Thomas P. Oates is associate professor with the Department of American Studies and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL and the editor (with Travis Vogan) of Sports, Power, and Resistance: An Introduction to Critical Sports Studies. His scholarship on sports, media and culture has been published in American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Sociology of Sport Journal, and other venues. In this interview, we discuss Sports, Power, and Resistance, as well as the field of sports studies and some intersections between sports and society.
Greg: Please tell me a little about your background. What piqued your interest in connections between sports and social issues?
Tom: I grew up a sports fan in the 1980s. I watched as a cascade of moral panics and scandals made it obvious to me that the supposed barrier separating sports from politics was a fiction. By the time the 1990s ended, I was utterly convinced of this. I was a basketball fan, and Allen Iverson was my favorite player since his first day at Georgetown. The details of Iverson’s story are too numerous and fascinating to go into here, but his career helped me understand how power operates through racialized norms and expectations. He faced numerous attempts to control or confine him, and I admired how Iverson fearlessly pushed back.
Greg: How did you decide which essays to include in this collection? What do you want readers to take away from the pieces you’ve chosen?
Tom: My co-editor Travis Vogan and I proposed a symposium in 2023 that brought eleven critical sports scholars to the University of Iowa campus. All of these scholars were in the humanities, and Travis and I have admired their work for years. After an exciting weekend in Iowa City, the presenters departed, but they each adapted their presentations into the chapters that make up the collection.
Greg: Is sports in a unique position to highlight issues of power and resistance compared to other pop culture institutions? And if so, why?
Tom: I think so. Sports are unavoidable in our society. Since they are best consumed live, they are ideal for advertisers navigating a world of on-demand streaming. This makes sports media properties incredibly valuable. Unsurpisingly then, media companies relentlessly promote them, often by connecting them with other ideals that are already firmly established in the culture. This makes sport media a key site for the expression of power in modern societies. At the same time, the workforce that makes elite sports possible often originates in marginalized and oppressed communities, and many of these people and the allies find occasion to object to the treatment. In this way, sports are also a regular site for expressions of resistance.
Greg: In your introduction to the collection, you wrote, “Sport, because of its tremendous power, has a responsibility to live up to the high standards it so often claims to embody.” Can you unpack that statement? Among athletes, owners, executives, sponsors, media, etc., who has what responsibility? The Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger—Together” suggests standards that apply to physical competition while also hinting at a moral dimension. Are the standards you refer to both physical and moral?
Tom: Most of the essays in the collection address the latter more than the former, but there is also a politics to the body, as a large and growing body of feminist scholarship addresses. This is evident in ways that I think are rather obvious in the debate about trans participation in sports, which rests on untested assumptions about biology and human performance and assumptions about what men and women should look like. One of the chapters in the collection addresses this issue directly.
Greg: Was there a particular essay that especially surprised you or challenged your existing beliefs on the topic?
Tom: I’d rather not single one out, but everyone who was invited had written something that surprised or challenged us as editors. That’s why we invited them.
Check out Tom’s book Sports, Power, and Resistance for thought-provoking critical essays in the field of sports studies. And for more interviews like this one, visit The KineSophy Library.