This article investigates how media discourses are sites for multiple “becomings” of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurobiological condition associated with repetitive brain trauma. I explain that these discourses are contexts in which multiple actors (journalists, scientists, athletes, and sports organizations) struggle to represent the material complexities of CTE through competing ways of knowing. My analysis reveals two tensions underlying debates about sport-related traumatic brain injury. First, my examination reveals discursive clashes between emotionally charged representations of CTE as an urgent public health problem and commentary cautioning audiences about the scientific uncertainty surrounding CTE. I illuminate how, in the face of this uncertainty, scientific conclusiveness remains privileged as the basis for meaningful action to improve athletes’ health. Second, inconsistencies across representations I examined illustrate how CTE defies a straightforward material-semiotic divide. These contradictions demonstrate how the materialities of CTE exceed the medico-scientific and lay discourses through which the condition is commonly known. I argue that such limitations should not enable stakeholders to overlook calls for drastic changes to how sports are played or deflect questions about how sports violence impacts athletes’ lives. Instead, this level of uncertainty should accelerate (rather than delay) challenges to socially acceptable levels of sports violence.
This paper uses a genealogical approach to explore the conjuncture at which the longstanding but partial and uneasy silence surrounding painkiller use in the National Football League seems increasingly under threat. We historicize and problematize apparently self-evident narratives about painkiller use in contemporary football by interrogating the gendered, racialized and labor-related discourses surrounding Brett Favre's 1996 admission of a dependency on Vicodin, as well as the latest rash of confessions of misuse by now retired athletes. We argue that these coconstructed and coconstructing moments of noise and silence are part of the same discursive system. This system serves to structure the emerging preoccupation with painkillers in the NFL, with Favre's admission still working to placate anxieties surrounding the broader drug problems endemic to the league, and failing to disrupt our implicit knowingness about painkiller use, thus reinforcing ongoing cultures of silence and toughness in professional football.Cet article adopte une approche généalogique pour explorer la conjoncture par laquelle le silence persistent, bien que partiel et inconfortable, au sujet de l'utilisation de médicaments analgésiques dans la National Football League semble de plus en plus menacé. Nous faisons l'historique et problématisons les récits en apparence évidents en soi à propos des analgésiques dans le football contemporain en interrogeant les discours genrés, racialisés et sur le travail qui entourent l'aveu en 1996 par Brett Favre d'une dépendance au Vicodin, ainsi que la récente série de confessions d'abus par des athlètes désormais à la retraite. Nous suggérons que ces moments de bruit et de silence qui se construisent ensemble font partie du même système discursif. Ce système sert à structurer la préoccupation de plus en plus grande par rapport aux analgésiques dans la NFL, l'aveu de Favre permettant de calmer les anxiétés entourant les problèmes plus vastes de drogue qui sont prévalents dans la ligue, et ne réussissant pas à déranger notre connaissance de l'utilisation de médicaments antidouleur, renforçant ainsi les cultures persistantes du silence et de la robustesse dans le football professionnel.
Drawing on an extensive archive of media texts collected between 2014 and 2019, we trace shifting representations of the National Football League in discourse on painkiller use among its players. We argue that in contrast to earlier eras, an image of the league as an exploitative and corrupt institution has come to the fore. Clustered around the announcement of a series of player lawsuits, these discourses are tempered by the persistence of narratives of personal responsibility and the elision of racial logics that predetermine athletes’ subjection to pain and injury. Situating our analysis in the context of the drug wars and the profit motive of the National Football League, we argue that these discourses both reflect and contribute to the workings of racial capitalism across the professional football and pharmaceutical industries.
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