Cultural Landscapes of Purification: Sports Spaces and Discourses of Whiteness

Abstract

In this article, I ask the following question: what importance does “whiteness” play in shaping the built environments of sport? I examine (a) the significance of studying space; (b) how race and space intersect; (c) how whiteness is a historical legacy of architectural modernism, the style of design that characterizes many North American and Canadian sport spaces; and (d) the relationship between desires for rational, respectable, organized space and subjects and the production of white(ned) normativity. Using a spatial ethnographic approach, I show how discourses of whiteness and neoliberal discourses of respectability, degeneration, progress, reproduction, renewal, and reinvigoration are brought to bear on the subjects who administer, use, and maintain everyday sport and recreation spaces such as locker rooms. I argue that these discourses historically proceed through the racialized logics of modernity and serve to evoke or enforce hidden signs of racial (spatial) superiority and cultural hegemony.