Sport media studies and (re)producing identities

Abstract

“Identity ” is one of the most disputed notions in many fields of study. Ironically, while identity is considered by many to be anobsolete term under erasure, identity remains a salient issue andorganizing principle in sporting environments. Responses to issues of identity have varied from explicit identity-based political struggle organized to redress inequality to non-identarian challenges by postmodern theorists whom criticize essentialist identity-based movements for the pernicious reproduction of inequality along various axes of power. Within these paradoxical developments, a middleground postcolonial postpostivist realist (PPR) approach has emerged since the late 1990s to recover understandings of experience, social location, material conditions, and the grounded salience accorded to identity by individuals and groups. In this paper Sayta Mohanty and Paula Moya PPR approach is adapted using Stuart Hall notion of identification and Benedict Anderson notion of nation as an imagined community to ethnographically explore a sport media case study of the negotiation of national and racialized athletic identifications associated with swimmers from Equatorial Guinea by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation during the 2000 Summer Olympics. Identifications are found to be relational,contingent,
performative, and productive and therefore continue to have political salience and material impact on people at sites of sport media production andcompetition. Non-essentialist
approaches to identity studies are argued to be theoretically and politically useful but in need of further development.