EC.GLBT Subcommittee Document Endorsing Protest Demands 2010

This is the statement created in the Equity Council Subcommittee on LGBTIQQ Concerns meeting on August 23rd that endorses the list of demands as presented by students affiliated with URI GSA and the GLBT Center

Notes on the uses of sport in Trump’s white nationalist assemblage

Using conjunctural analysis and informed by insights drawn from critical whiteness studies, sport studies, and masculinity studies, I offer some developing interpretations on two inter-related questions. First, how sport has been used to cultivate and popularize the proto-fascist white nationalist project(s) currently gripping the United States. And second, how sport facilitates the production and popularization of the unapologetic and omnipotent performance of white masculinity that seems central to the popular appeal of this contemporary American white nationalist assemblage. To address these questions, I critically examine the patterned ways Donald Trump, first as candidate and then as President, has used sport to promote his white nationalist project. Additionally, I critically unpack the writings and performances of two white male cultural figures who are key figures within Trump nationalist assemblage. The first, Richard Spencer, coined the label ‘alternative right’. The second, National Football League superstar, Tom Brady, is a man who Trump loves to call a ‘good friend’. I contend that, like Trump, they venerate (in Spencer’s case) and normalize (in Brady’s case) an idealized performance of white masculinity I call white male omnipotence, that is central to explaining the appeal of Trump’s nationalist project to “Make America Great Again” for many anxious white Americans

Remasculinizing American white guys in/through new millennium American sport films

In this essay I analyse the cultural politics of the white masculinities constructed in new millennium American sport films. Specifically, I situate the production and consumption of these films in a historical conjuncture marked by an alleged crisis of masculinity for American men and the revitalization of a new conservatism in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001. Produced within this social milieu, several new millennium American sport films offer narratives featuring white everymen experiencing various crises where sport provides a masculinizing solution to their anxieties (at least momentarily). Thus, I illuminate four representational strategies common in a number of these films in order to read new millennium sport films as key cultural sites disseminating and popularizing a set of conservative ideologies and logics about gender, race and class, whose effect, if not intent, is the re-centring of white masculinity in post-9/11 American culture and, by extension, refortifying white male privilege in American society

From NASCAR Nation to Pat Tillman: Notes on sport and the politics of White cultural nationalism in post-9/11 America

The author offers some developing thoughts on a domestic White cultural nationalism that emerged from the ashes of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. More specifically, the author reads the November 10, 2003, National Review cover story and the media spectacle made of Pat Tillman\u27 s death in 2004 while serving in President Bush\u27 s war on terror in the Afghanistan theater as expressions, and producers, of a reactionary White cultural nationalism that emerged in post-9/11 America. In articulating this National Review cover story about NASCAR with the media spectacle made of Pat Tillman\u27 s death and life, one will be able to see how sport - particularly media discourses about sport figures and formations - is being mobilized in post-9/11 America to express, naturalize, and garner public consent for this reactionary form of White cultural nationalism. © 2007 Sage Publications

Making American white men great again: Tom Brady, Donald Trump, and the allure of white male omnipotence in post-obama america

In this chapter, I critically examine cultural representations-advertisements, journalistic accounts, social media, documentaries, and even film and television cameos-of New England Patriots\u27 quarterback, Tom Brady to show how they articulate with many similar racial, gender, and class ideas and affects that organize the Trump campaign and presidency. More specifically, I illuminate how Brady\u27s white masculinity is often coded as unapologetic about his socio-economic privileges, omnipotent in his manliness, and as a master of his body and athletic craft. In short, Brady embodies a living fantasy of white male omnipotence that serves symbolically as an imagined solution to white male anxiety for those who feel that the United States is in the midst of a culture war against white men and traditional American culture and values. In each of these ways, cultural (and self-) representations of Brady\u27s white masculinity showcase the new preferred representational logics used to render white masculinity visible within this latest wave of backlash politics that extends from the Trump White House through popular culture to the online spaces that brought the alt-right life. At stake in this politics is the renewal of white male prerogative as the taken-for-granted governing logic of American civic life