One Day in September and a Week in February: Mobilizing American (Sporting) Nationalisms

Abstract

In an ongoing effort to “police the crisis” (see Denzin, 2004a and b; Denzin & Lincoln, 2003) and critically interrogate the tyrannical (govern)mentality of conservative rhetoric centered on a peculiar or juridical concept of “right” (Baudrillard, 2001; Johnson, 2002; McClaren, 2002) under the agenda of “9/11 America,” this article explores the official moral pedagogies of the sporting media. Through analysis of the media representations of two major sporting events that took place in the first week of February, 2002—the delayed Super Bowl and the Opening of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics—the article focuses on the place of sport as an economy of affect through which power, privilege, politics, and position are (re)produced. The “epistemic panic” (Gordon, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 2000) played out through these two events can be read as part of the wider self-examining, self-referential, existential narrative of the American nation in the wake of the ontological, social, and historical disruption (Giroux, 2002) wrought by 9/11—a politicized and militaristic rhetoric appropriated within, and mobilized through, the affective realm of the sporting popular.