Description
Book SynopsisThe National Football League is one of the most significant cultural engines in contemporary American life. This book offers a collection of critical essays to focus attention on the NFL as a cultural force.
Table of Contents Foreword: Football as Mediated Spectacle • Michael Oriard
Introduction: The Political Football: Culture, Critique, and the NFL • Thomas P. Oates and Zack Furness
I Production, Promotion, and Control
1 The Greatest Game Ever Played: An NFL Origin Story • Daniel A. Grano
2 Game Time: A History of the Managerial Authority of the Instant Replay • Dylan Mulvin
3 The Ochocinco Brand: Social Media’s Impact on the NFL’s Institutional Control • Jacob Dittmer
4 New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom • Thomas P. Oates
II Identities, Social Hierarchies, and Cultural Power
5 NFL Sex • Toby Miller
6 Football and “Ghettocentric” Logics? The NFL’s Essentialist Mobilization of Black Bodies• Ronald L. Mower, David L. Andrews, and Oliver J. C. Rick
7 “I Was a Gladiator”: Pain, Injury, and Masculinity in the NFL • Katie Rodgers
8 Masculinity, Race, and Violence in Any Given Sunday • Aaron Baker
9 Spignesi, Sinatra, and the Pittsburgh Steelers: Franco’s Italian Army as an Expression of Ethnic Identity, 1972–1977 • Nicholas P. Ciotola
III Gridirons and Battlefields
10 Offensive Lines: Sport-State Synergy in an Era of Perpetual War • Samantha King
11 NFL Films and the Militarization of Professional Football • Michael L. Butterworth
12 For the Love of National Manhood: Excavating the Cultural Politics and Media Memorializations of Pat Tillman • Kyle W. Kusz
Contributors
Index
