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Abstract
The National Football League (NFL) draft is an annual meeting where professional teams claim contract rights to college players. It has recently become a major media event, previewed extensively by scores of magazines, newspapers, and websites, and televised in its seventeen-hour entirety by ESPN. A critical reading of these discourses finds frequent expressions of desire for the bodies of draft prospects. The paper situates this homoerotic commentary in the historical context of American white supremacy in order to explain why the mostly black prospects are available for this kind of perusal and assessment, especially given the taboos against homosexual desire that suffuse the culture of elite football; while explaining how such practices affirm inter-male dominance based on a hierarchy of race by deploying the patriarchal strategies of the male gaze.
Keywords:
Acknowledgments
He would like to thank Susan Birrell, Robert Ivie, John Sloop, Catriona Parratt, Judy Polumbaum, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this essay.
Notes
1. Lisa Magenheimer, “‘Sexy’ Draft Attracts Extensive Coverage,” Tampa Tribune, 16 April 1999.
2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1972), 52.
3. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993), 9–19. Neale argues that “in a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body may not be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look; that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic element suppressed. In the draft, the looking is legitimated as a commercial transaction and, ultimately, through the inter-male violence that characterizes elite football. For more on the erotic gaze in sport, see Kelly Nelson, “The Erotic Gaze and Sports: An Ethnographic Consideration,” Journal of Sport History 29 (2002): 407–12.
4. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1995), 60.
5. Kellner, 61, 58.
6. Susan Birrell and Mary McDonald, “Reading Sport Critically: A Methodology for Interrogating Power,” Sociology of Sport Journal 16 (1999): 284.
7. Birrell and McDonald, 283.
8. Birrell and McDonald, 284.
9. Celine Parrenas Shimizu, “Master–Slave Sex Acts: Mandingo and the Race/Sex Paradox,” Wide Angle, 24 (1999): 44.
10. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 221.
11. David Duffy, “Players: It Was … Like a Meat Market,” http://espn.go.com/ncf/seniorbowl/weighin.html (accessed 23 January 2002).
12. Jill Lieber, “Maximum Exposure,” Sports Illustrated, 1 May 1989: 38.
13. Lieber, 38.
14. Lieber, 38.
15. In spite of this fact, race-based hierarchies remain unusually pronounced in the NFL. The management of the game remains firmly in the control of white men. Blacks hold a minority of the assistant coaching positions, and further up the hierarchy, the personnel profile is even less diverse. In the NFL's history, less than 3 percent of head coaches appointed have been black, and until 2001, when the New York Jets hired Herman Edwards, an African American, forty-two consecutive head coaching vacancies had been filled by whites. Whites currently hold 27 of the 32 head coaching positions in the NFL, and every majority owner of an NFL franchise is white.
16. S. L. Price “Whatever Happened to the White Athlete,” Sports Illustrated, 8 December 1997: 34.
17. Rick Reilly, “White Like Me,” Sports Illustrated, 4 April, 152.
18. Joan Ryan, “White men can bitch,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 February 2002, http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/02/17/IN157576.DTL (accessed 28 September 2003).
19. Michael Freeman, ESPN: The Uncensored History (Lanham, MD: Taylor, 2002).
20. Brian Baldinger, “My Turn: Brian Baldinger,” The Sporting News, 28 April 2002: 6.
21. Lane Hartill and Suman Bandrapalli, “Inside the NFL draft,” Christian Science Monitor, 23 March 2000.
22. Luke Cyphers, “Hot startups,” ESPN: The Magazine, 17 April 2000: 81.
23. Joel Buchsbaum and the Editors of Pro Football Weekly, Pro Football Weekly 2001 Draft Preview (Northbrook, IL: Millennium Graphics, 2001), 102. From 2000 to 2005, this preview was made available each year in its entirety on http://sports.espn.go.com/nfldraft/index, ESPN's website devoted to the draft.
24. Mel Kiper, Jr., Mel Kiper Jr.'s 2002 Draft Report (Jarrettsville, MD: Mel Kiper Enterprises, 2002), 71, 8.
25. Kiper, 2002, 8
26. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/graphics/nfldraft06/flash.htm (accessed 11 April 2006); Buchsbaum 2001, 121; Buchsbaum 2002, 150; Buchsbaum 2002, 37.
27. Mel Kiper, Jr., Mel Kiper Jr.'s 2000 Draft Report (Jarrettsville, MD: Mel Kiper Enterprises, Inc., 2000), 68; Kiper 2002, 65; Nolan Nawrocki and the editors of Pro Football Weekly, Pro Football Weekly’ 2004 Draft Preview (Northbrook, IL: Pro Football Weekly, 2004), 84; Nawrocki 2004, 26.
28. Buchsbaum 2001, 118.
29. Buchsbaum 2002, 20.
30. Buchsbaum 2001, 91; Buchsbaum 2001, 55.
31. Quoted in Allen Guttman, The Erotic in Sports (New York: Columbia, 1996).
32. Alan Dundes, “Into the Endzone for a Touchdown: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football,” Western Folklore 37 (1978): 87.
33. Brian Pronger, “Outta my Endzone: Sport and the Territorial Anus,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 23, issue 4 (1999): 372–89.
34. Mark Simpson makes a similar point about phallic competition in soccer in Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (New York: Cassell, 1994), 72.
35. David Kopay and Perry Deane Young, The David Kopay Story: An Extraordinary Self-Revelation (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1977), 52–54.
36. Nick Trujillo, “Machines, Missles, and Men,” Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (1995): 417.
37. Mariah Burton Nelson, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the Culture of Sports (New York: Avon, 1994), 117.
38. Burton, 118.
39. Alan Grant, “A Combine Affair,” http://espn.go.com/magazine/grant_20020305.html (accessed 5 March 2002).
40. http://www.easports.com/nflheadcoach/theater.jsp (accessed 29 April 2006).
41. Freeman, 270.
42. Keyshawn Johnson and Shelly Smith,“Just Give Me the Damn Ball!”: The Fast Times and Hard Knocks of an NFL Rookie (New York: Warner, 1997), 26.
43. Margaret Morse, “Sport on Television: Replay and Display,” in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Los Angeles: University Publications of America, 1983).
44. bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996), 197.
45. Berger, 45, 47.
46. Berger, 52.
47. Berger, 64.
48. Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising (London: Sage, 1997), 41.
49. Sean Nixon, Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 3; see also Frank Mort, “A boy's own?: Masculinity, style, and popular culture,” in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988).
50. Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 229–64.
51. Toby Miller, Sportsex (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 11.
52. Bordo, 234.
53. Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Screen 29 (1988): 25.
54. Anne DuCille, “The Unbearable Darkness of Being: ‘Fresh’ Thoughts on Race, Sex, and the Simpsons,” in Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, ed. Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 306.
55. Jay Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia, 1996), 211.
56. Shimizu, 46.
57. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 149.
58. Johnson, 145.
59. Johnson, 149.
60. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 98.
61. Wiegman, 99.
62. duCille, 308.
63. John Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
64. Leola Johnson and David Roediger, “Hertz Don't It?: Becoming Colorless and Staying Black in the Crossover of O.J. Simpson,” in Morrison and Lacour, Birth of a Nation‘hood, 223.
65. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Methuen, 1989), 219.
66. Fiske, 219.
67. David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (New York: Vintage, 1998), 177.
68. “Pruett Apologizes, Avoids Reprimand for Comment,” Associated Press, 15 September 2004.
69. Roach, 211.
70. Elizabeth Alexander, “‘Can You be Black and Watch This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s) in Black Male: Representations of Black Masculinity in Contemporary Art, ed. Thelma Gordon (New York: Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994), 92–93.
71. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 34.
72. hooks 1992, 39.
73. Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995), 295–300.