Fifteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

The professional athlete occupies an important role in the public and cultural spheres of their society. While the professional athlete is paid to perform a particular task, they are also hyper-visible and hold significant influence. This is often amplified by their racial, gender, and sexual identities. How the professional athlete — more specifically — the Black Athlete is represented tells us something not only about the place of sport in national imaginaries but the way in which dominant discourses construct the Black subject as an aberration from the norm. This paper offers a reading of South African rugby player, Siya Kolisi, and shows how discourses of race and nation coalesce in producing a representation of Kolisi that is informed by a set of assumptions that proffer a normative idea of the South African nation.