Introduction to “Sport and Failure”

Abstract

This Special Issue is a collaborative project on the study of sport and failure. In dialogue with a range of works, queries, objects of study, and fields, these interdisciplinary sports studies scholars use a variety of approaches to ground and provide innovative critical entanglements to understand how sports types, players, cultures, worlds, and industries create, reproduce, and resist dominant ideas and structures. Collectively, these authors consider how sporting failures can articulate a “counterhegemonic discourse of losing” that challenges a world obsessed with power, prestige, privilege, and various other articulations of success. In this Issue, the authors explore how failure can catalyze acts of liberation from and resistance to restrictive and unequal modes of being in “societies structured in dominance.” Failure in this capacity can help to imagine alternatives to hegemonic norms, structures, and identities.

Spatially framed metaphoric concepts, educational attainment and locations of poverty: an analysis of newspaper texts

“…Yet, as our analysis demonstrates, the alleged transcendence of these barriers is not reflected in reporting by the mainstream media. Hence, we are inviting an important dialogue among disciplines interested in sport to engage with Sheppard's (2019) question of what we can learn from 'losers'.…”

“…While the loss and failure of sportswomen has not received significant attention, there are exceptions, and broader literature on loss in sport (see Ball 1976;Fischer and McClearen 2019;Gieseler 2019;Halberstam 2016;Sheppard 2019). For example, Fischer and McClearen (2019) drew on Halberstam's (2011) work on the queer art of failure to understand the barriers for trans women in sport, focusing on mixed-martial arts.…”

Challenging neoliberal sport: Skateboarding as a resilient cultural practice

“…Such a framework maintains that inequality and hierarchical organisation are fundamental to all forms of social relationship (Coakley, 2011). Modern sport thus produces bodily discourses of exertion, force, rules and competition in which failure is meant to signal a lack of superior character or ability (Sheppard, 2019).…”

“…Such a framework maintains that inequality and hierarchical organisation are fundamental to all forms of social relationship (Coakley, 2011). Modern sport thus produces bodily discourses of exertion, force, rules and competition in which failure is meant to signal a lack of superior character or ability (Sheppard, 2019). These are neoliberal discourses, based on entrepreneurial activity, cost‐benefit calculations and performance evaluation, creating narratives of competitive individualisation over co‐operation and community (Spence, 2015).…”