Retheorizing the Cultural Politics of Sport After a Decade of Activism,Populism,and Polarization

Abstract

This article details three developments of the last decade that have had significant effects on the cultural status and sociopolitical functioning of sport in the United States: (1) an unprecedented wave of sport-based protest and athlete activism; (2) new norms and conventions in the sporting establishment for dealing with athletic protest and social issues, especially with respect to media coverage and commentary; and (3) recent Right-wing ethnonationalist engagements with sport, including targeted criticism of both activist athletes and sport as well as populist mobilizations around sport. I summarize these developments and argue that they have made social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. This new era of contestation and polarization, in turn, has destabilized longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about how lasting these changes will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself.

Introduction

The cultural politics of sport is a phrase or theoretical construct that, as I understand it, speaks to the broader communicative and symbolic significance of sport in political discourse and social life. The social and political messages constructed in and conveyed through sport (often not intentionally), as sport scholars have tended to understand them within this framework, are typically related to the production and reproduction of dominant social images, identities, and belonging—for example, race, gender, and nationalism—but can also involve broader aspects of political legitimacy as well as ideologies about power relations, social and economic arrangements, and public problems. The cultural politics of sport is not, in other words, about institutional struggles within the world of sport (though these dynamics surely create the institutional practices and broader organization field that are presented and made symbolically meaningful in the public sphere); rather, the cultural politics framing refers to the broad social and political meanings, messages, and implications that athletes and sport itself represent in the broader culture and society.

With roots in cultural Marxism and critical ethnic studies (Giroux, 1985; Nash, 2001, and especially Hall, 1980), as well as cultural feminism (Hargreaves & McDonald, 2000; Pirkko, 2003) and Foucauldian theory (Cole, 1993; Cole et al., 2004), scholarship on the cultural politics of sport has focused on the social messages that are somewhat routine, reproductive, and taken-for-granted—a kind of cultural commonsense as theorized by Gramsci, Habermas, and other scholars of hegemony, consensus, and consent. It may not be too much to suggest that what makes (or has made) the sociopolitical messages conveyed in and through sport so significant, at least in the past, is precisely the fact that they have not been seen or experienced by regular, ordinary citizens self-consciously as political.

Scholarship on the cultural politics of sport has been marked by tremendous vibrance, import, innovation, and excellence over the past few decades. In the 1990s, this work focused on issues related to power (McDonald & Birrell, 1999) and the reproduction of gender (Hargreaves, 1990); race/racialization (Cole & Andrews, 1996); capitalism and political economy (Gruneau, 1988; Sugden & Tomlinson, 2000), with the symbolic social and political significance of globalized professional sports, mass media, celebrity athletes (Andrews & Jackson, 2002), and mega/spectacle events all coming in for focused attention and analysis. Eventually topics ranging from neoliberalism (Hartmann, 2016; Newman & Giardina, 2011) to ability/disability (Howe, 2008) also came to the fore. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the 2000s witnessed a plethora of work on the role of sport in reproducing and legitimating national unity and the established political order (Silk, 2013; Weedon, 2012), especially in the domains of patriotism and nationalism (Kusz, 2007; Newman, 2007; Silk & Falcous, 2005), patriarchy and hyper-masculinity (Leonard, 2012), and militarism (Fischer, 2014; Kusz, 2017; Schimmel, 2017). With its focus on political functions and symbolic implications, such work is crucial to making the case for the independent, irreducible social force of sport in society to scholars and critics who are skeptical of, or dismissive about, it.

However, this work has been so focused on sport's role in legitimating power and reproducing the social status quo that it has a tendency to miss or minimize the ways in which sport can function or be used for dissent, resistance, and change. This blind spot has been particularly apparent in recent years with the rise of protest, counter-protest, and polarization in and around sport. Indeed, this article is built on the claim that such recent historical developments in and around the sporting arena have significant implications for cultural status and political functioning of sport in the contemporary United States—empirical implications that allow and in fact require us to review our theories of and approaches to the cultural politics of sport.

I will focus on three developments that have taken shape in the last decade, and which both individually and collectively compel use to rethink the nature, and critical scholarly approach toward, the cultural politics of sport. The first is the emergence of a whole new (and unprecedented) generation sport-based protest and athlete activists, especially those in service of various left-leaning social movements and agendas. The second has to do with the shifts in the sporting establishment, and especially among sport journalists, with respect to their treatment, tolerance, and embrace of activism, advocacy, and social issues in sport. A third, final, and most recent development involves the appearance of new, Right-wing populist engagements with sport, many of which have emerged in opposition to left-leaning athletic activism (and mainstream media coverage of it) and appear to have coalesced into a backlash, counter-mobilization of its own.

In the pages that follow, I will discuss these developments and the changes each has brought. Their cumulative effect, I argue, has been to make social issues in, and the symbolic significance of, sport more explicit, contested, and polarized than in earlier eras. These changes not only complicate the symbolic functioning of sport in political discourse and public life, they have implications for longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport and its relationship to politics and social change. While questions remain about pervasive these changes are and how lasting they will be, I suggest these new conditions and the cultural politics that come with them call for a reinvigorated critical, dramaturgical theory of sport—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing social struggle that has public meaning and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself, but that is also cautious about making bigger or more concrete claims about the sociopolitical force of sport.

The final section of the paper will lay out some basic elements of a revitalized critical dramaturgical approach focusing on (a) what it means to think about sport as a dramaturgical platform and (b) how the social dynamics publicly dramatized are not only about power and the social status quo but now involve social contestation and polarization. Given the extent to which research on cultural politics has focused on processes and forces that are believed to be relatively unseen or invisible, I will also suggest the need to track and assess public understandings, attitudes, and beliefs about sport as a cultural form and social force in coming years.

Background

This essay grows out of a series of papers on the race-based athletic activism of the past decade in the United States and responses and reactions to this activism including opposition and backlash, that I have embarked upon in the past few years (2019, 2022a, 2022b, 2023; see also: Hartmann et al., 2022; Hawkins et al., 2022). My larger goal in this multipronged project—now being turned into a book tentatively titled “Ballers and Backlash”—is to use this material, essentially a history and analysis of Black athletic activism and the backlash against it, as a case study to better understand the role and function of sport in public discourse and political culture, not only with respect to race and racism but for any number of societal issues, topics, and public problems. This article may be understood as initial effort to lay out the larger, more general theoretical lessons by thinking specifically about, and systematically through, their implications for the cultural politics of sport and our theories thereof. At the very least, I hope this context explains why I rely heavily on material and examples related to race-based activism and response.

Recent Developments and Initial Implications

Of the three sociohistorical developments that have reshaped or are reshaping the conditions under which the cultural politics of sport play out in contemporary American society, I begin with athletic activism because it is, for better or for worse, the development that set the other historical changes in motion.

Sport-Based Protest and Athlete Activism

The last decade of sport history has witnessed the emergence of an unlikely and unprecedented wave of activism, protest, and mobilization all across the US sporting landscape, not to mention more internationally (Kilcline, 2017). Though it lacks any real leaders, resources, or top-down organization, this activism is extensive, patterned, multifaceted, and publicly visible enough that it can and should be thought of in movement terms (Hartmann, 2022a). It includes mobilizations in a wide range of sports, athletes as well as coaches, and at all levels of sport from elite, professional sport to community-based and scholastic forms. It is touches on all the social issues, public problems, and global concerns of the era. Race-based social justice activism associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and struggles against police violence, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy have been at the leading edge of these movements (Bryant, 2018; Cooper, 2021; Edwards, 2016; Zirin, 2021; Trimbur, 2019) and are the ones I know best and have been most focused on myself; however, activism, resistance, and protest in domains such as gender equity (Antunovic & Hardin, 2012; Cooky, 2017), human rights (Chappelet, 2021; Chanda et al., 2021), and environmentalism (Millington & Darnell, 2019) have also been prominent. Sport-based organizing and activism against professional sport, mega events, and global sporting organizations constitutes some of the most organized and ongoing resistance in the sportsworld (Boykoff, 2023, 2014) and includes fans as well (Hodges & Brentin, 2018; Valiente, 2019).

While there is a great deal to be said about this activism as well as about reactions and responses to it, here I focus on aspects relevant to the sociopolitical meaning and functions of sport in the public sphere. One is that it is athletes who command public attention in sport and are thus responsible for the vast majority of activism in and around sport. Second, the bulk of recent athlete activism and protest has not been targeted at problems in the world of sport, but rather uses the platform of sport to call attention to broader social issues and concerns, ideally contributing to larger, nonsport movements for social justice and other forms of social transformation. This is a more important point than may first meet the eye.

What makes contemporary protest and activism in and especially through sport so important—such as demands for human rights in the context of international sport, or the calls for racial justice coming out of Black Lives Matter movement—is its scope and reach. Sport-based activism is not really about sport per se, it is about the bigger audiences and heightened cultural visibility and emotional intensity that comes with sport. Athletic activism and social advocacy brings, or at least can bring, awareness of and attention to social issues for audiences who might not otherwise have heard or cared about these issues (Antunovic & Hardin, 2012). The US women's soccer team's push for gender equity might seem like something of an exception to this, but in this case, their activism within sport (not unlike Title IX itself) brings attention to the broader, more general cause of gender equity and thus has ramifications well beyond the world of sport (Druckman & Sharrow, 2023). And not only does sport-based activism bring heightened attention to certain social issues (“agenda seeding,” as it is called in political science [Wasow, 2020]); it can also help frame these issues and intensify emotional reactions to them. In concert with the emphasis of the larger Black Lives Matter movement, for example, athlete activists helped define the question for racial justice in terms of police violence, anti-Blackness, and systemic racism (Hartmann et al., 2022).

Because of sport's role in helping to establish, amplify, and frame various social movements and causes, I, like others (Cooper et al., 2019), often use the phrase “activism in and through sport.” This “broader than” or “beyond” sport language is intended to capture the ways in which athletic activism obligates audiences and observers to be attuned to and thus more aware of the social context of athletic participation and fandom—that is, that athletic competitions do not take place in a social vacuum or silo, but are, in fact, part and parcel of the social world and all its messiness and complexity. And athletic activism has brought not just protest, but a broad, general awareness of all manner of social issues and concerns that athletes (and others) can bring to larger public attention via sport. Think here of the platform for social commentary and advocacy provided to professional and collegiate athletes via the Player's Tribune (Manning et al., 2021).

Whatever else they might think about it, athletic activism and social advocacy reawakens audiences—scholars, media commentators, and the public generally, sports oriented and not—to the power and possibility of sport as a vehicle for social critique, resistance, contestation, and social change (Cunningham et al., 2019; see also: Kaufman & Wolff, 2010). The awareness is important because, as noted in the introduction, much of the scholarly work on the cultural politics of sport in the post-9/11 2000s was based upon the unseen and fundamentally reproductive—conservative, in the traditional sense—functions of sport in that era. Indeed, it was in these decades that the most powerful and sophisticated understandings of the reproductive and legitimating power of sport as a sociopolitical force were recognized and fully developed. While these helped us understand the reproductive role and symbolic function of sport in this context, they dimmed our recollection of the more resistance-oriented ways in which sport can function. ¹

For many observers, analysts, and critics, the growing public awareness of the social character of sport and of the opportunities for protest and change that come with it suggests that sport has become, or at least is becoming, both more overtly political (Bairner et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2020) as well as more politically progressive (Zirin, 2021) than ever before. On balance, I tend to agree with this general inference and framing; however, I also want to nuance and qualify it somewhat as well.

Part of the reason to be cautious about claims that sport is coming to be more political and/or more progressive is simply about terms and, more specifically, what is meant by politics and by what standards or criterion notions like “progressive” or “liberal” might be assessed. More substantively, there is also the fact that activism and protest alone does not necessarily bring about actual social change. While liberal journalists and left-leaning scholars often romanticize protest, it can lead to no concrete change or institutional reforms, or have unintended and even reproductive functions such as just “blowing off steam” in sport, and then getting back to “business as usual” in the social world (an insidious variation on the old “opiate of the masses” critique). The performance of protest, in other words, does not necessarily translate into progressive politics and meaningful social change.

A third reason we need to be careful about making blanket statements or drawing overly large generalizations about the political leanings of sport has to do with the deeply divided, starkly polarized public reactions that athletic activism has provoked. I myself have studied polarized responses to athletic activism primarily in the context of race-based athletic protest. Polarization, both strong support and intense opposition, is quite evident in both public opinion polling (Intravia et al., 2018; Knoester et al., 2021; Niven, 2021) and social media (Frederick et al., 2018; Gill, 2018) as well as in interviews and focus groups (Chaplin & Montez de Oca, 2019). In some respects, the appearance of new levels of public support for athlete activism provides evidence that the public is both more attuned to and supportive of uses of sport for purposes of advocacy and dissent. That said, support for athletic activism also comes with corresponding levels of skepticism, criticism, and backlash. I will have more to say about opposition and how it has, in some circles, hardened into a backlash movement of its own. But the key point for the moment is polarization itself. Much as Howard Bryant emphasized in The Heritage (2018), his indispensable history of Black athletic activism in the United States, attitudes and opinions about race-based athletic activism are starkly and rather consistently divided along the same racial, ideological, and political lines that play out in the broader political arena.

These polarized reactions and responses are at the root of the two divergent developments I will discuss in the following sections. But before I get to those, let me make one additional point about the polarized public perceptions of and responses to athletic activism. It involves the fact that the polarization we see in sport maps quite neatly and directly on to the polarization we see in society on political attitudes more generally. Indeed, as someone who has reviewed numerous journal articles on attitudes about both athletic activism and politics more generally it is exceedingly difficult to disentangle and distinguish the correlates and determinants of public attitudes toward athletic activism from other political issues and controversies. They look remarkably similar. The same cleavages of political affiliations, ideological leanings, racial background, age, and religion that mark and define one, mark and define the other. The algorithms work!

There are two key takeaways for this analysis—one empirical observation, the other more of a research question. The empirical observation is that athletic activism doesn’t appear to change people's minds on politics or any other social issues so much as it reflects and reproduces already-established social identities, ideals, and commitments, and the sociopolitical fault-lines associated with them. On this front, it is worth nothing that there is some evidence that sports fans do not change their viewing habits significantly either (Peterson & Muñoz, 2022). Make American Great Again (MAGA) viewers, for instance, have not switched “woke” sport off, as some suggested they would. What is less clear is how or to what extent this generation of athletic activism has shifted (or not) general cultural understandings and beliefs about sport—whether with respect to its general cultural status or its fraught relationship to politics, or its grand utopian claims about meritocracy, equity, and social change. The impact on these deep ideological structures of sport is the research question to return to and continue to track.

Changing Establishment Norms and Media Conventions

A second recent development in the world of sport that has implications for the theory and operation of the cultural politics of sport in the United States grows directly out of the athletic activism just discussed: it is that the various institutions and leaders of the sporting establishments—teams, leagues, associations, and their leaders, coaches, and especially sports writers and reporters and the publications they work for—have, on the whole, become more tolerant and accepting of athletic activism and general social commentary from athletes and their allies than in earlier generations.

This is an empirical claim that is obviously bigger and more complicated than can be fully documented here. Sports media is perhaps the best, perhaps most impactful, and most well-documented example of this acceptance of athletic activism. I am referring here to new conventions and commitments in the mainstream sports media that move beyond the formal boundaries of reporting only on athletic competitions themselves—the old “stick to sports” paradigm—to also report upon various social protests, causes, and agendas in and around sport. Not that long ago—arguably, in fact, not much more than a decade ago—almost no self-respecting American sports journalist could openly condone, much less support, the introduction of nonsport issues and ideas into the otherwise sacred or pure-play realm of sport. This was certainly the case with the athletic activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Hartmann, 2022b), and these conventions held firm in the 1990s and 2000s eras of conformity and complacency in the athletic realm. Today, however, scholars have documented a whole new generation of reporters and media outlets who now see it as their job to situate sport in a broader social context and report on the views athletes have about various social issues and causes (Broussard, 2020; Schmidt, 2018). ²

Driven in part by principles and in part by the need to keep up with the political maelstrom of much social media and the direct access to athletes and their social opinions it affords sports fans, this shift in media norms and conventions may be the single biggest institutional innovation in the realm of sport in the contemporary era. And versions of this shift, this new openness to athlete activism and freedom of expression, can be found in the core institutions of the athletic establishment itself. I am thinking here of the reluctance of professional leagues like the National Basketball Association (NBA) or the National Football League (NFL) to create or enforce rules restricting protests and demonstrations, of various schools and conferences of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) affirming the rights to free speech of their student-athletes, or of all the coaches, counselors, and teachers who supported and assisted high school and college students who took a knee in the years between 2016 and 2018 (Zirin, 2021). I am also thinking of how various leagues and athletic leaders have encouraged their players to speak their minds and be active on social media or embraced various “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) causes and initiatives. All of this suggests, at the very least, the acceptance of a general principle that would have been almost unimaginable a decade or two back: that athletes have a right to protest or at least to free speech; to use the platform that sport provides them to talk about issues and causes that they care about or are deeply committed to.

Having established this general point, some cautions and qualifications are immediately in order. Perhaps first and most important: the tolerance of activism and social advocacy in the athletic realm has been far from absolute or complete. Neither the sports media nor the athletic establishment have been totally and unambiguously supportive of all social commentary, advocacy, and activism in the sporting arena, and pockets of fierce opposition and backlash have remained in place and even intensified.

Significant barriers and constraints upon activism and speech have been put in place in many sports contexts including, perhaps especially, for collegiate student-athletes (Hatteberg, 2018; Kluch, 2023; Reese, 2017; Staurowsky, 2014) and Olympians (Modi, 2023). A significant number of sportswriters, commentators, publications, and platforms also continue to fall back to traditional norms and conventions, thus reproducing dominant viewpoints and conceptions—a “white frame” as Turcott and Boykoff have styled it on the race front (2020; see also Boykoff & Carrington, 2020), or as Cooky and Antunovic (2020) have documented for gender equity. Furthermore, self-consciously conservative and even reactionary media platforms such as Breitbart Sports or even Barstool have been created (Clavio & Vooris, 2018; Falcous et al., 2019; Kusz & Hodler, 2022). Within the athletic institutional establishment, reactions and responses have been varied and uneven, depending upon sport and social context (Kwak et al., 2023), with sports like National Association for Stock Auto Car Racing (NASCAR) or MMA (mixed martial arts) remaining defiant in opposing the and embracing a more traditional, conservative set of social ideals and functions.

It also needs to be said that the sports media and the athletic establishment didn’t necessarily come to these changes because of their liberal ideals and progressive politics. Some of the changes in sport have prompted by changes in society, and the fact that there is more public support for many of the causes championed by athletes—racial justice, gender equity, and human rights—than there has been in the past. For example, the white majority has been far more receptive to racial reckoning and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement than in previous generations (Dunivin et al., 2022; Setter, 2021). In this respect, leaders of the athletic establishment are simply going along with the masses, jumping on the BLM bandwagon as it were. If nothing else, journalists and reporters have been obligated to enact a broader, more socially engaged forms of reporting just to maintain their audiences (and associated advertising).

Other scholars have emphasized the labor concerns of athletic leagues and organizations—the need to acknowledge and appease the concerns of the athletes whom the entire enterprise depends upon. With their reliance on Black athletic labor, to again use a race example, organizations such as the NBA or the NFL or even the NCAA have been particularly vulnerable to such charges (and practices), with threatened football boycott at the University of Missouri in 2015 being a widely circulated cautionary tale (Trachtenberg, 2018). The “support” of the athletic establishment, in such views, is not so much principled as it is pragmatic: keeping athletes happy.

The fact of the matter is that the sporting establishment remains a media-spectacle complex deeply bound up with power, profit, and all forms of privilege in the culture and because of that its impulses have been to limit, contain, and control activism. Any number of examples and developments could be given here: monitoring social media use or no longer allowing athletes on the field during the playing of the national anthem (as some college conferences have taken to doing); engaging in small, symbolic gestures such as “end racism” slogans on jerseys and banners, “Get Out the Vote” campaigns, or perfunctory statements about world peace, cross-cultural understanding, and human rights; continued adherence to rules and practices—such as Olympic Rule 50—which “allow” free of expression but only in designated spaces, often far from fields of play or places where large numbers of spectators congregate. And then there is “woke capitalism” itself as exemplified most famously in Nike's “activism” advertising campaign with Colin Kaepernick at the end of the previous decade (Montez de Oca et al., 2022), or the embrace of “CSR”, often for branding and image-making as much as social change (Rugg, 2020; Hayhurst & Szto, 2016). All of these would appear to privilege advocacy over activism, symbolic gestures over concrete, direct actions.

Such engagements are less radical and explicitly political than they could be, and can be argued to do more harm than good, by virtue of creating the appearance of activism, progress, and change. Nevertheless, the fact that the sporting establishment has become more tolerant and accommodating of athlete's rights to use the platform of sport to talk about social issues and public problems is a cultural and institutional shift which has significant implications for the symbolic politics of US sport.

First and most obviously, the relative acceptance of the athletic right to speech in the world of sport has removed or softened previous barriers toward activism in the sporting realm and, without a doubt, allowed new and continued athletic activism, mobilization, and protest. Relatedly, media coverage of and commentary on these issues has brought this resistance and these messages of dissent to broader public audiences, thus amplifying both attention to protest as well as revealing the ways in which sport is bound up with (rather than kept separate from) social issues and political controversies (cf. Henry & Oates, 2020). On this latter front, the fact that the polarization of attitudes about protest and social issues in sport which has been widely reported in the media has also contributed to the emergence of sports journalism that is more self-conscious of itself and oriented toward the recognition and reporting of social issues in and around sport. Indeed, these new journalistic attitudes and practices also help to explain why sports reporters appear far more willing to go behind the scenes to investigate the social, economic, and bureaucratic machinations and maneuvering necessary to produce elite-spectacle sport; the profit and excess associated with it; its complicity with forms of power, profit, and privilege (“sportwashing”, Boykoff, 2022); and its corruptions. This is the kind of journalism that serves—or can serve—to demystify or de-romanticize sport itself. How, or to what extent, these developments, especially those in the media, have shifted idealized cultural understandings and beliefs about sport remains an open question.

Right-Wing Populist Engagements With Sport

The third and final historical change that has impacted the form and sociopolitical function of sport in the contemporary moment involves Right-wing, populist engagements with sport, including and perhaps especially, the backlash against athletic activism. I am thinking here, for example, of Donald Trump's and the larger MAGA movement's attacks on athlete activism, especially that of Black athletes (Andrews, 2019; Kusz, 2019), but also of the wider and more general populist engagement with and use of sport for various political purposes (Oates & Kusz, 2019).

President Trump's use of sports and engagement with athletes (both as a fanboy and as a critic) in speeches and on Twitter (Frederick et al., 2021) and the transformation of White House champions ceremonies under his watch (Seigel, 2019) were among the first and most famous of these interventions. But it is not just Trump and his immediate circle of supporters to whom I am referring.

The emergence of conservative and reactionary media outlets, organizations, and platforms cited previously is a large part of the opposition and backlash against athletic activism from the Right. NBA star Kyrie Irving with his flat earth claims, anti-vax politics, and flirtations with anti-Semitism is another example of an engagement with and mobilization of sport from a more conservative orientation (Geller & Butterworth, 2023). Persistent condemnations of Colin Kaepernick and other athlete activists by Republican politicians even in the absence of any meaningful protest activity are another. Still others include criticisms of the Biden administration for negotiating the release from Russian prison of WNBA Brittney Griner release (Keaton et al., 2023); of sports figures now turned conservative politicians ranging from Kelley Loeffler and Hershel Walker in Georgia to Tommie Tuberville in Alabama; the New College in Florida creating an interscholastic athletic program for the explicit purpose of combating “wokeness” and “political correctness” on campus; and most recently and extensively, the wave of attacks on and moral panics about trans athletes (Baeth & Goorevich, 2022; Fischer, 2023; Knoester et al., 2023; Sharrow, 2021). ³

There are at least three aspects of Right-wing engagements with sport that need to be highlighted. One is that many of these engagements centered, or even started with, racially coded attacks on Black athlete activists. The second is that much criticism also involves insinuations or accusations that the sporting establishment and the mainstream sports media had a liberal bias that was exposed by their tolerance of athletic activism. The third point is that at least since 2020, these criticisms and attacks have morphed into a series of mobilizations and counter-protests in the athletic arena, a movement of its own—not using sport but purporting to protect sport. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that when it comes to social movements and athletic-based activism in the United States today we are now in the backlash phase.

The emergence of this more conservative or populist movement, or counter-mobilization, has implications for the social standing and cultural politics of sport. Some of the effects are in line with those discussed for left-leaning activism above, albeit with essentially inverted sociopolitical dynamics and impacts. For example, the rise of a populist Right influence in sport accentuates the polarization that appears to have taken place in the world of sport. Populist engagements with sport were (or are) just as popular (or unpopular) among sports fans and followers as left-leaning activism and protest. Additionally, the emergence of explicitly conservative and even reactionary political engagements with sport underscores the larger, more general thrust of a sport culture that is increasingly political and politicized.

The populist right's explicit political engagement with sport also marks a stark break with the norms and conventions that governed American political leaders of all political persuasions over the previous one hundred-plus years. Well into the early years of the 21st century, in fact, even Republican and traditional conservative elites engaged sport in a cautious fashion. They approached sport often indirectly, using it to build up connections with their constituents often by establishing their own identities as regular, ordinary Americans. When politicians referenced sport or engaged it directly, the rhetoric was usually ostensibly unifying, intended to build bridges across ideologies, beliefs, and party lines. However, the sporting engagements on the right inspired by Trump and his populist supporters have been far more overtly political and intentionally divisive, making it almost impossible not to take sides. Trump's bombastic, unapologetically partisan, and deliberately divisive engagements with sport violated and thus called into question traditional norms and institutional conventions governing the balance between sport and politics (Hartmann, 2023)—a balance wherein sport was believed to be somewhat sacred so engagements were supposed to be subtle (rather than explicit), generally positive, and oriented toward unity or solidarity (rather than partisan politics and explicit boundary-drawing). This was again why Trump's criticism of sporting culture was so atypical for politicians engaging sport.

And there is a deeper theoretical or, really, normative challenge for sport scholars here as well. When it comes to politics and social issues in the sporting arena, we scholars have recently spent a great deal of time and energy insisting that sport is bound up with politics and social issues AND that athletes and their allies have a right to use the platform that sport provides to speak out on ideas and opinions of their own. However, for the most part the attitudes, ideas, and opinions about the social world that have been welcomed and expected from athletes have been the points of view that dominate in the academy: liberal, left-leaning, and progressive. What we have not expected—and certainly not theorized—is how, or to what extent, our arguments about the rights to free speech and political expression in the realm of sport apply to athletes and their allies from Right-leaning and even reactionary perspectives. In other words, we have not theorized, much less even considered, conservative political expression and speech. ⁴ Perhaps liberal sports journalists and left-leaning sport scholars need new or different understandings of politics, or “the political,” as well as of the normative criteria with which we analyze and assess them.

Broader Social and Analytical Implications (and Questions)

Many scholars, pundits, politicians, and leaders of the sporting establishment have taken the emergence of an unprecedented wave of left-leaning athletic activism of the last decade—the first and most well-known of the changes elaborated above—to mean that the sports world has become more liberal and progressive than ever before, open and committed to producing social change in areas of equity, rights, and justice (among others). As alluded to, there is some evidence for this, including the relatively high levels of support revealed in public opinion polling and the fact that the athletic establishment appears far more tolerant of social advocacy from athletes themselves than in the past. However, it is also prudent to be cautious about generalizing further along these lines.

One of the reasons I hesitate to offer definitive claims or even conjectures about the partisan leanings and political impacts of sport is because athletic activism has been divisive and polarizing, and has contributed to a Right-wing, populist athletic counter-mobilization of its own (the second and third developments I detailed above). Another is because the sporting establishment and media/spectacle sport more generally continues to be bound up with nationalism, global capitalism, and the social status quo, with the profit, power, and privilege of elites. This reality not only limits progressive initiatives and impulses in sport, but means that the sports world tends to coopt these forces and reappropriate them in service of profit and the reproduction and legitimation of the social status quo (i.e., the traditional cultural politics of sport; see, again, Rugg 2020). Which brings us back to the actual outcomes, impacts, and effects of all this protest and counter-protest and controversy in sport I mentioned earlier. It is, simply put, unclear what social contestation in and through sport has contributed to institutional reforms and concrete social change outside of the athletic arena.

In the face of these countervailing forces and trends, I have come to believe that it is less important to assess sport's partisan leanings or its contributions to substantive politics (is sport progressive or conservative, or something else?) and become more interested, instead, in if—and/or, how or to what extent—the developments sketched in this article have restructured or reconstituted the social status and symbolic functioning of sport in the United States today. More specifically, I have come to think of the social contestation and political polarization that have emerged in and around sport in recent years as the new conditions which structure and determine the cultural politics of sport. It is these new conditions, this new reality, that analysts and critics must grapple with and build into our theorizing about the sociopolitical functioning of sport.

When framed in this fashion, I find it useful and necessary to revitalize to the critical, Gramscian-inspired framework championed by Stuart Hall (2018) for popular culture generally (see also Gruneau, 1998)—that is, to see sport as a contested, conflicted social terrain which, because of its high visibility and deep emotional resonance, carries crucial symbolic significance and meaning for public audiences. Such a framework would emphasize not the actual outcomes or impacts of the sociopolitical struggles in athletic arena but rather how sport represents and communicates these struggles to broad public audiences.

I will return this metatheoretical framing in the next and final section, but several empirical issues and questions about this era of contestation and polarization first need to be addressed. The core question involves the impacts—or potential impacts—of recent social changes on the cultural status and public understandings of sport and its role in society—what might be called sport's “deep cultural structure.” This includes both general public understandings and beliefs about whether sport has some kind of special status or unique standing as a social form (or not), as well as various longstanding cultural norms and ideals about sport's relationship to politics and social change.

In an earlier version of this paper, I argued—extending from the points that I made about new media practices and the disruptive nature of Trump's engagements for traditional presidential norms and conventions—that the general norms and ideals that have defined sport's sociocultural status in the United States and governed its role as a social and political force were being disrupted and destabilized by recent developments. In particular, I speculated that longstanding cultural norms and taboos about the separation of sport and politics (Green & Hartmann, 2014) were breaking down and that romanticized ideals about sport being a generally positive, unifying social force (Coakley (2015) were being called into question—that sport, in a word, was becoming less special and more of a social institution like any other. Upon further reflection and feedback, however, I am less certain of how pervasive these changes are or how permanent they will be.

On the one hand, the seemingly bright lines between sport and social life do appear to be blurred by the explicit social contestation and political polarization sketched in this article. Additionally, the inherent tensions between cultural norms about sport being “neutral” or “apolitical” can be seen to run up against longstanding ideals about sport being a positive social force in society. When social claims are fundamentally in conflict, it seems like you can’t have it both ways. On the other hand, it doesn’t appear that most Americans (or even all sport scholars, for that matter) recognize these tensions and their implications. For the public, in fact, the traditional taboo of keeping politics out of sport still seems firmly in place. For example, many observers, both sports fans and otherwise, claim to be sympathetic to or even supportive of the various claims and social causes of athlete activists yet also remain ambivalent or uncertain about the appropriateness of protest in the athletic arena (Chaplin & Montez de Oca, 2019; Mueller, 2021). Sport somehow still seems special to them. Moreover, while polling has demonstrated divergent opinions about both athletic activism and populist mobilizations of sport, general attitudes about sport, and about sport's relationship to politics exhibit very little conflict or variation (Knoester & Davis, 2021; Thorson & Serazio, 2018). Indeed, advocates, allies, and supporters on either side of polarized social issues in sport tend to see their cause as legitimate, just, or necessary, and thus contrast it with those on the “other side” who are often dismissed as playing politics with sport.

Such patterns remind me of the inverted public attitudes about the clenched fist salute offered by Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the 1968 Olympic victory stand in Mexico City documented in the early 1970s. Black and white Americans expressed nearly opposed, inverted attitudes in support of or opposition to the image; however, these attitudes were shaped by whether they thought the demonstration was morally justifiable or not, and the one thing they all agreed upon was that politics had no place in sport (Hartmann, 2003b, pp. 204–206). The difference was what was defined as political (and thus inappropriate) and what wasn’t (and thus supported or even celebrated).

The take-a-away here is that public ideals and understandings of sport as a cultural form may be less disrupted by contestation and polarization in the athletic arena than I had originally imagined. More specifically, what may be contested in this era is not ideals and norms about sport, but simply politics itself—that is, what is seen as political and thus outside of the acceptable bounds of sport versus that which is not and thus consistent with ideals about sport being a positive force in social life.

Looking to the future, this era of contestation and polarization in sport could push Americans and American culture toward a less romantic, more realistic, and grounded understanding of sport and its place in our culture, society, and politics. However, given the longstanding and deeply entrenched ideological conceptions of sport I have just discussed (along with the historical propensity of Americans to return to more traditional, unifying political rhetoric and policy after periods of protest and social instability), it seems more likely that the sporting world will ultimately fall back on older cultural norms, beliefs, and values about the special or even sacred status of sport in society and associated calls for unity and solidarity (Butterworth, 2020) or forms of “apolitical escapism” (Serazio, 2019). And this, in turn, would mean a return to a more traditional, hidden, and reproductive symbolic role for sport in the culture—that is, the usual, more established cultural politics of sport. But this is just a guess and social scientists like myself tend to be better at after-the-fact, postgame analysis than at forward-looking predictions and speculations.

What scholars and researchers are well-positioned to do—and should do more of, in my view, moving forward—is to document and assess these possibilities systematically. We need to track if or to what extent Americans are recognizing the social contestation and political polarization in and around sport; how they evaluate these developments (good, bad, or indifferent); and whether their ideals and norms about sport are changing as a result. In other words, I am suggesting that in addition to continuing to document the evolution of the new context of social contestation and political polarization in and around sport, we need to study how these developments are seen and evaluated by the public, what impact they are having on cultural norms and ideals about sport itself, and if the public experience of sport is changing as a result.

These are, of course, empirical research questions and they are not easy to operationalize. But we do have tools available to collect data that can help us get started: public opinion polling, both descriptive and experimental; interviewing and focus groups; media, social media, and content analysis; critical discourse theory. All these can help us better understand how public understandings of sport and its relationship to politics and social change are impacted by the social contestation and political polarization of the past decade. And what is at stake here—why such research should be a priority for the field—goes back to the fact that so much of the research on the cultural politics of sport has been predicated on assumptions about the sociocultural power of sport deriving from a relative lack of awareness of its social significance, some form of ignorance, or even false consciousness. Our theories of the cultural politics of sport rely, in short, on whether or to what extent these assumptions about the culture of sport are accurate, or what else might be going on.

Conclusion: Toward a More Critical, Dramaturgical Approach

So where do we go from here? How should sport scholars theorize and analyze the cultural politics of sport in an era of contestation and polarization whose impacts may or may not be seen by others in society in the ways that we do?

All the complexity and uncertainty of the era pushes me, again, toward a more critical, dramaturgical orientation to thinking about sport and its role in politics and society—one which sees sport as a site of ongoing (and uneven) social struggle that garners public attention and thus conveys social messages, public meaning, and symbolic significance well beyond the boundaries of sport itself. I have begun to sketch the outlines of such an orientation in previous work (Hartmann et al., 2022); here, by way of conclusion, I will highlight some characteristics most relevant for the historical conditions at hand.

Built on the foundations of cultural or symbolic approaches to social life as embodied in the work of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz in anthropology or Erving Goffman in sociology, this dramaturgical approach emphasizes sport's primary role and significance as a platform, a meaning-maker, a cultural theater wherein audiences and observers, whether sports fans or not, encounter social issues, identities, and problems that they might not otherwise consider. They see these social phenomena brought to life and played out on the athletic stage. It is, in this sense, about the expressive, symbolic, and communicative workings or functions of sport in society. Not only does sport draw public attention to social issues, causes, and identities that are played out in its space; it can, as illustrated above, also help amplify and frame these issues and intensify emotional reactions to them.

Applications in sport studies include Gerald Early's work on boxing and the construction of racial differences in the United States (1989, 1994), Joe Gusfield on sport as an agonistic form (1987), and Trygve Broch on gender in Norwegian sport (2020; see also Broch & Skille, 2019). Such dramaturgical perspectives insist that the social force of sport is not about changing hearts and minds, much less in changing behaviors or bringing about concrete social change, but rather, about encapsulating, reflecting, and reinforcing existing sociopolitical identities, ideologies, and interests by re-presenting them in cultural form—Geertz's (1973) famous “model of, model for” framing. In this respect a critical dramaturgical approach has a good deal in common with well-established analyses of the cultural politics of sport (as well as early functionalist theories of sport). What differentiates the former from the latter is the latter's attention to social contestation and struggle.

Informed by critical race scholars and feminist theorists, a critical dramaturgical approach sees sport as “contested terrain” (Hall, 1980, 2018, see also Carrington, 2010) and looks beyond the legitimation of power and the social status quo to allow for and in fact prioritize the broader, more general meaning and significance of the dynamics of social struggle, conflict, and potential change in society at large. Hegemony, in this framework, is not something imposed from the top-town but rather something that is struggled over and for by various competing actors and interests. CLR James magisterial treatment of how cricket not only reflected colonial power but also served as a resource to contest it in Beyond a Boundary (2013 [1963]; see also Hartmann, 2003a) remains perhaps the single most important work of this sort, at least on the race front.

Theorizing and analyzing the dramatization of contestation and change in and through sport is, as the discussions above have served to foreground, a bit more complicated than it first might seem. For one, what is dramatized and publicized via the platform of sport is not just the performance of protest, but the larger dynamics of contestation and struggle, and even polarization itself. Put differently, the performance or presentation of dissent is just a starting point; analysts must also attend to what happens next, how activism and protest is perceived and responded to. The implication here is that the meaning or symbolic significance of a sporting drama is not given or assumed, but instead determined by how various audiences perceive and engage it. Reception and response are, in short, empirical phenomena and social variables in and of themselves. And reception can include opposition, backlash, and counter-mobilization as well as institutional responses and reforms.

And these social dynamics are just the start. Documenting and assessing the social meaning and significance of the struggles played out on and communicated through the platform of sport also requires that these dramas must also be set in their broader social and historical context and thus connected to the more general social forces and political interests they represent. (On this point, I would also submit that if genuine social change unfolds in connection with these dramas, it is almost certainly driven by forces outside of sport rather than internal to it.) Here also, analysts need to be aware of and attentive to different political uses of sport as well as their own normative, moral, and political commitments to better recognize and analyze the full range of social orientations and political engagements in play. One of the core challenges for contemporary sport theorists, as I suggested above, is to anticipate mobilization from the Right and have the normative criterion in place to analyze and critique it properly.

None of this is to suggest that social struggle is always and necessarily going on in sport and thus dramatized there. It is not. Nor is it to say that in the absence of struggle sport is always playing a fundamentally conservative, reproductive role in reinforcing dominant images, identities, and ideologies. To the contrary, the point is that none of these social functions and effects are given but they all must be anticipated, looked for, and analyzed as such—even, or perhaps especially, when certain aspects (say resistance or counter-protest) appear to be absent.

One final set of points about a critical dramaturgical approach involves the characteristics that make sport a powerful, unique, and perhaps even unparalleled popular cultural stage for the presentation and display of all manner of social issues and struggles. Part of sport's cultural specificity and social power has to do with the visibility, attention, and traction that sports and athletes in particular command in the public culture. This is where (and why) media and social media are so central to and defining of the power of sport (Antunovic, 2022). However, the power of sport also involves the incredible array of associated marketing, advertising, licensing, and merchandizing forces built up around athletes and the entire athletic arena (Serazio, 2019). In comparison with other political forms and, indeed, other popular cultural forms, sport is simply marked by inordinate public visibility, prominence, and influence. Conceptualizing sport in this fashion calls attention to the reality that protest, power, and social struggles played out on the stage of sport are received and consumed by large and diverse public audiences and a range of consuming actors—and thus has consequence and impact well beyond sports fans and the usual boundaries of the athletic arena.

In addition to the sheer visibility and public attention that sport brings, it is also important to recognize the deep, if paradoxical emotional engagement audiences have with athletics. I am thinking here of the direct, embodied vicarious experiences that come with the drama and uncertainty of athletic competition. What is seen and experienced on the stage of sport is often understood and experienced passionately and emotionally. These sensations are deeply embedded and embodied. This depth of emotional attachments and experiences that audiences have in sport makes whatever sociopolitical significance attached to these dramas all the more socially significant.

This deep engagement is also structured and defined by the norms and ideals discussed earlier—the deep structure or high ideals about sport being both beyond politics and having an inherently positive, constructive force in society discussed just above is part of that. Having introduced Geertz and touched upon the need to understand how public audiences understand sport and to what extent they self-consciously aware and approving of sport's role in the social world, I would also suggest that the social awareness that comes with the social dramas played out on the athletic platform may not be fully conscious or cognitively rational. Indeed, the social dramas of sport are often engaged in the manner of what Geertz called “deep play”—cultural engagements with social structures and implications that are passionately pursued but also then, typically and almost simultaneously disavowed or dismissed in terms of their seriousness and social meaningfulness. Popular engagements with sport are, in this respect, paradoxical, deeply ambivalent—and it is precisely this paradoxical engagement that makes them all the more compelling and powerful.

These points about audience awareness and understanding bring me back to the question of how audiences and observers understand and assess sport and its proper place in the culture. The question, for cultural politics of sport scholars, is again this: how do public audiences and observers, whatever their social backgrounds or political persuasions, make sense of the dramatic platform of sport itself? Do they see it as a platform or not? Does their awareness and understanding of these social struggles in and around sport impact their understanding of sport as a cultural form especially given longstanding norms about the need to keep sport and politics separate? Given how much of our foundational theory and analysis is predicated on presuppositions about a lack of audience awareness and understanding, it seems imperative to consider if and how this might have changed due to recent historical developments—and, in particular, where the older norms and taboos are shifting, breaking down, or holding firm.

Once again, it is very difficult to answer such questions empirically. It is extremely difficult to completely capture and assess questions about deep-seated ideological beliefs and structures that may be only partially conscious or not recognized at all. But perhaps the fact that sometimes such questions can’t be answered and/or are not fully recognized by social actors themselves as questions may be one final piece of the puzzle of the paradoxical dramaturgical power that sport holds in our society today. Perhaps the paradoxical, puzzling, shifting nature of audience engagement and understanding (and misrecognition) of sport and social issues in sport—the way in which audiences are both aware and unaware, deeply engaged and yet fundamentally dismissive of its own engagement—is actually the key to sport's peculiar and overdetermining features and sociosymbolic significance. If so, it seems to me all the more reason not to attempt to determine sport's substantive politics or assume its one-directional reproductive functions, but instead to simply focus on its complicated and oftentimes contradictory social struggles and their received meanings, communicative messages, and broader significance in a society that is, itself, deeply contested and polarized.