ABSTRACT
This book discusses the connections between football culture and broader systems of power as well as how change might be catalyzed from the football field, the press box, the stands, and public discourse. Football is such a complicated cultural text to interpret precisely because of the larger entanglements of power and social capital, with race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationhood. The National Football League (NFL), as a hugely profitable form of mass spectacle, is clearly entwined with dominant cultural interests that extend in and beyond sports culture. On a collective scale, the NFL is a unifying entity, one that amidst the exchanges of millions and billions of dollars, the centrality of transnational corporations, national narratives, militaristic interest, and commodity culture, traffics in narratives of everyday masculinity, shared community, and a working-class identity. NFL, despite its participation in hegemonic systems, is complex.
