This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight looks at Erin C. Tarver’s The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity (Chicago, 2017). Tarver is the President’s Humanities Fellow at Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Emory’s Oxford College. She works primarily in feminist philosophy, the philosophy of sport, and American pragmatism, though she draws on a wide range of philosophical and scholarly literatures, from Continental philosophy to the sociology and history of sport
What is your work about?
In my book I offer a philosophical response to the question, “why does sports fandom matter so much to so many Americans today?” I argue that sports fandom is a primary means of creating and reinforcing individual and community identities in the contemporary U.S., contributing both to communities’ persistence over time, and to the racial and gender hierarchies that characterize those communities. Sports fandom, I claim, is a practice of (what Foucault called) subjectivization: a means by which individuals are both regulated and, at the same time, achieve a sense of their own identities. Basically, I want to say that when sports fans say stuff like “I bleed blue and gold,” they’re saying something that’s not too far from the truth—their practices of fandom are giving shape to their innermost experience of selfhood. But it’s important to notice that these practices aren’t innocuous: mainstream sports fandom has been and continues to be instrumental in perpetuating norms of sexual and racial oppression. I end the book by considering some more marginal and subversive practices of sports fandom (i.e. the support of the WNBA by queer fans) and suggesting that we could engage in sports fandom in new and different ways, and thus begin to change its effects.
What does your work say about the place of athletes within our society? Do they subjectivize by providing a goal that, for most of us, is unrealizable? How does their subjectivizing influence change our understanding of phenomena like Colin Kaepernick’s protest?
First let me clarify that I do not say that athletes subjectivize fans. When I say that sports fandom is a practice of subjectivization, I am saying that the enormous constellation of practices that make up sports fandom—i.e. ongoing knowledge acquisition about the particular sport(s) a fan follows, the patterns of discourse particular to teams or sports (especially when these are used to mark in-group or out-group status), the collection and display of artifacts associated with a team or sport, the participation in collective rituals around that team like cheers, songs, tailgating or other specific traditions of spectatorship, as well as the imaginative relations that fans engage in when they root for specific players—are instrumental in creating sports fans’ senses of self, and in reinforcing norms associated with belonging and collective identity.
Now, fan practices are obviously organized around the activities of teams and individual athletes, and the various changes that the relationship between fans and athletes has undergone in the United States since racial integration and since Title IX have made that relationship quite complex and important to interrogate. This means that there is not just one “place of athletes in our society.” We should not assume, for example, that the mere fact that white fans now cheer for players of color on the field indicates that we are making progress in overcoming racial oppression. Instead, we might just be seeing a willingness on the part of white fans to treat young black men, as Malcolm X put it, as mascots—as useful for the purposes of bringing glory to those fans’ communities, so long as they do what’s expected of them and nothing else. A relationship like that reinforces white supremacy by giving white people the impression that these young men exist for them, rather than as full human beings with interests and desires of their own, and by meting out punishments to people of color who refuse to play by those rules. It seems to me that Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter protesters in the NFL put into sharp relief just how fraught and tenuous the relationship between the NFL’s mostly-white fan base and its majority-black player population is, and the extent to which it’s characterized by mascotting.
My book was going to press as Kaepernick’s protest was starting to get significant coverage back in 2016, so I didn’t get to talk about it there, but I just published an article on this in which I argue that the vitriolic fan response to this protest is illustrative of the role of American football fandom in managing fans’ racial and gender anxieties, and in upholding a nostalgic ideal of white masculinity.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Most basically, because I was trying to make sense of how it could be that sports were so deeply important to me, even though I was not an athlete. I found this fact consistently confusing, because in the abstract, being invested in the outcome of a game you have no control over and which has no obvious tangible consequences in your life seems fundamentally irrational. And yet, my experiences as a sports fan, and as a feminist, told me that this abstract view was missing something crucial about the activity of sports fandom. Looking at sports fandom as simply the irrational investment in an arbitrarily formed allegiance didn’t help me understand why telling someone about my specific sporting allegiances felt so central to my biography, why being able to recite the scores of games played decades ago seemed so important for so many of the boys and men I knew growing up, or how so many of the white people I grew up around managed to devote themselves to something that looked like worship of young black men when they were on the football field on the weekends and then to treat them as threats or worse off it.
So I went looking for answers in the literatures where I expected to find them, and was surprised how little there was, at least in the discipline of philosophy itself. Philosophy of sport was (and still is, generally speaking) more focused on sport qua sport, not sport as a social phenomenon or sport as considered from the perspective of fans. (I will say that a notable exception to this was Stephen Mumford’s Watching Sport, which I think is great, but which has a slightly different focus than my book.) The other surprise for me was how little work there was in feminist philosophy or the critical philosophy of race on sports, which was frankly a bit shocking to me, given how very gendered and racialized the phenomenon is, especially in the United States. It seemed to me something that we ought to be talking about. It is something feminists and critical race theorists are talking about in disciplines like sociology and anthropology, but much less so in philosophy.
Finally, I think that that as a white person, I have an obligation to investigate and work against the mechanisms that support white supremacy. Growing up in the deep south, I had the nagging sense that sports fandom as it was engaged in by many white people was in fact one of those mechanisms. So part of what I tried to do, both in the book and in the public pieces I have written that followed it, is to make a specific effort to expose what Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, called “the impact of racism those who perpetuate it”–in other words, to get white people to recognize the extent to which they/we are both implicated in and shaped by racism, especially in everyday practices like sports fandom.
I’ve heard debates among journalists on the Left over whether they should cover sports. Some say it is a distraction from what’s important, and others that the Left becomes marginalized if they don’t discuss a defining passion for so many in society? Do you see a similar danger if philosophers don’t engage the topic?
I think the danger of not talking about sports is bigger than just becoming marginalized. I think ignoring it actively makes us less able to adequately conceptualize and respond to the world we live in and the communities of which we are a part. Let me illustrate this by way of example: feminists in the last century have pushed us to reconceptualize some basic philosophical presuppositions. These range from the supposed biological immutability of gender and the physiological capacities associated with it to taking propositional knowledge (S knows that P) as the paradigm case of knowledge in epistemology. In both cases feminists have argued that what had been taken for granted as just straightforwardly true was at best contingent on a host of social factors that might or might not obtain depending on our context. One of the things that is fascinating to me about sports fandom is how it functions to reinforce both of these problematic assumptions: as I show in the book, boys specifically are often socialized in their sports fandom to value the acquisition of propositional knowledge about sport, to view that knowledge as a measurement of their approximation of normative masculinity, and consequently to presume incompetence as knowers on the part of girls, women, and anyone else deemed insufficiently masculine. Additionally, because participation in sport—either as a spectator or an athlete—has been so central to the enforcement of norms around masculinity, there have been deliberate efforts to prevent and/or restrict the participation in sports by women and girls. As Iris M. Young famously argued, these restrictions have themselves literally given shape to the bodies and subjectivities of women. What I am arguing is that the various practices of sports fandom are such an enormous part of our contemporary culture that they have real, tangible consequences for consciousness, and for social organization. If philosophers are still in the business of understanding reality (and I think we are!) then I think we had better not ignore something that’s such a big feature of it.
The one other thing I would say about this is that as a pragmatist, I think it’s crucial to begin our philosophizing from people’s experiences of the world. Though I disagree with his conclusion, I really value William James’s “The Moral Equivalent of War” in this regard. James was a pacifist and he worried about the consequences of Americans’ apparent attachment to war-mongering, but his starting point in the essay—which originally was an address to a group of pacifists—wasn’t to say “these people are stupid or morally bankrupt, we can’t talk to them.” No, the presumption he starts with is instead, “people are attached to this thing that they obviously know to be harmful in many ways, so what are they getting out of it? Does the fact that they are getting something out of an attachment to war help us better understand something about moral value, or about what humans need to be fulfilled?” His point was to try to get other pacifists to find a different way of reaching people, one that doesn’t presume incompetence and/or depravity on the part of the vast majority of the population. I think that kind of epistemic humility is important for doing philosophy well, and also for being a decent human being. So I’d say I feel a bit suspicious of philosophers or critics on the Left who think it’s obvious that this thing that so many of our family members, community members, students, etc. really care about is a distraction or unimportant. What happens if we take people’s experiences seriously instead?
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
My work in philosophy has always been for me about trying to understand the world around me, and figuring out how to be a better person in it. I came to philosophy in a sort of unexpected way: I was deeply religious as a teenager, and as an undergraduate I intended to study theology and move on to work for the Church. Before college, my main preoccupations were always about being a good person and finding my proper role in the universe—which at the time I understood as ‘doing what God wants me to do.’ I encountered Philosophy for the first time in a freshman honors seminar and was completely taken in when we read part of Cicero’s On Duties. Over time, I came to find philosophical argument and explanation more satisfying than the theological explanations I had started with. But I have never stopped believing, deep down, in the importance of thinking carefully about the choices I make in the world, the practices I am involved in, and in my obligation to help other people do the same. So for me, writing critically about the ethical and social implications of sports fandom wasn’t just an interesting way of connecting part of my personal life with my work; it was something I felt as an obligation.
In practical terms, I’ll say that this has resulted in my watching sport a lot less than I used to—not because I think it’s irredeemable, but because writing about it has demystified it a bit for me. It has also forced me to grapple more directly with the best way to approach something like football. On the one hand, I think it would be better on balance for society if no one played football; on the other, since my primary concern is with the long-term well-being of its practitioners, it is not at all clear to me that boycotting football is helpful, particularly given the President’s efforts in the last few years to mobilize NFL boycotts as a tool for advancing political goals that I find abhorrent.
How has your work influenced your teaching?
I love this question because I work in a unit of Emory that is devoted to undergraduate teaching: Oxford College is Emory’s original campus in Oxford, Georgia, and we function as a small, residential liberal arts college within the larger research university. So, as a professor, I identify most strongly with other SLAC faculty who take teaching extremely seriously, who do a lot of it, and who are always looking for new ways to help students connect with the material.
Most basically, I’d say there are two main ways my work has influenced my teaching: it has encouraged me to search for novel inroads to get students invested in questions they might not have otherwise found interesting, and it has encouraged me to put more emphasis on teaching students to write concise, clear articulations of their own ideas instead of spending quite so much time with textual analysis. For the first piece, it was when I was writing the book and thinking about the historical persistence of teams that I first realized what a gold mine a class like the Philosophy of Sport could be for teaching standard metaphysical concepts like the Problem of Identity (I talked about this briefly in a recent interview with Slate). But Philosophy of Sport also turned out to be an inroad for all kinds of other discussions that I thought were really important, like gender norms, racial oppression, labor and exploitation, disability and inclusion, and so on. There’s a massive group of people who are never going to sign up for a course in feminism or Marxism or metaphysics. But those same people will often find themselves enthusiastically participating in those discussions if we take the time to make the connections to something they are interested in, whether that’s business or sports or medicine, or whatever. As a teacher, I think I am in the business of empowering people to think more effectively about their world, and doing this work has reminded me of the importance of thinking creatively about helping connect students to philosophy.
For the second piece, I reached a transition in my life as a thinker when my editor at Chicago (the incomparable Elizabeth Branch Dyson) encouraged me to write more in my own voice and to spend less time telling my audience what Foucault had said about something. I found this both freeing and challenging, coming out of two graduate programs in Continental philosophy. I think for many years I relied too heavily on the citation and analysis of canonical figures, not because I couldn’t produce my own arguments, but because it felt necessary for having my ideas taken seriously. I decided I wanted my students to be empowered from the first to figure out how to articulate their own ideas well (and concisely!), so I shifted to assigning more short papers requiring them to write an argument in response to whatever author we were reading, and fewer assignments analyzing the arguments that those authors made. I still think argument analysis is crucial, but the process of writing this book made me rethink what my assignments were communicating about what is valuable in philosophy. I am committed to the idea that philosophy is more than a set of ideas put forth a long time ago by a series of (mostly white, mostly male) other people; it’s a living thing that WE do. And I wanted my assignments to reflect that.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on two book-length projects right now. One is an argument for a radical restructuring of intercollegiate athletics in the United States, which would involve creating a genuine minor league system in football and basketball and eliminating much of what we now know as big-time college athletics. The other is a more interdisciplinary investigation of the uses (and abuses) of sports fandom in American politics, in which I argue that we will better understand—and be able to move beyond—our current moment of political polarization if we recognize it as drawing on the worst habits of American sports fandom. I envision both of these as texts written for a popular audience. If I succeed in that regard, I am sure I will upset a few people, notably sports fans. But I think these things are important enough to merit serious attempts at public engagement, not just academic discussion.
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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
