Sport, Rhetoric, and Political Struggle

Sport, Rhetoric, and Political Struggle addresses a needed next step for advancing sport as a site of inquiry in rhetorical studies. The book claims that sport is central to contemporary antagonisms over, for example, gender and sexual binarism, queer visibilities, race and labor relations, public health, domestic violence, global institutional corruption, and posthuman body politics. The authors' attention to such antagonisms entails a dual focus: they argue (1) that sport does not function in isolation and that, moreover, relations of power take particular shape within, through, and around sport; and (2) that rhetorical studies of sport are not merely "about sport," but instead are integral to larger theoretical and ethical concerns that animate the discipline. The essays collected in this book contextualize sport and political struggle, examine the mobilization of resistance in sporting contexts, identify ongoing stigmas that present limitations in and around sport, and attend to prevailing ideological features that provoke questions for future research. In short, the authors demonstrate how and why sport is not only important, but how it is productive, how it offers understandings of practices or social formations or economies that scholars cannot get in quite the same way elsewhere.

Daniel A. Grano (Ph.D., Louisiana State University) is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of The Eternal Present of Sport.
Michael L. Butterworth (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Director of the Center for Sports Communication & Media and Professor in the Department of Communication Studies in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity, co-author of Communication and Sport, and editor of Sport and Militarism.