Introduction to “Sport and Failure”

Abstract

This Special Issue is a collaborative project on the study of sport and failure. In dialogue with a range of works, queries, objects of study, and fields, these interdisciplinary sports studies scholars use a variety of approaches to ground and provide innovative critical entanglements to understand how sports types, players, cultures, worlds, and industries create, reproduce, and resist dominant ideas and structures. Collectively, these authors consider how sporting failures can articulate a “counterhegemonic discourse of losing” that challenges a world obsessed with power, prestige, privilege, and various other articulations of success. In this Issue, the authors explore how failure can catalyze acts of liberation from and resistance to restrictive and unequal modes of being in “societies structured in dominance.” Failure in this capacity can help to imagine alternatives to hegemonic norms, structures, and identities.