This paper discusses a methodology for interrogating power, which we call reading sport critically. Although versions of this method are currently practiced by a number of sport scholars, the theoretical and methodological groundings for the approach are rarely explicitly articulated. In this paper, we outline this critical analytic strategy, map its theoretical locations, and explore the ontological and epistemological issues that ground it. We advocate reading sport critically as a methodology for making visible and producing counternarratives, that is, narratives infused with resistant political possibilities.

In this article we explore the narratives that 10 White, middle-class female athletes, ages 11–14, (co)produce around their sport experiences. Through interviews, observation, and participant observation, we argue that, consistent with the advertising rhetoric of such multinational corporations as Nike, these girls all advocate hard work, choice, opportunity, and personal responsibility in playing sport and in challenging gender discrimination. We argue this reflects the girls’ subscription to elements of liberal feminism and to their frequent positioning as “insider-others”—that is, outside the dominant gender norms of sport but simultaneously the beneficiaries of Whiteness and middle-class norms. In contrast to Nike and liberal feminists who frequently argue for equal opportunity in sport, these girls’ insider-other narratives suggest the need for critical interrogation of the multiple meanings and effects of sport experiences.

Grounded in feminist cultural studies perspectives, this article criticizes the marketing of postfeminist ideologies in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). While seeking to create new consumers, WNBA accounts construct the league and its advertisers as advocates for gender justice. It is argued that this strategy also reinforces a neoconservative project based on the advocacy of personal responsibility and self-help as antidotes to social problems and inequities that have been magnified via late capitalist economic arrangements.

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Michael Jordan ’s body offers a significant site to explore larger cultural meanings and anxieties in post-Reagan America. Informed by cultural studies sensibilities, this paper explores selected sporting and advertising accounts to suggest that representations of Jordan’s athletic body are constructed by promoters in ways which rely on particular associations of Black masculinity, sexuality, and the nuclear family. The carefully crafted image of Michael Jordan offers an enticing portrait of Black masculinity, playing off notions of natural athleticism and family sentiment in ways designed to induce devotion. This public persona of Jordan participates in the moralistic “family values” climate of post-Reagan America, while simultaneously working to deny historical and stereotypical depictions of Black masculinity as overtly erotic and dangerous. Thus marketing strategies encourage a voyeuristic, albeit “safe” enjoyment of Jordan’s commodified body.