Learning to Fail: Adolescent Resistance in Extreme Sports

Abstract

Employing dysfunctional or arrested development, extreme sports tricksters cultivate diverse strategies of sporting identity. Through parody, satire, and mockery, adolescent performances and representations resist hegemonic ideologies of mainstream sports masculinity. This work interrogates the representational and performative texts, events, and bodies of extreme sports using queer theories and psychoanalytic approaches. To assess failure as a potentially strategic and radical mode of counter-hegemonic resistance, I trace the origins of extreme sports cultures through icons such as Evel Knievel and the Dangerous Sports Club. I also look at a modern heir apparent—action sporting collective Nitro Circus. In failing at mainstream sporting masculinities, these athletes create different ways of being and doing sport through commoditization, adolescence, gender, Whiteness, corporeality, and death.