SOC 505 – Sociology of Sports

Celebrity, or Online Celebrity: Sports, Social Media, Trolling and the Re-Rise of the Right Wing
Sports Fan

Intro to Celebrity Culture

- C Wright Mills: Celebrity is a central site of contemporary life and operates as an “American
form of public honor”
- Celebrity coverage is a tool to illuminate sociological phenomena within American life.
- Celebrity Timeline:
- 20th century entertainment programming such as televisions shows offering “access” to
celebrities, sports channels producing “comeback, redemption, feel good and tragedy stories
collapsing sports stars into “everyday people”
- MTV and Much Music beginning to connect sports and music
- TMZ: 24/7 news coverage
- 1st wave online sports sites doubling as “the locker room” or bar after a game via comment boards
- Social Media, identity construction and anonymity

Issues in Celebrity, Stardom and Social Narratives

- As Oliver Driessesn (2012) outlines:
- Celebrification: captures the transformation of ordinary people and public figures into celebrities.
- Celebritization: a process that revealas the changing nature (as well as the societal and cultural
embedding) of celebrity
- That is, celebritization is less about an individual transaction, but instead is more a reflection of
the systems of access attributed to gaining celebrity status.
- For example, popular culture’s celebrities are recognized “commodities” produced to act as the
labour ensuring the continued generating of financial profit.
- In this model, celebrity is looked upon as a “cog in the wheel” of capitalism – a vital component
of profit such as how we examined Ja Morant in terms of scandal, redemption, social narratives
and meaning.
- Further, celebrification comprises the changes at the individual level, or, more precisely, the
process by which ordinary people or public figures are transformed into celebrities”
- Celebrfication then is not a singular transaction as the celebrity is now both a star in their field of
expertise, and by way of that stardom, a commodity as well.
- Specifically, Ricchard Dyer sees the cleebirty figure as “both labour and the thing that laobur
produces” (Dyer, 1986). For example, celebrity endorser
- The individual’s role as a celebrity itself is in addition to the success within their field, it is
produced by the media and central to their role as a celebrity is as labourer: the act of performing
their celebrity in order to sell other commodities such as objects, goods and experiences.
- Finally then,
- Celebritiziation is less about transformation but more so a reflection of the systems of access
attributed to gaining celebrity status.
- In more direct terms, social visibility is a required prerequisite to achieving status while status
itself is a prerequisite to power, and the internet is ideally
 (a) Democratic – access is open
(b) Diverse – we are all free to participate online
(c) WE have all migrated to a life online to some extent in particular young people such as those
comprising the Millennial and Gen Z demographics.

The Society of the Spectacle

- Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1967)
- The concept of Spectacle x four points:
(a) Refers to the domination of media images and consumer society over the individual while
obscuring the nature and effects of capitalism.
(b) Operates as a tool that distracts and seduces people using the mechanisms of leisure,
consumption, and entertainment as marked by commodifiable media culture
(c) Social capital accumulated to the point where it becomes and image and represents the historical
moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life
(d) Mediated and consumer society replace the “lived experience” as the passive gaze upon images of
status and lifestyle supplants active social participation, the appearance of mediation of
participation supersedes the actual participation in socialization in a classical sociological sense.
- Celebrity Culture <> Commodity Culture Model:
- This model positions new celebrity as a powerful tool of mass deception:
- That is , we are deceived into consuming the image as a formal sign (it as a denotation and
connotation) and as a social act meant to demonstrate status, access and power.
- Rojek (2001): Celebrities,,, “are the perfect products of capitalist markes, as well as
contemporary replacements for both god and monarch” and as such we shift us to considering
celebrity as religion.
- Central to both Lecture 10 and 11 is Erving Goffman’s Minor Ceremony Theory (1967) ans his
MCT contextualizes our own relationship(s) to celebrity via social media
- For example, celebrity sightings or encounters that underscore and reproduce the contemporary
moral orders of status, fame and reputation in everyday life.
- These MC’s act as a special kind of encounter with its own rules for interaction -i.e., uphold and
police boundaries: ordinary versus extraordinary, obscurity versus fame, stranger versus intimate
- New Celebrity (post-2000s) encounters may blur these previous boundaries and social media,
celebrity selfies and the potential for DM’s rupture the traditional boundaries and instead offering
“deep access”

The Rise of Barstool Sports

- As society shifts towards making social media a center focus of contemporary life then, so-called
internet trolls are a continually developing distractive dialogue.
- Trolls:
- Internet trolling is a pejorative term for individuals who disrupt or divide a community for the
goal of amusement and their disruptive behaviour is viewed as an irritation and a nuisance by
online communities.
- In Saturdays are for the boys: Barstool Sports and the cultura politics of white fratriarchy in
contemporary America it is argued that barstool responds to demands for sport sociologists “to
 explore how this creeping [far-right] discourse becomes entangled in and through the likes of
sports media”.
- We build off sport studies scholarship that theorizes the intersections of sport with previous
waves of backlash politics and examine social media commentary and trolls as a central, aand for
some, purposeful, feature of everyday and current social politics.
- Founded in 2003 as a Boston-based sport and gambling newspaper “for the common man, by the
common man”, Barstool Sports (“Barstool”) has grown to become one of the most important
sport brands in the US.
- The company produces and aggregates what its founder, Dave Portnoy once pridefully called,
“sports-smut” Boston Magazine summed up Barstool as “basically virtual frat house, a place of
uncensored, intemperate, often sexist stream-of-consciousness chatter among relatively well-
educated 25-year-old guys.
- The writing is vulgar, lowbrow, over the top, and full of expletives, and more specifically reveals
the socio-cultural politics of hetero-male sports fandom in terms of power, psychology, gender,
masculinity and power.
- Barstool’s racial politics are remarkably homologous to those of today’s far-right groups. Each
constructs particular performances of gender.
- For example, the affective appeal of “Big Man sovereignty” and the homosocial bonds of “white
fratriarchy” that produce active social worlds focused on sports but revolving around issues in
gender, race and sexuality.
- For example, these worlds are also remarkably similar to those organizing Trump’s America First
White nationalism and the Proud Boys’ “Western chauvinism” where White Americans are the
overwhelming majority and the normative affect is an antipathy toward political correctness and
progressive values and ideas.
- In Men, Masculinities and Social Theory (1990), Jay Remy envisions fratriarchy as a “mode of
male domination concerned wite a quite different set of values from those of patriarchy”
- The principle orgnaizing values of most fratriarchies is to allow its members “to have the freedom
to do as they please [and] to have a good time” to protect and promote “the self-interest of the
association of men itself” and the exclude and diminish “female values”
- Barstool- alongside fratriarchy – then plays an important, yet undertheorized, role in the
mainstreaming of far-right affects, idea,s and logics since the Obama era.
- It offers a new, seductive mode of white male backlash politics that interpellates young men by
inviting them to joyously party with other white men (conceptualized as brothers or “bros”) and
to feel free to do “whatever the fuck they want” without guilt, constraint, apology, or penalty.
- Numerous sport studies scholars have explored the connections between sport, masculinity, and
power relations, yet only a few have used Remy’s notion of fratriarchy to examine how gender
power manifests through sporting cultures. In short, fratriarchy is a social system organized by
“the rule of the brother”; a form of male rule operating through fraternal relations and bonds
among a select group of men usually to the exclusion of all others.
- Fratriarchy in summary:
- A group of young men – and a term that plays on fraternity and patriarchy – who bond over
demonstrations of physical prowess, courage and gameness while satisfying the “rules of the
brotherhood”
(a) The male dominant interests of the subculture
(b) The demand of a right to youthful freedom and rebellion
(c) The domination of the age set: young men free of familial or adult responsibilities
 - Lastly, Remy then states that Remy theorized that fratriarchies “usually have a markedly
delinquent character, including a penchant for gratuitous violence” and “the form of domination
to which it gives rise relies heavily on methods of intimidation and not infrequently on outright
terror.”
- Fratriarchies also often provide a feeling of sovereignty, freedom, inviolability, and domination
over others, space, and time (i.e., marauding, drinking, wataching sports, gambling, and
womanizing) for the men in the group
- In fratriarchal paces men can feel uninhibited, which can lead to enacting toxic (racist,
misogynistic, classist, homophobic, biological essentialist, etc.) ways of being a man with
impunity because such behavior will be rationalized by the logic: “Boys will be boys”
- Fratriarchy is an invaluable concept for making sense of Barstool’s social dynamics and cultural
politics but now also reflects much of the social politics a study of trolls in sporting social media
reveals.
- If, as Mills claims, celebrity is a central site of contemporary life operating as an American form
of public honor it stands to reason that in connecting celebrity to sports, and then connecting both
to the current social political climate alongside anonymity and trolling, that at the root of the
social media sports troll is an anger and contempt directed towards those athletes who are also
“famous” that are argued as outside of sporting tradition
- More specifically, those whose gender, sexuality, race and politics are in discord with the right
wing social politics dominating in 2023
Trolling as “sport”
- For Drea Jane, in her article, Back to the kitchen, cunt: speaking the unspeakable about online
misogyny (2018), “gendered abuse and threats online cause “embodied” rather than “virtual”
harm and that behaviours present in virtual interactions can map onto more familiar forms of
offline violence against women and girls”
- More specifically, she argues that “negative interactions, broadly described as hate speech, often
break various criminal laws, however they frequently go unchallenged and are now accepted as
part of virtual interactions.”
- This complicates and reveals many of the defense mechanisms employed by the Barstool
ideology claiming “free speech” as it fails to recognize that free speech does not mean “legal”
speech.
- In Sporting Women and Social Media: sexualization, misogyny and gender based violence in
online speaces, Emma Kavanagh et al investigated “gender based violence targeted at high profile
women in virtual environments through presenting the case of women’s tennis”
- As we saw earlier in the semester, gender based criticism of sporting women has long been an
issue, and in particular in terms of women in tennis through either:
(a) Typical and predictable de-legitimizing techniques through mockery and insult
(b) An extension of (a) but with specific reference to the body as either (1) “not feminine enough” or
(2) deep sexualization through which her play itself is irrelevant.
Trolling as “sport” via (a)
- Kavanagh breaks down examples of both (a) and (b) from the slide above and states that
“comments made toward the female athletes often included examples of hate speech or e-bile.
The online commentary rarely included direct reference to the athlete’s performance and instead
demonstrated the use of hostile language in interactions.”
(a) Serena Williams is a massive bitch and I hate her.
 (b) Cunt of the year award oes to @serenawilliams
(c) Fucking bitch Serena Williams is a massive whore
- The adoption of terms such as bitch or whore are representative of gendered discourse and
representatios of masculinity in the interactions.
- Often such commentary is adopted in orer to demean the subject and includes the use of terms
recognized to be misogynistic and sexualized in nature that express toxic representations of
women.
- Much of the language adopted reinforces hierarchies of male domination and female
subordination and provides evidence of the presence of inequitable gender relations present in
virtual space performed by male followers of the sport
- For example, language use on the following slides is abject, abusive and derogatory.
Trolling as “sport”
- Kavanaugh et al and their study has provided one the earlier, as well as empirical and systematic
investigations into how a group of female tennis players are vulnerable to being exposed to
gender based violence and the study has established the groundwork for future research in this
area.
- More specifically, as Jane notes “to not speak the unspeakable – the abject language – and thus
perpetuate the tyranny of silence about the sexually explicit nature of the material would be to not
challenge it.
- That is, the reality of this kind of abuse is not upheld if offensive words are hidden or edited, and
as Jane further notes, women who read such posts about themselves and others do not get a
warning, as celebrities or otherwise.
- Adopting a sociocultural lens to interrogate relations of power in terms of social media, power
and trolling in the context of violent, hate-speech driven, and dehumanizing shaming of
professional athletes is – we can conclude – both needed, bound up in formal legal issues, and
certainly, warranted.
- Consistent then with a view to relations of power, our understanding of public shaming in sport
would be enhanced by investigating the ways in which the nature of public shaming may be
influenced by anger and animosity in terms of the troll’s own relationship to gender, sexuality,
race, and religion, among others.