Research Overview

My research examines how networked sports media industries—including broadcasters, sponsors, teams, and leagues—brand difference. I lay bare how these institutions calibrate gendered, racialized, national, and sexual difference for consumption and illuminate the progress and pitfalls of their efforts. While my central objects of study are sports media industries, brand culture, and identity and representation, I ground my research in intersectional feminist media studies and critical/cultural studies to alter the conventional ways we study sports media.

Scholarship on marginalized identities in sports often focuses on increasing representation to achieve equity. For example, the adages “representation matters” and “if she can see it, she can be it” circulate in women’s sports scholarship as a presumed solution to the drastic inequalities women face in a male dominated space. Yet, this scholarship less frequently considers the ways sports industry logics take up these same mantras and profit on diverse representations. My work questions the presumptions that representation is an equalizing force in society and instead seeks to understand how and why sports media industries deploy difference in their brands. More importantly, I scrutinize the problematic consequences of these ideologically laden brand strategies for marginalized identities.      

Embedded within my critiques is an inherent skepticism of neoliberalism. Much of what I research in sports interrogates how neoliberalism subsumes formerly discrete aspects of cultural life while commodifying activism and deploying business practices that are antithetical to social justice. Articles in  progress include a piece on the labor of neoliberal masculinity in the UFC, an examination of how data analytics intersects with consumer social media engagement to elevate the visibility of women’s sports, and an article that reads Nike’s girls’ empowerment advertising featuring women athletes against transgender exclusion debates in state governments. I am also currently co-authoring a piece on the appeal of Naomi Osaka, a mixed race, Black and Asian, multinational tennis star, to brands who seek to connect with global Generation Z consumers. 

In each of these instances, I tease out what each case study tell us about the way dominant economic, gendered, and racialized ideologies shift to incorporate progressive representations of difference while they also maintain less visible neoliberal business operations that continue to exploit athletes.