democracy, we cannot treat strong group
identification in privileged groups as equivalent with strong group identification in marginalized and
oppressed groups. The latter form of identification fosters the kind of political pride that is
democratically useful, whereas the former does not. Insofar as sports fandom in particular locales and
communities brings about this latter kind of pride—if it can in fact come to do so without doing it on the
backs of those who now bear the brunt of its normalizing effects—it has radical democratic potential.
Conclusion: Being Better Fans
Though we are, in the contemporary United States, apparently a long way from making good on
the democratic potential of sports fandom, we cannot overlook the extent to which it, like the discursive
regime of sexuality identified by Foucault, is productive of capacities, identities and forms of life that
would not be possible without it. For better and for worse, sports fandom in its present configurations
is a constitutive feature of who we are—and of how we come to know our selves and our possibilities. I
end with a call for deeper investigation into and concern for practices of more responsible fandom—
particularly in fans relationships to athletes. Given the role that athletes play in facilitating these
technologies of self and collective fantasies of identity, what would non-exploitative or anti-oppressive
fan-athlete relationships look like? We may not be able to escape the force of sports fandom in the
shape of our identities, but if we value a vision of the future that is less unjust, we must strive to enact
practices that would make us better fans.