Orchestrated Outrage: Athletic Activism, Anger, and Media Narratives of WNBA Player’s Engagement in the Political Sphere

Abstract

This paper examines how WNBA players collectively marshaled their anger against WNBA team owner, Kelly Loeffler, into positive political support of senate candidate, Raphael Warnock. While many scholars link anger with isolation, depression, and volatility, in this project, engaging Audre Lorde’s theorization of the uses of anger, I examine the WNBA’s public support for Warnock as a contemporary case study of women’s collective political momentum and productivity when driven by anger and rejection of the existing conditions. With this cultural landscape in mind, Critical Discourse Analysis was employed to examine how national and local news represented and covered the relationship between the WNBA’s endorsement of Warnock and his political success. From this, a critical-cultural record was built considering both how these WNBA players mobilized their collective anger to achieve their political goals, but also how the news media made these actions legible to the American public.