The Mediasport Interpellation: Gender, Fanship, and Consumer Culture

Abstract

This paper considers how mediated sport’s promotional culture works to hail us in interlinked gender, fan, and consumer identities. The paper draws on findings from a recent series of studies to illustrate how an emergent dirt theory of narrative ethics helps move beyond Althusser’s notion of ideological hailing to understand the dynamics of power and contraints at play in strategic sporting narratives that stereotype men and women and their roles as fan and consumer. The discussion focuses on the dynamics of narrative hegemony and the prospects and limits of social change in the ethics that undergird sport-related narratives in consumer culture.