Search results

This article provides a series of critical reflections on my recent encounters with the spaces and bodies of tourist Appalachia. As both researcher and returnee, I look back on various qualitative research activities that have brought me back home to the Appalachian tourist destination of Sevier County, Tennessee. In so doing, I also outline (1) the market transformations that have come to shape the present-day Appalachian tourist economy—and the bodies working within it, (2) the ways in which active and symbolic forms of hillbilly embodiment produce not only local identities but the very "tourist gaze" upon which those bodies are often fixed and thus made marketable, and (3) my struggles as a critical qualitative researcher-returnee to come to terms with these corporeal-commercial projections. I end with a discussion on how my researcher-hillbilly body is negotiated, complicated, and [re]made as I return to spaces of my youth.

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.

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 Mississippi's ("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.

This study offers an ethnographically informed critical interrogation of the spaces and spectacles of `NASCAR Nation'. Informed by a series of open-ended interviews with fans and administrators at NASCAR races, hundreds of hours of participant observation and spatial analysis at these events, and examination of various mediations of NASCAR driver-celebrity, spectacle, and fandom, this project illuminates the processes by which citizenship and entitlement in `NASCAR Nation' are both constructed and contested. The article also investigates the ways in which NASCAR — often referred to as America's `fastest growing sport' — has played a significant role in articulating the hegemonic structures of consumer capitalist neoliberalism and the current regime's brand of faith-based, militarized neoconservativism to the identity politics of stock car racing fandom.

In this "paper," we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come "together-apart" as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from individual papers (nodal points) and our diffractive processes were moving (with) us. Sharing these creative respondings, new relations co-emerged through the texts-images and the various diffractive patterns that traveled widely through screens, devices, bodies, from New Zealand and Australia, to Iran, London, Finland, Canada, and the West and East Coasts of the United States. Paying attention to the fine details, difference emerged, as did new forms of more-than-human connection. The visual and written respondings were then cut together-apart (literally, metaphorically and methodologically) to represent the multiplicities of the diffractive process, bodies, hauntings, absences and excess, and the tensions and affective vulnerabilities that co-emerged through our process. We present four visual montages of the diffractive patterns that surfaced from the individual papers as nodal points and our creative collaborative processes of becoming-with the special issue. We conclude with some final thoughts on the process of diffracting the special issue, inviting the reader to join us in imagining new lines of flight, alternative possibilities for becoming a more response-able, more-than-human academic community.

Andrews (1999) has argued that under conditions of market-based liberalization, the sporting past has increasingly been put to use for the purposes of accumulation. This selectively rendered "sporting historicism," he argues, results in "a pseudo-authentic historical sensibility, as opposed to a genuinely historically grounded understanding of the past, or indeed the present by rendering history a vast, yet random, archive of events, styles, and icons" (2006). Under such conditions, power-laden and selective "mythscapes" emerge. In this paper, we carry Andrews' contention forward by arguing that critical sport scholars should further problematize the uses of the sporting mythscape—particularly by calling into question those re-historicizations that emerge in public discourse and excavating whose interests they serve. Here we interrogate the politics of how sporting pasts are mobilized in contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand; in particular at the conjuncture of a globalized "free-market" economy and fluctuating (post-)colonial identity politics. We point to various cases that help reveal how specters of sporting pasts circulate within national mythologies in selective and politicized ways.

In this article, we offer commentary on moving bodies and the spaces they simultaneously inhabit and produce, pointing specifically to dominant rhythmologies of the contemporary market society. We offer as the article's core thrust the pedagogical, political, and performative exigencies of the street: its traversal and occupation, its flow and stasis. We utilize the theories of Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Lieven de Cauter, Guy Debord, and Paul Virilio to build an argument against hermeneutic determinism(s). In so doing, we (temporarily) look past conceptualizations of the street as late modern discursive metonym, and instead turn toward public dimensions of time and space. In so doing, we encourage qualitative inquirers to look beyond the dynamic texts or fixed environs and toward the sensual and sensory, postulating a (re)location of the flesh and bones that has often been missing from the thinking(s) and doing(s) of qualitative research.

In this article, the authors engage with three emerging debates germane to contemporary biopolitics: (a) How do we advance the critical interrogation of the biopolitics of human movement? (b) How and in what ways might we "move" about (and ideally against) regimes and systems of biopolitical subjectivity? and (c) How might "moving" methods of writing, representation, and performance bring light to contemporary biopolitical struggles, contestations, and power relations?

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.

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.

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.

Written against the backdrop of the exploding popularity of NASCAR auto racing, the authors argue that the American South's post-Emancipation mediated history-and the signifiers through which it has been mediated-legislate a lingua franca of White privilege, White supremacy, and patriarchal hegemony. Under the auspices of a seemingly natural "heritage culture," the authors surmise that "the South" actively stands for something. The authors use this article to make the case that when it is brought to life by way of public spectacle, such as the spectacles of the neo-Confederate sporting local, this imaginary South resurrects the power structures that have long influenced the lived experiences of the region. They conclude by arguing that under the auspices of a Bush-inspired, post-9/11, anti-affirmative action backlash, a hyper-White, neo-Confederate NASCAR gives license to the resurgent regimes of the most vigilant factions of the ethnocentric American White Right.