Description
Book SynopsisSports fandom determines how millions of Americans define themselves. In
We Average Unbeautiful Watchers, Noah Cohan examines contemporary sports culture to show how mass-mediated athletics are in fact richly textured narrative entertainments rather than merely competitive displays.
Trade Review"Cohan's book will appeal to cultural critics, fans of all stripes, and American Studies scholars as it thoroughly and convincingly examines an understudied and undertheorized perspective of the Sport(s) Media Industrial Complex."—Scott D. Peterson, Sports Literature Association
"For a different look at sports fandom, this is a book well worth checking out."—Lance Smith,
Guy Who Reviews Sports Books“This is a first-rate contribution to the field of sports studies and an important work for scholars within literary studies. The thoroughness and breadth of this interdisciplinary research is breathtaking. But more impressive still is the deft and precise manner in which Noah Cohan has brought the many and varied concepts and sources to bear to clarify our understanding of his objects of study and of his argument. He manages to be at once engaging, vivid, interesting, and crystal clear. . . . This book is a pioneering and genuinely unique contribution.”—Yago Colás, professor of English at Oberlin College and author of
Ball Don’t Lie: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball“Noah Cohan’s
We Average Unbeautiful Watchers offers novel ways of thinking about and contextualizing sports fandom as an important, diverse, complex, and artful creative practice. It brings together an eclectic range of source material to broaden understandings of fandom beyond its stereotypical roots in ‘fanaticism’ and association with torso-painted and hollering bros to explain this phenomenon’s contested politics and cultural work.”—Travis Vogan, author of
ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television “Noah Cohan deftly demonstrates that, far from mindless entertainment, sports fandom is an enormously complex and significant form of human meaning-making. Analyzing sports fan narratives across a staggering range of media, Cohan draws us into the inner and the social lives of American sports fans, which are by turns disturbing, fascinating, and inspiring.”—Erin C. Tarver, associate professor of philosophy at Oxford College of Emory University and author of
The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of IdentityTable of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. So We Fabricate: Baseball and the Unfriendly Confines of History
2. It was My Fate, My Destiny, My End, to Be a Fan: Football, Mental Illness, and the Autobiographical Novel
3. Race in the Basketball Memoir: Fan Identity and the Eros of “a Black Man’s Game”
4. It’s Been a Problem with Me and Women: Failed Masculinities in Depictions of Sports Fans on Film
5. Reimagined Communities: Web-Mediated Fandom and New Narrative Possibilities for Sport
Epilogue: Feminist Rewritings of Sports Fan Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index
