In ‘Football and Manliness,’ Thomas B. Oates offers a prescient intersectional feminist analysis of the central symbolic place of the National Football League in U.S. culture and politics. In each chapter, Oates provides close readings of various popular media texts, which, despite remaining secondary to the spectacle of televised games, profoundly shape the ideological work the NFL performs in relation to dominant constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. These texts include fictionalized cinematic and televised melodramas depicting the internal dynamics of professional football teams; sports media coverage of the NFL draft; self-help books authored by noted NFL coaches; computer-based games, including fantasy league football and Madden NFL; and lastly, the investigative reportage that ignited the NFL concussion scandal. As Oates succinctly posits, “these texts produce a complex but ultimately coherent set of stories about gender, race, and contemporary capitalism” (20).
Articles by Shannon O'Sullivan
Shannon O’Sullivan is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Green Mountain College. O’Sullivan earned her doctorate in Media Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2017. During her time at CU, she also completed graduate certificates in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies. Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on investigating the relationships between media, public policies, and the reproduction and resistance of social injustices.