| Sociological analyses of sports often emphasize their power to reinforce existing social formations. This dissertation complicates this perspective by focusing on the ambivalences, anxieties, and uncertainties that haunt the sports/media complex. The study draws on the critical insights of poststructuralist theory in order to demonstrate that these ambiguities are more than marginal by-products of an otherwise stable structure. Instead, the dissertation shows that just as the field of sports emerged through the rearrangement of social hierarchies within elite, 19th century educational institutions, so ambiguities continue to enable the expansion of that field into diverse spectacles. At the same time, this study uses critical theory to illustrate the contingency of sports, as these uncertainties are not contained within the field, but shared with other social structures that permeate sports culture, while exceeding its boundaries. More precisely, this dissertation traces the playing out of three productive ambiguities---the impossibilities of reading, participation, and identity---within the field of sports. Through case studies of instant replay, fantasy sports, the NBA, and ironic sports-talk, this study explores the aesthetic and rhetorical tactics through which the various agencies involved in the production of sports culture---fans, athletes, advertisers, merchandisers, referees and media industries---negotiate these ambiguities.;Throughout this analysis, this dissertation draws on Guy Debord's theorization of spectacle in order to connect the rhetorical and commercial economies of these negotiations of uncertainty. This study combines this older critical theory with more recent scholarship on media convergence, and focuses its attention on the contingent expansions of 21st century mediated sports culture. The close readings that it offers are studies of the synergies and tensions that emerge from the interactions between and among spectacles. These readings provide a better understanding of the transformations that are occurring as sports expand across media platforms. By explicating the productions of ambiguity, uncertainty, and ambivalence that haunt sports culture, this dissertation offers new insight into the complexity and sophistication of an important arena of popular culture and makes a compelling case for increased attention to sports within the field of media studies. |
