Roberto Sirvent (Committee on Degrees in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Harvard Medical School)
First-Year Seminar 74I 4 credits Enrollment: Limited to 12
Monday, 6-8pm CANVAS SITE
What does race have to do with sports gambling and fantasy football? Why do fans and the media get upset when elite athletes wish to take mental health breaks? What fears, anxieties, and aggressions motivate the interpersonal and structural violence against trans athletes? How complicit are fans in the long-term injuries and premature deaths of athletes when we encourage, celebrate, and take pleasure in violent sports? Why are athletes coached to “play through the pain”? How do sport governing bodies rely on colonial logics of ability and disability to reinforce racialized ideals of sexual difference?
This first-year seminar introduces students to the gendered and sexual dynamics of sport in American culture, as well as the racialized gender policing that occurs within the world of sports. Through a combination of group discussions, guest speakers, and a sports watch party, we explore how amateur and professional sports aid in the formation of social classes, national and racial identities, sexuality, and gender roles, both in the United States and abroad. Key topics and case studies include: the rise of anti-trans moral panics in sport; the ways that legal, medical, and scientific discourses in global sport produce and reproduce power relations; anti-Black media representations of Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka; the racial politics of fandom; and, finally, what Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s relationship might teach us about U.S. celebrity culture and its relation to dominant views of race, masculinity, and femininity.