Michael Jordan’s Family Values: Marketing, Meaning, and Post-Reagan America

Abstract

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.

“Allez Wiggo”: A Case Study on the Reactions of the British Print Media to Bradley Wiggins’s Victory in the Tour de France

“…For example, Vande Berg (1998) explained that the commitment to home and family life of American sporting heroes Nolan Ryan (Baseball) and Joe Montana (American Football) was a constant feature of the media coverage of their careers. Another American superstar, Michael Jordan, has also been regularly portrayed in relation to his own ideal family circumstances (McDonald, 1996). In a British context Cashmore and Parker (2003, p. 220) Ashes series against Australia was framed around the stability of his family life (e.g., Etheridge, 2005a;2005b;Tozer, 2005 Bradley then went to find wife Cath and their kids Ben, seven and five year old Isabella.…”

Chapter 30 - Thinking Through Power in Sport and Sport Media Scholarship

“…My own work on Michael Jordan (McDonald, 1996) drew upon feminist understandings about the intersectional and fluid character of power and subjectivities to explore the ways that narratives of gender, race, class, and sexuality are articulated through both the texts of Jordan's persona and the contexts of the recent regressive family values climate in the United States. Media images of Jordan encourage viewers to identify with a vision of Black masculinity as a "safe sex symbol" designed to induce desire instead of invoking dread.…”

Consuming sporting Orientals

“…More specifically, he claims that their images have been used to give "market legitimacy to everything from gas grills to high-end luxury cars to clothes" (2004, p. 56). McDonald (1996) also points out the increasing presence of African American athletes and their roles as corporate endorsers throughout the 1980s and 1990s.…”

“…Just as Andrews and Jackson (2002) state that we become familiar with sport celebrity "from the outpourings of the commercial media" (p. 1), a sport celebrity can be seen as a product of the strategic partnership of sport and media in consumer capitalism. Sport studies scholars have been interested in media representations of sport celebrities and racially-commodified athletes for several years (Andrews, 1996(Andrews, , 2001(Andrews, , 2012Andrews & Mower, 2012;Andrews & Jackson, 2002;Birrell & McDonald, 2000;Cole, 1996;Dyson, 1993;Jackson, 1998;Kusz, 2007;Leonald & King, 2011;McDonald, 1996;Smart, 2005;Whannel, 2002). Their scholarship has resulted in an examination of the ways in which racial minority athletes' mediated images and identities have been used for commercial purposes, and they also interrogate the cultural meanings of these athletes' images.…”

“…Specifically, I argue that the articulation of racial identity of Asian Americans and capitalism in major American sports has been occurring since the 1990s. The examination of ethnicity and celebrity with sport is not new, as a number of scholars have examined the economic, cultural, and political implication of European, African, and Latino American athletes as sporting celebrities (Andrews, 1996;Andrews & Cole, 2000;Andrews & Jackson, 2001;Andrews & Mower, 2012;Cole & Denny;Cole, 1996;Jamieson, 2000;Kusz, 2007;Leonard & King, 2011;McDonald, 1996;McDonald & Andrews, 2001). However, the presence of racially-commodified Asian American athletes and their ideological appropriations have been overlooked.…”