Normally I have less than zero interest in popular sports, but this article
does raise some interesting issues about certain sports (those in which
African-Americans, and in some cases other racial minorities as in Britain,
are represented as athletes in more than their statistical proportion of
the total population) in relation to race and social class. [His examples
are from baseball, but only to start the story, and then mainly basketball
and especially boxing ...]
I have a little theory, as some of you who were in Aarhus may have heard,
that class, race/ethnicity, age, and gender classifications form a single
unified semiotic system that cannot be understood unless all the elements
are taken into account in every analysis (just the sort of complexity that
modern social science hates because it makes research so much less easy).
Another way of saying this is that each of these notionally distinct
dimensions of classification is in practice critically dependent on each of
the others. This view is not particularly original as regards class and
gender, or class and race especially, but it tries to be more radically
unitarian in its basic formulation (which I will not give here, but may get
up on my website in some version before too long).
According to this theory, what is most saliently missing from Early's
analysis is gender. He is all on about race, and quite a bit about class,
though there is not a very clear sense of just how these are functionally
related in terms of their meanings for people. There is even some reference
to age in the fairly insightful observation that, certainly in the US
(maybe also elsewhere), and especially (not sure how unique this really is)
for baseball, adults have a nostalgia for childhood figuring prominently in
their feelings about certain sports. Not much is really made of this point
however, since there doesn't seem to be much of a developed theory of Age
and age-grades as a meaning-construction with specific social functions (as
the construction of the meaning of classes, or genders, or races has such
functions).
The importance of age for such an analysis is most clearly signalled by the
fact that professional athletes are remarkably age-homogeneous, perhaps the
most age-exclusivist role-repertory in our culture, and certainly one of
the most salient. To get an interesting analysis of why this matters, one
has to have a theory of the _relationships_ among the age-grades in a
society (and how they vary according to race/ethnicity, class, and gender
type). In my model, these are _antagonistic_ relationships, and support
structures of domination ... just as do the other social classifying
principles. The social meaning of these sports is very much about
age-relationships, and this links in many ways to race/ethnicity.
But what is wholly left out, and yet must be quite critical, is the
subsystem of gender classifications ... in which I include a great deal
more than the ideologically trivialized notion of male/female, or even the
more complex binary of masculine/feminine ... since one has to take into
account also various sorts of neuters and 'boths' ... and matters of degree
on multiple behavioral-performative-dispositional dimensions ... as well as
the large matters of sexual orientation, the alternative gender types among
lesbians or gay males, not to mention all the trans- and inter- gender and
sexed possibilities without consideration of which you can't see the
overall patterns that define the gender system as a whole. A great many
people have noted the homoerotic qualities of much of professional sports,
especially the sports dominated by working class and subordinated
racial/ethnic athletes (who appear at the same time both more masculine,
and more homophobic, than their upper middle class counterparts). Not too
much is said about the actual attitudes of women of various social
backgrounds towards these sports, but there are certainly dominant
constructions of femininity that prescribe certain dispositions. And one
can hardly doubt that both the athletes and their mostly male fans are
engaged in the construction of their own masculinity through both
participation and identification, through occasional play and incessant
talk about these sports.
Early says that race is being performed in these sports, by whites and
non-whites alike. No doubt, but so is a particular age-grade (one with high
sexual-attractiveness and masculinity status, but lower power relative to
the much older dominant age-grade) and its relative position being
performed, and a particular position in the gender matrix, and, as Early is
well aware, a particular social class position. My point is that you can't
perform a position in one of these systems without performing the linked
positions in the others ... and very few of all the combinatorial
possibilities actually occur, which is what defines the sociological
semiotics of these sports, and the ways in which they can support and
disrupt identities.
"To be white can be partly defined as not only the fear of not being white
but the fear of being _at the mercy_ of those who are not white." -- Early
(emphasis in original).
Well now, at what kind of mercy? just what is the archetypal scene being
alluded to here? and if seen in relation to the pervasive metaphors of the
social semiotic system (whereby a domination relation in one is projected
onto or stands in for such a relation on one of the other dimensions of
difference), in what respects are, say, children at the mercy of adults?
women at the mercy of men? and the white men in Early's thesis at the mercy
of black men? Please take three very deep breaths and read the word ... rape.
Now try to forget all the defensive responses that word evokes (especially
if you are a heterosexual male) in order to justify denial of the
possibility ... and just imagine a series of dominoes falling, all the
linked relations of domination, inverted and overturned: racial domination,
gender domination, class domination, age-grade domination ... what else
could be so threatening in the identity construction of those occupying the
social apex? not even a young daughter murdering her father (torturing him,
maybe?) ... nor even the archetypal dominatrix "raping" her middle-aged
male manager in deliberately humiliating fashion (a common form of
pleasure, from the control of the threat, but multiply mitigated as well in
the overall sign system at stake). Maybe I'm missing another possibility,
but the asymmetries of the system do all seem to point to a critical
breaking point in the system (at least as seen from the dominant viewpoint,
that is), imagined in the archetypal being-raped scene. (To see this you
have to construct just which position in the system here is raping just
which other position, and how each of these relates to someone in the
dominant or apical position in terms of the superiority and vulnerability
of his identity.)
I make this extreme point only to suggest more generally that analyses like
Early's systematically and quite unconsciously elide the most critical
missing pieces in understanding the phenomenon he is talking about, and
that the most suppressed of these is the gender-type/masculinity component
and its dependence on the domination relations in which it is solidary with
racial-ethnic, age-grade, and social class dominations. Nor am I saying
this is the whole story of sociality and our existing social structure's
meaning system ... just the part of it that's most dangerous to think too
much about.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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