Welcome to Sporting Rhetoric

This blog is a space where I can share with the public my academic journey with sports media. As a former NCAA Div 1 athlete, now R1 PhD student, my involvement and interest in sport and sport media has been a life long endeavor. But it wasn't until I came across Jabari Mahiri's Out of Bounds: When Scholarship Athletes Become Academic Scholars that I realized there was an entire space and field of work on sport, education, and media communications that I was missing out on. Lawrence Wenner's MediaSport opened the door further in exciting new ways.

Despite its growing prominence and interest in other academic fields, sport and sport media have yet to really hit the rhet-comp's radar, save for the recent contributions by Barry Brummett, in his edited collection Sporting Rhetoric, and Linda Fuller's recent edited compilations Sport, Rhetoric, Gender, Sexual Sports Rhetoric:Universal and Global Contexts (2010a; 2010b), and Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical and Media Contexts of Violence. These four books speak to a growing interest in rhetorical scholarship concerning the political economy and rhetorical effects of sport and serve as important points of departure for my academic journey with the myriad spaces and places of sport in the context of gender relations. For more classical lenses from the field of rhet-comp, I am grateful for Debra Hawhee's Bodily Arts which explores connections between ancient athletics and Sophistic rhetorical pedagogy.

Of pivotal interest to me are rhetorics of the (gendered) body and the rhetorical effects of the mind/body split in certain social subject positions and spaces, particularly the student-athlete and professional and college athletics. Jabari Mahiri's Out of Bounds and Shooting for Excellence, as well as Julie Cheville's Minding the Body: What Student-Athletes Know About Learning all interrogate the rhetoric of Cartesian metaphysics that so many student-athletes struggle to negotiate across and within various institutional spaces. Exploring the classed, raced, and gendered implications of the mind-body split, Mahiriand Cheville provide a powerful impetus for rethinking the predominantly pejorative myth of the "dumb jock" and their social position within higher education; they contextualize, indeed humanize, these students' experiences within the larger institutional webs of power and conflicting ideology of which they are co-constitutive, shaped by and helping to shape.

These works, in addition to my growing interest in feminisms, including technofeminism/ cyberfeminism, American and French postmodern feminisms, and feminist sport sociology and communications scholarship (Hall; Lenskyj; Creedon; Cole, among others), as well as critical discourse analysis (Fairclough; Van Dijk; Mean), are providing exciting new inroads for my academic journey through a PhD in the humanities. As I make my way through the rich intertextual and interdisciplinary conversations about sport, media, and gender, I find myself exhaling; renewed, refreshed, and grateful.

As a scholarship athlete turned academic scholar, I am indeed grateful for the roads paved by these scholars, and for the exciting opportunities I now have, in part because of their work, to connect my lived experiences--which, for so long, seemed so foreign to and unacknowledged by academe--with a richly diverse and expanding field of research on sport, media, and gender. I hope some of the blog snippets that follow in the months are of some interest, if not educational import, for those kind enough to join me in the process.

All best,

-Cassie Wright