Rhetoric, Materiality, and the Disruption of Meaning: The Stadium as a Place of Protest

Abstract

Recently, athlete protests about social injustice have garnered much attention from fans and the media. An element frequently overlooked is the role of place in sports protests. Stadiums are iconic markers of identity for communities and play a significant role in the media’s representation of sports games. Informed by Endres and Senda-Cook’s research about place-in-protest, I argue how the Botham Jean and O’Shae Terry protests outside AT&T Stadium in Dallas functioned as place-as-rhetoric to build on the intended purpose of the stadium while temporarily reconstructing its meaning. This material enactment is achieved by the stadium serving as a performative space that authorizes new meaning onto the stadium and surrounding space while heralding it as a champion marker of social justice. I position my analysis within a framework that understands how sports stadiums deploy material rhetoric in ways that produce embodied rhetoric and ephemeral rhetoric that legitimize the Jean and Terry protests as social justice protests. I argue that the stadium functions as place-in-rhetoric to capitalize on its mobilization of fandom in order to amplify social justice messages to a wider audience.