Bigger, faster, stronger: how racist and sexist ideologies persist in college sports

ABSTRACT

US college sports are prime cultural sites of racist and sexist ideological production [Coakley, Jay. 2015. Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies. 11th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; Eitzen, Stanley D. 2016. Fair and Foul: Beyond the Myths and Paradoxes of Sport. 5th ed. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield]. Much of the research into the ideological production in college athletics centres media coverage of two men’s commercialized sports (American football and basketball) as the producers of ideologies and one subject (fans) as the consumers of ideologies. Less is known about how ideologies are produced, circulated, and ultimately reproduced amongst college athletes. To address this gap, I use [Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy. New York, NY: Monthly Review] approach to ideology to analyse 47 interviews with Olympic (or non-commercialized) college athletes. Findings position college sport as an ISA with at least three mechanisms – time, behaviour, and language – that hail participants to racist and sexist ideologies rooted in ‘biological’ difference. Findings also explore how college athletes question how their own bodies are constructed by dominant ideologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Ideology
• Althusser
• reproduction
• college sports
• life-history interviews

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kirsten Hextrum is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and a faculty affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her professional career in college athlete academic support services and personal experience as a Division I athlete inform her research, teaching, and activism. She is a leading expert on the college athletic admission process and is at work on the book, Special Admissions: The Sports Path to College. Dr Hextrum’s larger research agenda examines school-sports as social settings that can maintain and/or contest power systems. A variety of top-tier journals have published her research including Harvard Educational Review; Studies in Higher Education; Sport, Education, and Society, and Teachers College Record. Her work has also received public coverage in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Inside Higher Education, and in the documentary The Business of Amateurs.