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2020 Fall. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Designed to contribute to conversations about the political nature of sports, this thesis proposes a new type of rhetorical activism that is utilized by professional athletes. The figure of the athlete activist has a long history in United States sports culture of using their platform to speak to their fans and other audiences about social issues that occur in the lives of everyday citizens. By drawing on scholarship surrounding rhetoric, social activism, identity, and embodiment, this thesis directs explicit attention to the way that the human body functions rhetorically for professional athletes when practicing social activism. Extending Kevin Michael DeLuca's claim that the body is not inherently argumentative, I argue that given the inherent political nature of sports, the body of a professional athlete can be read as political even without intent of the athlete themselves and because of that, athletes are given opportunities to practice "embodied social activism." Representing an evolution of the athlete activist, I define embodied social activism as the way an athlete's marked body or lived experiences can be read as consequential contributions to discourses surrounding social issues. Analysis of the careers and activism of National Basketball Association (NBA) player Allen Iverson and National Football League (NFL) player Michael Bennett stands to show the ways that the athletic body can both function as argument itself and can be used as evidence to support more traditional means of social activism.

" After the War of 1812, Americans belatedly realized that they lacked national identity. The subsequent campaign to articulate nationality transformed every facet of culture from architecture to painting, and in the realm of letters, literary jingoism embroiled American authors in the heated politics of nationalism. The age demanded stirring images of U.S. virtue, often achieved by contriving myths and obscuring brutalities. Between these sanitized narratives of the nation and U.S. social reality lay a grotesque discontinuity: vehement conflicts over slavery, Indian removal, immigration, and territorial expansion divided the country. Authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine M. Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Lydia Maria Child wrestled uneasily with the imperative to revise history to produce national fable. Counter-narratives by fugitive slaves, Native Americans, and defiant women subverted literary nationalism by exposing the plight of the unfree and dispossessed. And with them all, Edgar Allan Poe openly mocked literary nationalism and deplored the celebration of "stupid" books appealing to provincial self-congratulation. More than any other author, he personifies the contrary, alien perspective that discerns the weird operations at work behind the facade of American nation-building. "--