ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the sporting body as a site of resistance and refusal. Specifically, it investigates how suicides of former professional football players and hockey “enforcers” offer a commentary on physical labour in late capitalism. Positioned in response to the ‘concussion debate”, the chapter argues that athlete suicides must be read collectively as a “social text”, symptomatic of specific working conditions and labour struggles often misread as external to sports. To excavate the political possibilities of athletes’ suicides, we turn to sociological and anthropological studies of suicide as social protest (i.e., hunger strikes and self-immolation). Here the self-destruction of the athlete’s body is understood less as an individual psychological aberration than as a political act, one that reflects and reacts against a specific set of socioeconomic conditions. The suicides mark a “corporeal critique” that speaks to professional sport as an economic enterprise indebted to the use, abuse and “disposability” of athletic bodies as physical labour. Rather than framing and dismissing each suicide as an act which says something about the characteristics of the individual, as those now left behind to memorialize it, we have an obligation to acknowledge and extend the expression of the act as collective, political and communicative.
