UC Santa Cruz

As a mediatized spectator sport, American tackle football has never been more popular. At the same time, football’s undeniable connection with traumatic brain injuries and degenerative brain disease has spurred a decline in youth participation and an existential predicament. Fewer kids are playing the sport, but will Americans ever stop consuming football? If not, why not? Who remains to fulfill America’s insatiable desire for football and what does this reveal about the economic and racial structures of the National Football League (NFL)—the most profitable sports league in the world? This dissertation details how we reached this point (of peak football, and of a mounting public health crisis), and considers what America’s fascination with football has wrought. Football’s embodiment of American economic, social, and political values has helped to naturalize the game as American myth. Reflecting on the visual, aural, and rhetorical sources of football’s power, I first historicize the creation of America’s football mythology, paying close attention to the role moving images and narrational devices have played in the sport’s popularization; from its appearance in early cinema, newsreels, and narrative features to the promotional documentaries of NFL Films. Using an interdisciplinary framework of textual analysis, contextual cultural history, visual culture studies, critical theory, and Black feminist thought, I closely analyze a cross-section of media objects, including narrative and documentary films and television programs as well as experimental media works, to explicate the dominant ideologies embedded in American football. But my reading is also attentive to signs of resistant and oppositional articulations, ruptures, and pleasures. I locate these counterhegemonic articulations and counternarratives in unconventional nonfiction and avant-garde films, but in mainstream dramatic offerings as well.

This research asserts that in American sports media, the labor and performance of football is regularly transfigured as narrative, with unscripted reality (the playing of a game) and dramatized spectacle fused into one, which in turn creates a distancing effect. This disavowal, of football’s arduous physicality, is one of the constitutive elements underpinning football’s success as a media sport. This century’s data-driven turn in sports management and analysis has added a further layer of abstraction and distance, as athletes’ bodies become increasingly perceived as data points and profiles to be atomized, parsed, and controlled. I maintain the consequences of this disembodiment are not yet fully understood or appreciated. In counterpoint to the game’s ideologies of conquest, racial capitalism, hegemonic masculinity, coercive entitlement, and white supremacy, I also contemplate football through a lens of tenderness, intimacy, and care, bringing forward more utopian potentials.