MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Sport is often analyzed by reference to class, race/ethnicity, and gender. All three of those concepts are commonly used to understand issues of concern in American society. Racial problems continue to plague American society, e.g. the issue of police use of deadly force against African-Americans and the “Black Lives Matter” social movement as a response to that issue. The United States has one of the highest levels of inequality of any modern democracy in the world. The contradiction between democracy and inequality haunts and undermines American democracy. While the United States has made giant strides in creating a society based on merit, gender inequality is still an inescapable reality, e.g. women’s salaries still lag behind those of men, men still dominate in almost all key institutional spheres, especially the corporate world, and a women’s right to choose has often been curtailed by conservative state legislatures, in spite of Roe versus Wade. While it is fruitful to utilize each of those concepts to analyze American society, a newer approach, called intersectionality, pioneered by Patricia Hill Collins and Margaret Anderson (among others), views the discrete use of those concepts as limited and advocates the use of all three together to fully understand social reality. This paper is exploratory and seeks to explain intersectionality and specifically how it can be useful for the sociology of sport. In other words, instead of examining a sport like football by reference to race/ethnicity, class, and gender and to analyze how each, discretely, can be helpful in understanding the game, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the use of all three, together, intersectionally, might yield a deeper, more penetrating understanding of football than the use of each concept separately.