A colorful assemblage of football, entertainment, and advertising, the Super Bowl is the most visible mass-mediated spectacle in contemporary American culture. This paper argues that the Super Bowl, by virtue of hegemonic undertones of misogyny and homophobia, communicates punitive standards of masculinity norms to its audience. Pain and injury in football culture figure as scaffolds for ideal masculinity, and attention to discourses of violence elucidate the ways in which football venerates bodily violence as a marker of manhood. What happens when male bodies become weapons? In exchange for temporary glory and fame, professional football players jeopardize their physical and emotional health, accepting the possibility of a shortened life expectancy and chronic illness. Gender is crucial to this risk-laden masculine behavior. Through homosocial competition on the football field, the players gain an opportunity to give visual expression to their masculine identity and to “do” their gender appropriately. This “doing” includes the denigration of women. Women are largely absent from the Super Bowl, occupying ceremonial and decorative roles. The overwhelming non-femininity of the Super Bowl is compounded by its strict heterosexuality. Although the close bodily contact between the players on the field might reasonably be considered homoerotic, the violence inherent in football denies the intimacy between two men inflicting pain on one another while providing a forceful preclusion of homoerotic possibility. If, as Gail Mason has written, violence has the capacity to constitute sexual subject positions, then the violence of pro football enables players to establish consensus about who they are, and, perhaps more importantly, who they are not. This paper looks at examples of visual and communicative planes upon which violent assertions of masculinity play out in the Super Bowl, resonating intertextually with TV ads for “masculine” commercial products, and in American football more broadly.
About the presenterJan Huebenthal
Jan is a Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program at the College of William & Mary. His research interests include gender studies, queer theory, cultural studies, 20th century American history, critical race studies, and sports studies. He holds advanced degrees from the College of William & Mary (M.A., 2013) and the University of Bremen (B.A., 2011). Jan is also the Assistant Director of the William & Mary Global Film Festival.