Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

The devaluation of femininity and exclusion of women in American politics and sports culture are topics that have separately been given much attention in gender studies and related fields. A topic that has not yet been explored is the practice of watching televised political debates as sport. This is a growing phenomena since the 2004 United States presidential election that merges the gendered practices in both politics and sports. This tradition frames the consumption of politics through the lens of the sport-media spectacle. Building off Judith Butler’s notion of “citation with a difference,” I argue that sport spectacle functions as a citation throughout political discourse, such that U.S. political debate is performed as sport spectacle in consumer culture. Records from the 2004-2016 presidential debates on Reddit and Yelp, as well as advertisements in online magazines, reveal how these elections were as commodified as sport-media spectacles. In this paper, I analyze how bars owners, bartenders, and their attendants—mimic the male-dominated world of sports, which in turn codify the performance of citizenship for masculine consumption. Through several examinations of “female masculinities,” Jack/Judith Halberstam confronts the spaces in which “gender difference simply does not work right now.” Ultimately, I argue that as political and sports spectators, women often negotiate their presence in traditional male-dominated spaces by performing masculine behaviors. In this paper, I develop a deeper understanding of how sports bars spatialize the consumption of politics, commodifying it as a ritual that has long been associated with constructions of masculinity.