Spring 2023, Thursdays, 1:00-4:00PM; Meets at MIT

This seminar explores the interlocking systems of gender, race, class, and nation in sport. Sport, athletics, fitness, wellness, and other forms of exercise have historically been popular culture and forms of entertainment in and across regions. In its socio-cultural magnitudes and pervasiveness, sport reveals the structures and nuances of our cultural politics and social values. Using an interdisciplinary approach based in sociology, critical race theory, feminist studies, cultural studies, international relations, and history, we will examine the gendered foundations and developments of sport in the U.S. and abroad since the late nineteenth century. While we will use sport as a lens to consider the tenacity and durability of gender inequalities over time, all our work will analyze and understand diverse intersectional positions; indeed, sports and fitness throw the interconnectedness of social identity frameworks into stark relief. We will consider how sport— from children’s neighborhood games to global megaevents such as the Olympics or World Cup—serves as a powerful vehicle to examine contemporary interlocking systems of power, and can simultaneously offer a site for resistance and social change. Over the semester, students will gain an understanding of critical sport analysis and consider how sport’s social structures affect their own lives.

Faculty

Dr. Kyoung-yim Kim is an assistant professor of the practice of social science at Boston College. Kim's scholarship is informed by critical race, postcolonial, and transnational feminist theories in addressing social injustice. She researches issues of labor migration, media, environment, and social activism in sport. Kim is involved in the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

Dr. Anne M. Blaschke is a historian of twentieth-century U.S. political culture in the American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published academic articles on U.S. political economy, gender, diplomacy, immigration, and civil rights. Blaschke also writes publicly for the Washington Post. She is revising her first book, Foxes, Not Oxes: Women’s Athletics in American Political Culture, for publication. Title IX—the 1972 law mandating sex equality in American education—is the subject of her second book project.