ABSTRACT
As argued in the previous chapter, the sporting spectacles that took place in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 appropriated US corporo-political needs, opining a myopic expression of American jingoism, militarism, and geopolitical domination that provided citizens with the tools through which to make sense of 9/11. Importantly, and even though emotive, affective, and thus highly pedagogic and political texts, these expressions of nation were also part of the commercial production process. That is, embedded within a spectacular society, these texts were commodities that deployed the power to shape national identities and subjectivities (Giroux, 2000b; Hall, 1997). Such a conglomeration of ‘needs’—political, corporate, militarized, economic-points to the ways in which we are seduced and incorporated into discursive systems and materialisms directed both by the state and transnational capital in the interactions between nationalism and popular culture (cf. Giardina, 2005; McCarthy et al., 2005; Prideaux, 2009). In this regard, national symbols, myths, and memories were deployed through the strategies of transnational corporations-elsewhere I have termed these corporate nationalisms (see Silk, Andrews, & Cole, 2005)—which point to the relative power to convey or stage ‘nation’ (no matter how superfi cial or erroneous). In the staging, or manipulation, of ‘nation’ in the interests of capital, it is possible to point to the role of the (sporting) body that ‘mattered’ in the post-9/11 moment. In an extension and critique of Bryman’s (2004) concept of Disneyization, Andrews (2006) proposed that it is the sporting body that is most important to hypercommercial sporting spectacle. For Andrews (2006), the narrativized sporting spectacle is only as compelling to a viewing audience as the emotive objects-bodies-that provide the focus of highly personalized storylines. As such, Andrews (2006) emphasized the primacy of emotional labor in the sporting spectacle, suggesting that the sporting body exhibits what are perceived to be engaging (commercially desirable) personas-to which could be added engaging neoliberal, neoconservative, militarized, and thus highly political, functional, and productive bodies. As such, sporting organizations have “conjured forth a phantasmagorical world of embodied identities and narratives incorporating tropes routinely associated with the experiential sweep of human
existence (triumph and tragedy, falling and redemption, success and failure, heroism and villainy)” (Andrews, 2006, pp. 99-100). Given the confl uence of interests-commercial, state, military, sporting-in the constitution of sporting bodies that could most “successfully interpellate the subjectivities of suffi cient swathes of the consuming populace” (Andrews, 2006, p. 99), I turn in this chapter to the ways in which the sporting popular in the post-9/11 era offered a rigid, fi xed, and narrow defi nition of who and what constituted an American after 9/11, compelling political and pedagogic discourses that clearly indicated who did and did not matter to and for America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I begin through locating these corporeal representations of America within a rapid neoliberalization of politics / society and militarization of culture prior to turning to a number of examples in the sporting popular that served to ‘validate’ a post-9/11 patriarchal body politic.
