University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The way we ball: global crossovers within the hoops habitus

(USC Thesis Other)

The way we ball: global crossovers within the hoops habitus

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content THE WAY WE BALL: GLOBAL CROSSOVERS WITHIN THE HOOPS HABITUS By Courtney Michelle Cox A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMMUNICATION) ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM December 2019 ii Copyright © 2019 by Courtney M. Cox All rights reserved iii CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... vii Illustrations .................................................................................................................................. viii Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................. ix Pregame Shootaround ..................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Overview ...................................................................................................................... 12 First Quarter | Choreographing the Crossover .............................................................................. 16 Why Basketball? ........................................................................................................................ 17 Basketball Goes Coast to Coast ................................................................................................. 23 The Crossover as Analytic ......................................................................................................... 25 The Crossover as Black Cultural Production and Performance ................................................ 28 Choreographing Black Feminist Thought in Basketball ........................................................... 29 Method ....................................................................................................................................... 33 Second Quarter | Add Women and Sell: #WeAreWomen and the Sporting Economies of Visibility ....................................................................................................................................... 40 About the WNBA ...................................................................................................................... 43 About the Sparks ....................................................................................................................... 49 Breaking Barriers, Breaking Records? ...................................................................................... 53 Educating the Public .................................................................................................................. 60 Media Coverage ......................................................................................................................... 61 Game Day .................................................................................................................................. 64 The Future of the WNBA .......................................................................................................... 67 Discussion .................................................................................................................................. 71 Third Quarter | Translating Timeouts: The Choreography of Playing Overseas .......................... 76 Theorizing the Timeout ............................................................................................................. 78 Global Sporting Labor ............................................................................................................... 79 Choreographing a Career ........................................................................................................... 82 Basketball in Russia ................................................................................................................... 87 Lost in Translation ..................................................................................................................... 90 “An outsider, a foreigner, an alien” ........................................................................................... 91 Translating Labor ...................................................................................................................... 93 Translating the Game ................................................................................................................. 97 Translating Politics .................................................................................................................... 99 Community Crossovers ........................................................................................................... 101 Time Out of the Country ......................................................................................................... 103 Translating Citizenship ............................................................................................................ 104 Translating Finances ................................................................................................................ 106 Discussion ................................................................................................................................ 109 Fourth Quarter | Haram Hoops?: FIBA, Nike, & the Hijab’s Half-Court Defense .................... 112 Dual Hijabophobia ................................................................................................................... 114 Governing Bodies .................................................................................................................... 118 Muslim Women in Sport Network .......................................................................................... 123 iv #FIBAAllowHijab ................................................................................................................... 127 What will they say about [Nike]? ............................................................................................ 131 Dual Hijabophobia in Hoops ................................................................................................... 138 Discussion ................................................................................................................................ 143 Postgame Press Conference ........................................................................................................ 146 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 156 Appendix A: Interview Questions – Athletes ............................................................................. 168 Appendix B: Sparks Employees Interview Questions ................................................................ 171 Appendix C: Oral Consent Script (Sparks employees) .............................................................. 173 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Basketball is a fascinating blend of the individual and the collective. Superstars emerge, only through the community of those behind them. A unique blend of role players, trainers, management, endorsers, and coaching provide the recipe for a successful season and for an aspiring rookie, hope for a promising career. I’d like to thank an incredible group of folks who took the time and energy to support me and this project, even (especially) in moments where I doubted myself and my work. My father, Ronald Cox, believed in my writing in its earliest phases and cultivated in me a curiosity which has yet to be extinguished. Thank you for the many trips to Mountain View Public Library, the bedtime stories, the adventures. My mother, Gaylen Cox, served as my first editor and emphasized the importance of getting it right. Through her own dedication to serving others, she also taught me the value of empathy and continues to exemplify a passion for making the world around her more equitable. I owe these two amazing people everything and I hope I’ve made you proud. To my incredible partner in life, Terence “TJ” Finley, thank you for loving me through this entire process. You have supported me with coffee, brainstorming sessions, and advice in some of my most vulnerable moments. I appreciate your willingness to see me through my most stressful stages of this dissertation and I share this accomplishment with you. To my beautiful friends and family (framily!) who held me down throughout this process, you are so very much appreciated. Dr. Kate Miltner, Stefania Marghitu, Perry Johnson, Philana Payton, Brooklyne Sutton, Dr. Jasmin Young, Dr. Marissiko Wheaton, Lauren Moss, Michael Moss, Kristin Bacchus, Dr. Alvin Wyatt, Dr. Brittaney Belyeu, Keisha Dedlow-Wright, Alexa Dedlow-Wright, Warnessa Hightower, Dr. Antar Tichavakunda, Becca Johnson, Matt Bui, vi Franny Corry, Sulafa Zidani, Caitlin Dobson, Simogne Hudson, Jessica Hatrick, Rhian Rogan, Sama’an Ashrawi, Nicholas Jerome Busalacchi, Rogelio Lopez, Briana Ellerbe, Rhonda Cotton, Briana Hammond, Dr. MC Forelle, and Clare O’Connor. I love you all so much. This work has been challenged and upgraded by an incredible group of scholars from its earliest phases as a prospectus. I am immensely thankful for the constructive care of my qualifying and dissertation committees, comprised of Dr. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Dr. Christopher Holmes Smith, Dr. Ben Carrington, Dr. Safiya Noble, Dr. Nayan Shah, Dr. Josh Kun, and Dr. Robeson Taj Frazier. I am especially grateful for my advisor, Taj, for his patience and enthusiastic support throughout this entire process. I am also so appreciative for the mentorship of Dr. David J. Leonard, a scholar who has educated me from afar for more than a decade, and now brings his brilliance to me regularly with every phone call, text, or email. Finally, I must acknowledge the incredible group of participants who took time to share their own knowledge with me. Without them, this dissertation doesn’t exist. While many cannot be identified by name here, their voices and perspectives shaped each chapter and impacted me both personally and professionally. Thank you for your wisdom, your vulnerability, and your investment in me and my scholarship. vii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the lived experiences of women within basketball as they navigate a sport simultaneously marked by historical gender inequality and a recent surge in marketplace feminism. Specifically, it considers how these women negotiate the sports-media complex through performances of race, gender, nationality, and religion. These performances operate within what I am calling the hoops habitus, that is, the constant creation and reproduction of basketball as a cultural text designed by and for men. The project offers the crossover as an analytic to interrogate how the participants of this study create strategies that allow them to move throughout a white, Western, heteropatriarchal industry. Drawing upon feminist scholarship and performance studies, this project defines the crossover as a way of understanding how women implement disruptive strategies to create opportunities for themselves and others in a sport that often seeks to relegate them to the periphery. This dissertation addresses the following questions: How do Black women within the hoops habitus create space for themselves and others within an industry constantly attempting to relegate them to the periphery? And how are efforts to expand women’s basketball often co- opted by marketplace feminism? Three case studies demonstrate how athletes, journalists, advocates, and team employees contribute to embodied knowledge concerning marginalized women’s encounters with a sport situated within a history of imperialism, colonialism, and sexism. This research finds and details how capitalist notions of “empowerment” obscure the more complex, dynamic Black feminist thought of women both on and off of the court. In attending to the lives of those affected by the norms and practices of the hoops habitus, this project also finds relational crossover strategies across each case study through the choreography employed both on and off of the court. viii ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1 Artist Victor Solomon’s work combines stained glass with a basketball hoop comprised of beads reminiscent of a rosary 2 Promotional material from the Washington Nationals’ Ladies Night 3 Cierra sketches out basketball plays during her English lesson with Lera 4 Kazanochka's Instagram post dedicated to Lena's father 5 A Michael Jordan statue in the Moscow airport TGI Fridays 6 The Change.org petition page for #FIBAAllowHijab Tables 1 Interview participants from the Sparks' front office ix ABBREVIATIONS ABL American Basketball League NCAA National Collegiate Athletic Association WNBA Women’s National Basketball Association FIBA Fédération Internationale de Basketball NBA National Basketball Association PBL Professional Basketball League MWSN Muslim Women in Sports Network x cross·o·ver [KRAWS-OH-VER] noun A simple basketball move in which a player dribbles the ball quickly from one hand to the other. As in: When done right, a crossover can break an opponent’s ankles. As in: Deron Williams’s crossover is nice, but Allen Iverson’s crossover was so deadly, he could’ve set up his own podiatry practice. As in: Dad taught me how to give a soft cross first to see if your opponent falls for it, then hit ’em with the hard crossover. - Kwame Alexander, The Crossover 1 1. Kwame Alexander, The Crossover, Kindle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 29. 1 PREGAME SHOOTAROUND "For we cannot forget how cultural life, above all in the West, but elsewhere as well, has been transformed in our lifetimes by the voicing of the margins." -Stuart Hall 2 This dissertation examines the relationship between the structure of sport and the agency of women maneuvering through this cultural domain despite various exclusionary practices based upon race and gender (among other identity markers). My initial interest in this project stems from a personal relationship to sport comprised of a short-lived (quite mediocre) stint as an athlete, a career in sports media, and of course, a lifetime of joy and disappointment as a fan. How can one be a sports fan? It’s a question posed by Pierre Bourdieu in the title of his essay where the French sociologist frames sport as a supply designed to meet a social demand. 3 This supply is defined as the sporting practices within a particular moment (always subject to change), and demand is represented by the expectations, interests, and values housed within these practices. What we consider "sport" is the end product of tensions of this supply/demand relationship. It is then, Bourdieu argues, formalized through policies and governed by organizations which enforce these rules and discipline those who step outside its bounds. 4 Sports are also shaped through a politics initially established through a specific definition of amateurism, fair play, and masculinity. Bourdieu also notes that the social realm of sport is a site of struggle over these very understandings (and others). Specifically, it is a site which determines 2. Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent, Discussions in Contemporary Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998), 23. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, "How Can One Be a Sports Fan?," in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, Second edition (New York: Routledge, 1993), 427–40. 4. Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” 430. 2 which bodies are “legitimate” and how they can be used. 5 We class sports, calling them “country club sports,” “revenue-generating sports,” or on the opposite end of the spectrum, denote forms of play as “streetball.” Operating as mass commodities, 6 and for some, a means towards upward social and economic mobility, 7 Bourdieu argues that to study sport requires examination through a class habitus which structures those within it. Habitus represents the various ways we carry social sensibilities and categories through individual and collective practices. The sporting habitus, then, is about a particular relation to the body in addition to the field of production. To study sport is to incorporate corporeal practices within a class habitus comprised of spare time, economic capital, and cultural capital – three critical factors in sporting distribution. How can one study sport? Bourdieu’s colleague Loïc Wacquant utilized habitus as both a topic and tool in his ethnography Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. For him, a Chicago boxing gym operated as a microcosm of broader social and cultural values within lower- class Black communities in the United States. In combining the classed and racial aspects of sport and society, Wacquant points to four aspects of habitus which guide this project: 1) It is a set of acquired dispositions which 2) operates beneath the level of consciousness and discourse and 3) varies by social location, and is 4) derived from pedagogical work – how people acquire skills and values through sport. While Bourdieu is primarily concerned with how class bears upon the sporting sphere, I consider his notion of a sport habitus in tandem with Wacquant’s 5. Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” 431. 6. Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” 433. 7. Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” 435. 3 addition of race and consider its gendered aspects as well as it relates to women. These elements comprise what I am calling throughout this dissertation as the hoops habitus. Sociologist Michael Messner writes that even in a moment marked by a wealth of niche markets that offer more content than ever before, there remains a “center” to the cultural regime of sport. 8 Defined by the most visible and profitable institutions, teams and athletes, this center is, more often than not, a space constructed by and for men. 9 This center is maintained through a hierarchy dictating the quantity and quality of media coverage 10 and the allocation of financial resources, including salaries 11 , both areas documented by scholars studying sport for decades. 8. Michael A. Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, XVIII. 9. Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports, XVIII. 10. Frederick L. Battenfield, Bosmat M. Dzaloshinsky, and Samuel Y. Todd, “The Demise of the WNBA in Florida: A Mixed Method Case Study of Newspaper Coverage about Women’s Professional Basketball,” The Sport Journal 10, no. 2 (2007); Cheryl Cooky et al., "It's Not About the Game: Don Imus, Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Media," Sociology of Sport Journal 27, no. 2 (2010): 139–59; Cheryl Cooky, Michael A. Messner, and Robin H. Hextrum, “Women Play Sport, But Not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media,” Communication & Sport 1, no. 3 (2013): 203–30; Akilah R. Carter-Francique and Michelle F. Richardson, “Controlling Media, Controlling Access: The Role of Sport Media on Black Women’s Sport Participation,” Race, Gender & Class 23, no. 1/2 (2016): 7–33; Victoria Carty, “Textual Portrayals of Female Athletes: Liberation or Nuanced Forms of Patriarchy?,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 2 (2005): 132–55; Barbara Thomas Coventry, “On the Sidelines: Sex and Racial Segregation in Television Sports Broadcasting,” Sociology of Sport Journal 21, no. 3 (September 2004): 322–41; Katherine L. Lavelle, “‘Plays like a Guy’: A Rhetorical Analysis of Brittney Griner in Sports Media,” Journal of Sports Media 9, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 115–31. 11. Andrea M. Giampetro-Meyer, “Recognizing and Remedying Individual and Institutional Gender-Based Wage Discrimination in Sport,” American Business Law Journal 37, no. 2 (2000): 343–86; N. Jeremi Duru, “Hoop Dreams Deferred: The WNBA, the NBA, and the Long-Standing Gender Inequity at the Game’s Highest Level,” Utah Law Review, 2015, 559– 603; B.R. Humphreys, “Equal Pay on the Hardwood: The Earnings Gap between Male and Female NCAA Division I Basketball Coaches,” Journal of Sports Economics 1, no. 3 (2000): 299–307. 4 Messner notes that these practices which marginalize certain sporting bodies and performances have significant effects on children’s perceptions of race, gender, capitalism, and other issues. 12 What I am offering to the rich body of work of Messner and many others is work which intentionally lives at these margins with my participants, what bell hooks calls “a profound edge.” 13 The margins, hooks writes, is where the magic happens. It is not merely a site of deprivation but a site of radical possibility. hooks writes that the margins can operate as a site of creativity, an inclusive space of recovery and resistance. This stance is a decidedly different perspective from sport scholarship which laments the status of women on the periphery of sport and continually documents the slow progress of gender equity. To be clear, there is a significant difference between an imposed marginality (say, relegating the role of race or gender to a discussion section of an article) as compared to marginality as a site of resistance – hooks is explicit in acknowledging this in Yearning. This dissertation moves beyond measuring the distance from the center to the margins; it is far more invested in considering, first and foremost, what is happening at the margins. What would it mean to intentionally reside in the margins, to see, create, and imagine possibilities from the current standpoint? To locate oneself in the margins is difficult, but as bell hooks writes, necessary. “It is not a ‘safe’ place,” she writes. “One is always at risk.” 14 To counter the riskiness of this positionality, hooks advocates for a community of resistance. Throughout this dissertation, I have been energized and motivated to observe various communities supporting and amplifying 12. Messner, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports, XIX. 13. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 149. 14. hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 149. 5 women at the margins of sport. The specific margins of this project focus on basketball, with participants comprised of athletes, journalists, activists, and their respective organizations. In many ways, the sport of basketball, like other sports, is used to both confirm and challenge racial stereotypes. As Kevin Hylton writes, sport is used as evidence of racial progress, equal opportunity, and a site of “diversity” where playing together binds individuals both within and across racial and ethnic identities. 15 On the other hand, Hylton argues, it is also through sport where we see various hierarchies maintained in the demographics of coaching and front-office ranks 16 , racial stacking across various sports 17 , and the enacting of post-racial logics through notions of meritocracy and microaggressions regarding the athleticism and intellect of certain bodies and brains. 18 In Race, Sport, and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora, sociologist Ben 15. Kevin Hylton, Contesting “Race” and Sport: Shaming the Colour Line (New York: Routledge, 2018), 4. 16. Richard Lapchick et al., “The 2018 Racial and Gender Report Card: National Basketball Association,” The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (Orlando: University of Central Florida, June 26, 2018), http://nebula.wsimg.com/b10c21a67a6d1035091c4e5784c012f4?AccessKeyId=DAC3A56D8FB 782449D2A&disposition=0&alloworigin=1; Melanie Sartore and George Cunningham, “Stereotypes, Race, and Coaching,” Journal of African American Studies 10, no. 2 (2006): 69– 83; N. Jeremi Duru, Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 17. Daniel Buffington, “Contesting Race on Sundays: Making Meaning out of the Rise in the Number of Black Quarterbacks,” Sociology of Sport Journal 22, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 19– 37, https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.22.1.19; J.R. Woodward, “Professional Football Scouts: An Investigation of Racial Stacking,” Sociology of Sport Journal 21, no. 4 (2004): 356–75; Benjamin Margolis and Jane Allyn Piliavin, “‘Stacking’ in Major League Baseball: A Multivariate Analysis,” Sociology of Sport Journal 16 (1999): 16–34; Trevor Bopp and Michael Sagas, “Racial Tasking and the College Quarterback: Redefining the Stacking Phenomenon,” Journal of Sport Management 28, no. 2 (2014): 136–42. 18. David J. Leonard, “Never Just a Game: The Language of Sport on and off the Court,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7, no. 2 (2012): 137–43; Abby L. Ferber, “The Construction of Black Masculinity: White Supremacy Now and Then,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 11–24, https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723506296829; Andrew C. 6 Carrington describes the Black athlete as a cluster of contradictions bound up into a political entity and a global sporting racial project. 19 Historically developed out of a white, masculine, colonial fear of loss, he argues that even in today’s hyper-commercialized landscape, sport remains a deeply racialized space to consider and consume the Black Other. 20 This is particularly vivid in a sport like basketball, where the ease of acquiring the necessary equipment for play (a ball and some form of basket or hoop) compared to other sports like baseball or American football made it an appealing game within U.S. major cities, where urban sprawl constricted open space for leisure. While Black athletes were prevented from accessing the YMCA gyms which initially housed the game, the sport eventually flourished in Black communities. It was taken up in the early 1900s at the collegiate level across all-Black institutions and amplified by Black migration to Northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century. As the sport grew in popularity across the country, it became an important faction of Black cultural production, expanded through collegiate play, the Harlem Globetrotters, and eventually, the National Basketball Association. There is a wealth of scholarship which considers Billings, “Depicting the Quarterback in Black and White: A Content Analysis of College and Professional Football Broadcast Commentary,” Howard Journal of Communications 15, no. 4 (October 1, 2004): 201–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/10646170490521158; Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown, “Sporting Space Invaders: Elite Bodies in Track and Field, a South African Context,” South African Review of Sociology 46, no. 1 (2015): 7–24; Barbara Thomas Coventry, “On the Sidelines: Sex and Racial Segregation in Television Sports Broadcasting,” Sociology of Sport Journal 21, no. 3 (September 2004): 322–41; James A. Rada and K. Tim Wulfemeyer, “Color Coded: Racial Descriptors in Television Coverage of Intercollegiate Sports,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 49, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 65–85, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4901_5. 19. Ben Carrington, Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora (London: Sage, 2010), 2. 20. Carrington, Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora, 5. 7 how basketball reflects racial logics, the commodity of Black expression, and the regulation of blackness through various leagues and institutions. In this particular sport, the phrase "playing the right way" is invoked to describe an unselfish, team-oriented style of play. However, the commonly-used expression also contains a moral judgment as to the "wrong" way to play. 21 Yago Colás argues that debates surrounding the right way or wrong way to play offer thinly- veiled racial discourses which speak what he terms the white basketball unconscious. This term is defined as a set of beliefs rooted in a mythical understanding of how the game used to be and more importantly, perhaps, who used to play it. 22 Given the game’s original athletes’ identities as white, able-bodied, heterosexual, American, Christian men, those operating outside of the imagined parameters of the peach basket past are rendered deviant, destroying foundational values with each possession. Several scholars have considered how these “ways to play” are racialized, especially within the National Basketball Association (NBA) 23 ; however, there is 21. Yago Colás, “What We Mean When We Say ‘Play the Right Way’: Strategic Fundamentals, Morality, and Race in the Culture of Basketball,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45, no. 2 (2012), 114. 22. Yago Colás, “Our Myth of Creation: The Politics of Narrating Basketball’s Origin,” Journal of Sport History 43, no. 1 (2016): 37–54. 23. David J. Leonard, “It’s Gotta Be the Body: Race, Commodity, and Surveillance of Contemporary Black Athletes,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 33 (2009): 165–90; David J. Leonard, After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness, SUNY Series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012); David J. Leonard and C. Richard King, eds., Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); Todd Boyd and Kenneth L. Shropshire, “Basketball Jones: A New World Order?,” in Basketball Jones: America Above the Rim (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 1–11. 8 significantly less research dedicated to how this operates across racial and gendered lines for Black women in basketball. 24 In each of the case studies presented within this project, the majority of the participants I interview and observe are Black women; they comprise the majority of players at the highest level of the game in the United States and are featured on professional rosters around the world. Previous research centered on the experiences of Black women in sport, while primarily focused on African-Americans, finds that their experiences differ from those of Black men and white women. 25 Black women are deemed outside the parameters of white, Western femininity, read as overly masculine, aggressive, and at times, too athletic to be considered "real women." These accusations (especially the latter) have most recently been levied against the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Brittney Griner and South African track athlete Caster Semenya. Perhaps the most famous and well-researched example of the matrix of domination at play with Black women in sport operates within the media framing of Venus and Serena Williams. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe describes the various ways the Williams sisters' bodies are read 24. Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Hoop Dreams: Professional Basketball and the Politics of Race and Gender,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 23, no. 4 (1999): 403–20; Cheryl Cooky et al., "It's Not About the Game: Don Imus, Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Media," Sociology of Sport Journal 27, no. 2 (2010): 139–59; Jennifer L. Hanis-Martin, “Embodying Contradictions: The Case of Professional Women’s Basketball,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 30, no. 3 (2006): 265–88; Mary G. McDonald, “Queering Whiteness: The Peculiar Case of the Women’s National Basketball Association,” Sociological Perspectives 45, no. 4 (2002): 379–96. 25. For more on the experiences of Black women outside of a U.S. context, see Munene Mwaniki, The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017); Janelle Joseph, Sport in the Black Atlantic: Crossing and Making Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Shari L. Dworkin, Amanda Lock Swarr, and Cheryl Cooky, “(In)Justice in Sport: The Treatment of South African Track Star Caster Semenya,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 40–70. 9 against the racial, gendered, and classed expectations of the tennis world, where they are described as "ghetto Cinderellas," and "animals." She articulates the contemporary Black female athlete through a post-Civil Rights hip hop generation where there are no simple readings of protest or conformity within the sporting space; instead, she argues that resistance takes on contradictory and complex forms within this highly-mediated space. 26 A Black feminist critical lens takes a decidedly different perspective on sport study. Whereas the majority of journal articles and book chapters dedicated to Serena Williams focus on the racism of media coverage, officiating, or governing bodies of the sport, Black feminist scholars like Claudia Rankine place Serena in conversation with other Black women. In Citizen, Rankine considers how Williams embodies Zora Neale Hurston's quote "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," the whiteness of the tennis world in harsh contrast to a young Serena's beads adorning the court or a grown Williams confronting a lousy call. 27 In the same way, Brittany Cooper considers the impact of the Williams sisters in her book Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower when she writes, “They have created this kind of alchemy that uses their physical strength and strategic prowess on the court, together with all the racial slurs and insults they have endured over the years – being called the n-word, being called ugly, being told their bodies were too manly – to create something that looks magical to the rest of us.” 28 Here, Cooper is grappling with the same history of these 26. Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald, eds., Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 27. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014). 28. Brittney C. Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Kindle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 6. 10 athletes but transforms their performances on and off of the court into its own form of embodied knowledge which transcends familiar research paradigms within sport communication scholarships. Given this history and previous scholarship, I am most interested in the current gendered and racial structures which dictate the status of women within basketball as well as the strategies these women devise to navigate through the industry. I holistically consider how this particular sport operates across racial, gendered, and geographic lines through a variety of actors and institutions conjoined by the global flows of basketball. The insights contained within this particular project resonate far beyond the court, press box, or front office of a team. Rather, the relationship between the agency of individuals and groups against structural inequality speak to strategies of resistance which transcend the sporting space. In researching the lived experiences of the women detailed throughout these chapters, I find larger connective threads to the struggles of marginalized individuals and groups across both industry and history. This dissertation takes up Aarti Ratna's call for critical sport scholarship, which moves beyond cultural tropes of difference and speaks directly to the alternative knowledges produced by those experiencing racial and gendered forms of violence. 29 In “Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color,” Ratna laments the white, Western framings of sport research which too often fail to take into account how people of color (especially women) use sport as a site of resistance and pleasure. Ratna details the urgency of critical scholarship focused on the complex relationship between women of color and sport. She calls for renewed attention to the writings and memoirs of women of 29. Aarti Ratna, “Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color,” Sociology of Sport Journal 35 (2018), 197. 11 color, valuable sources I use throughout this project to contribute additional voices and perspectives across time and space. 30 Ratna's review of literature located at the intersection of race, gender, and sport found three primary research areas: African American women, South Asian and Muslim women, and the Global North/South. More work is needed on the transnational connections and movements of these women, as well as the unique circumstances of their sporting participation to disrupt scholarship depicting women of color as a singular, undifferentiated Other. She also calls for more work addressing racist and Islamophobic sport governance, an issue I take up in Chapter 4 with FIBA's ban on the hijab, a case study which also prioritizes the potential of sport as a space of solidarity. Finally, Ratna emphasizes the importance of scholarship attending to acts of resistance and places these figures within more extensive dialogues/ontologies of women of color. 31 The women represented in this dissertation offer a counterpublic to sporting fields of study too long comprised of white, Western feminism. In this dissertation, I actively resist assumptions that the women participating in this project are merely reactionary. Instead, I introduce the crossover to point to how these women are always already both ready for defensive mechanisms while actively focused on their own goals, ambitions, and pleasure. The crossover, an analytic I introduce in the following chapter, operates as a means to conceptualize 30. Ratna, "Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color," 198. 31. Ratna, "Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color," 200. 12 transnational flows of knowledge, power, and culture, situated within a broader historical context. Throughout this project, I ask, what social norms and practices define and regulate basketball for women? How do those operating within this industry use their knowledge of these regulatory practices to choreograph alternative possibilities? And in what ways do they share these crossover tactics to create space for one another? I argue the participants of this project, operating within a discriminatory system, create new forms of feminist thought developed under various types of labor and love which evade temporal and spatial specificity. Through three case studies, I contribute to larger bodies of literature to disrupt established forms of knowledge too long invested in excluding sporting practices located at the margins. Chapter Overview In The Way We Ball: Global Crossovers Within the Hoops Habitus, I trace the processes of basketball organizations, players, journalists, and corporations within a massive transnational industrial complex. Like a basketball game, this project is organized into four quarters, each addressing aspects of what I collectively term the hoops habitus – the individuals and institutions which culturally and symbolically define basketball through negotiations of agency and structure. In the first chapter or “quarter,” “Choreographing the Crossover,” I detail the hoops habitus and define the crossover, an analytic I use throughout the three case studies of this dissertation. Providing historical examples, I consider how Aimee Meredith Cox’s concept of choreography connects prominent moments of agency for women in basketball. In the second quarter, "Add Women and Sell: #WeAreWomen and the Sporting Economies of Visibility," I examine the influx of empowerment campaigns and programs within 13 professional women's sports organizations. Focusing on the Los Angeles Sparks' inaugural #WeAreWomen campaign, I interrogate the various ways a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) team markets itself through empowerment logics, as well as the internal debates about these marketing practices. I place #WeAreWomen within a prominent branding trend of marketplace feminism, where increasing profit drives the perceived push for equality and empowerment through these initiatives. However, these programs ultimately reveal the massive struggles which remain for organizations attempting to increase visibility for women's basketball. The third quarter, “Translating Timeouts: The Choreography of Playing Overseas,” focuses on the experiences of U.S. professional basketball players competing in international basketball leagues. The majority of WNBA players compete year-round, opting to play in a variety of countries during the offseason where the pay is higher, the talent is less competitive, and culture shocks are frequent. One of these players is Cierra Burdick, a player I observe as she choreographs her life on and off of the court in Kazan, Russia, subject to arduous national and global athletic business cultures. Overall, this chapter posits that for U.S. women traveling abroad to compete professionally, they are marked as Other in a myriad of ways. Race, gender, sexuality, and nationality take on dynamically different and transformative modes for people like Cierra whose labor demands that they cross multiple borders and navigate foreign bank accounts, visas, and language barriers. The financial volatility and cultural marginalization of the WNBA, coupled with the dizzying divide of playing overseas for eight months per year, continue to mark female professional basketball players as outsiders within their sport. The fourth quarter, "Haram Hoops?: FIBA, Nike, and the Hijab's Half-Court Defense," explores FIBA, the global governing body of basketball, and their ban on the hijab and the 14 effects of the policy on Muslim girls and women. This chapter furthermore highlights the agency, activism, and marketability of Muslim women basketball players by giving attention to two prime examples. The first concerns discourses surrounding FIBA's 2017 vote on whether or not to allow athletes to wear the hijab during international games. Secondly, I look at the introduction of Nike's Pro Hijab, released less than a month after the announcement of a multi- year, title partnership with FIBA, who, at the time, did not allow athletes to wear the hijab in competition. I consider how these women struggle and find agency in these cases, as well as reflect upon the ambivalence of corporate intervention in issues of Islamophobia and sexism globally. Through interviews, content analysis and observations of the online Muslim Women in Sport Network Summit, I interrogate the various ways in which Muslim women's attire and actions are continuously subject to the scrutiny of both Islamic factions and Western policies. I also examine how Muslim women in sport find community globally through online channels. I conclude with "Seeing the Game Globally," where I consider how this work could expand beyond the lives and experiences of Black American women. I reflect on how each chapter speaks to larger issues of mobility, constraint, and "choreographing" new possibilities. How women make sense of their lives through theorizing the present and imagining the future is paramount for creating new opportunities to resist normative scripts. I also reflect upon sporting feminist literature and the gaps this dissertation both fills and leaves for future exploration, especially as it pertains to the inclusion of athletes’ voices in sport-related research. It is my hope that this project is in itself a crossover of sorts – connecting the rich work of so many scholars with the vivid words and thoughts of those competing on the court. I consider what the choreography of the crossover looks like for each of the women in this dissertation, and what 15 new possibilities open up as they envision maneuvering past those who would prevent forward momentum. 16 FIRST QUARTER | CHOREOGRAPHING THE CROSSOVER “The thing about a crossover is that, perhaps more than any other signature dribble move, it relies on trust: a defender willing to trust you, and what they understand about you, and your willingness to deceive them…The main strength of a crossover is that it works best when you are being closely guarded.” – Hanif Abdurraqib 32 Over the past four years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in gyms. Mostly on the periphery – watching or writing. Other times I’ve found myself on the court, active and involved. Whether inside of million-dollar facilities or outside on blacktop pavements, under buzzing lights in Russia, or just down the street from my home on the Venice boardwalk courts in southern California, my favorite basketball move remains the crossover. Not as flashy as a dunk or as violent as a block, the crossover is about agility, balance, and deception. It demands rapid lateral movement with seemingly little effort. It also requires particular poise and control to challenge an opponent’s balance, leaving adversaries helpless as they flail, trip, or crash to the ground (referred to on the court as “breaking ankles”). The crossover relies upon an athlete knowing where they are on the court and where they need to go. Shifting from one side to the other rapidly and following an internal rhythm, the well-timed crossover allows one to create space for themselves and their teammates, ultimately allowing for a clear path to the basket. In this dissertation, I utilize the sport of basketball to illuminate the knowledge and cultural production of marginalized women creating space for themselves and others. This project uses interviews and participant-observation to center the lived experiences of athletes, journalists, team employees, and activists as they navigate an industry which often obscures their contributions. These observations take place across various borders, with stops in Los Angeles, 32. Hanif Abdurraqib, “It Rained in Ohio on the Night Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover,” in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Columbus: Two Dollar Radio, 2017), 128–29. 17 California; Kazan, Russia; and Paris, France. I also traversed multiple spaces through online platforms such as Skype or YouTube, where interviewees shared their experiences from Beijing, China, or took part in online conferences connecting women in sport across dozens of countries. This project, like many others which precede it, considers sport a vibrant space to explore notions of identity and representation within popular culture. It follows a long lineage of scholarship focused on sport as a space which both reflects and challenges dominant norms of race, class, gender, and religion. Why Basketball? Basketball is a vibrant cultural text and set of practices to examine various shifts and struggles related to labor, identity, industry, and media within today’s postmodern global landscape. As the world’s second most popular team sport (and the most-watched team sport at the Olympic Games), basketball brings more than 450 million players to the court around the world, and even more inside of arenas, in front of TVs, or through streaming devices each year. 33 It is this worldly facet of basketball – that it is a game played worldwide; its global market and geopolitical relevance and impact within media, entertainment, retail, and diplomacy; that it is a practice of body, imagination, and emotion that shapes consciousness across borders of geography, identity, and culture – which concern me. Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian educator, first introduced the game in a Springfield, Massachusetts Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) gym in 1891. 34 Given the Y’s 33. “Facts and Figures,” FIBA.basketball, accessed August 15, 2018, http://www.fiba.basketball/presentation. 34. Naismith has been quoted as saying, “Honestly, I never believed that it ever would be played outside of that gymnasium in Springfield.” 18 connection to religious entities, missionaries exported basketball with their Bibles, taking the game throughout Great Britain, France, China, and India over the sport’s first decade. In Brazil, for example, as YMCA officials established schools and colleges, art history teacher August Shaw packed a basketball with his books as he traveled to teach in São Paolo. After setting up a basket on a patio and playing in his free time, students’ curiosity about the game led to the creation of boys’ and girls’ teams at the school. 35 Other educators, like Shaw, brought basketballs with their belongings, organically spreading the sport, unlike the religious and educational practices pushed by the missionaries behind these institutions. Noticing this, organizations such as the YMCA and eventually, in 1906, the Playground Association of America used play as a means of "progress," moral values, and modernity. 36 Tied to the ideals of Muscular Christianity, a concept created by Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes in England, these organizations (and others) argued that sports like basketball reinforced values of “temper, self restraint, fairness, honour, unenvious approbation of another’s success, and all that ‘give and take’ of life which stand a man in such good stead when he goes forth into the world.” 37 Muscular Christianity sought to simultaneously (re)capture "manliness" 35. Claudia Guedes, “‘Changing the Cultural Landscape’: English Engineers, American Missionaries, and the YMCA Bring Sports to Brazil - the 1870s to the 1930s,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 17 (December 2011): 2597-2598. In Guedes's work, she importantly notes that gendered unevenness in publicizing these teams. Pictures of male teams appeared in 1899; women's rosters didn't appear until the 1920s. 36. Guedes, 2601. Luther Gulick, president of the YMCA in the 1880s, declared that “Christ’s Kingdom should include the athletic world.” 37. Shirl James Hoffman, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 112. 19 and morality through physical activity which would not only exercise their flesh but their faith as well. 38 Figure 1. Artist Victor Solomon’s work combines stained glass with a basketball hoop comprised of beads reminiscent of a rosary 39 As Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen write in Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport, “The perceived goodness of masculine activity and sports was implicitly part of the vision to win the world for Christ and thereby usher in the millennium.” 40 In the image above, Victor Solomon’s assemblage piece highlights the religious as well as imperial context and ethos which basketball was exported throughout the world from 38. Hoffman, 119. 39. On his website literallyballing.com, Victor Solomon’s work is described as an "examination of basketball as a class vehicle [which] appropriates the sport's universally attainable iconography and embellishes their production with antiquated processes historically reserved for the elite." 40. Tony Ladd and James A. Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport (Grand Rapids: BridgePoint Books, 1999), 29. 20 the late 19 th century throughout the 20 th century. The combination of the stained glass and rosary beads can be read as both a nod to the religious roots of the game as well as how the game is considered sacred or a spiritual experience by those who take the court. Basketball is also a rich site to investigate the evolution of women in sport because men and women have played the game for nearly the same amount of time. The mother of women's basketball, Senda Berenson, brought girls and women to the court within weeks of James Naismith laying the foundation in 1891 at that Springfield YMCA gym. Berenson wrote, "Let such a person try this game, she will forget herself at the first throw of the ball, will take deep draughts of air with the unaccustomed exercise and tingle and throb with the joy of the game." 41 In some U.S. regions, especially the west coast, basketball was considered a women’s game, with no record of men’s games until 1907. 42 Early women’s basketball replicated much of the Victorian culture of its time, emphasizing refinement and gentility. 43 However, as Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford write, it also represented “a profound shift in standard views of womanhood, trading fragility for determined resolve” 44 on the court (and off of it as well). 45 41. Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford, Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball (New York: The New Press, 2005):10. 42. Joanne Lannin, Finding a Way to Play: The Pioneering Spirit of Women in Basketball (Portland: Portlandia Press, 2015). 43. Lannin, 32-33. 44. Lannin, 11. 45. Mabel Craft, a young reporter assigned to cover the first collegiate women’s basketball, wrote that “Basketball wasn’t invented for girls, and there isn’t anything effeminate about it. It was made for men to play indoors and it is a game that would send the physician who thinks the feminine organization ‘so delicate’ into the hysterics he tries so hard to perpetuate.” 21 From its genesis, women received criticism for playing basketball, accused of being too competitive, aggressive, unladylike, and at risk of exploitation by promoters. These assessments of the women's game are complicated even further over time as the bodies and performances of athletes are evaluated across racial and ethnic lines. As religious groups spread the gospel of the game, war and occupation also propagated basketball to new regions, with U.S. colonial troops in the Philippines and World War I soldiers competing in tournaments organized by the American Red Cross. Basketball (among other sports) became a mechanism with which to enforce expectations of gender, nation, and religious conversion and expression. It was a means of acculturating colonized subjects to the realities of colonization, military conquest, and imperial rule. It was part of the "educational apparatus" of empire. In boarding schools housed on reservations across the United States, basketball was part of a "civilizing" mechanism in tandem with the physical violence and forced cultural assimilation of these institutions. 46 While American football was eventually rejected as an acceptable form of physical education due to the violence of the game and necessary equipment to compete, other sports such as basketball were seen as a means to “[build] character and [promote] constructive and worthwhile behavior.” 47 Scholar John Bloom’s interviews with indigenous athletes who competed at some of these boarding schools reveal sport as a connector of cultural tradition, a tool of assimilation, and, at times, an equalizing space of pride. 48 46. One of the most famous teams to emerge from these institutions is the Fort Shaw Indian Industrial School’s girls’ basketball team, who played in a series of exhibition games at the 1904 World Fair. 47. John Bloom, “‘Show What an Indian Can Do’: Sports, Memory, and Ethnic Identity at Federal Indian Boarding Schools,” Journal of American Indian Education 35, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 39. 48. Bloom, 40. 22 Like the cases I examine in this dissertation, the gendered boundaries of basketball affected girls and women who wanted to take part in creating space for themselves on the court. On the reservation, they often received resistance from both boarding school officials and community elders. 49 Bloom writes that sport functioned as “a complex cultural practice where Native Americans could not only respond to an educational system that was often insensitive, but through which they could also experience pride, mischief, or pleasure.” 50 This example represents how a sport created to encourage exercise during the winter months morphed into a phenomenon capable of transmitting values and shaping identities. Expanding globally through imperialism and colonization, basketball became a site of tension and exchange as more groups accessed the game. As basketball crossed over borders (physical or cultural), it regularly changed, as rules, tactics, and plays became the stuff of sporting innovation. As more basketball players took to the court around the world, these new ballers represented a variety of backgrounds not found on the first YMCA courts of Dr. James Naismith. 51 As they adopted the sport, they changed the game to suit their geographic locations and cultures. These players moved in, out, and between formal and informal settings, through self-organized teams and leagues or sanctioned events by governing bodies or corporate entities. At the same time, sporting hierarchies determined which styles of play and players remained acceptable and eventually, profitable. The ways colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism mobilize basketball globally reflect similar shifts in labor, nation- 49. Ibid., 45. 50. Ibid., 46. 51. Yago Colás, “Getting Free: The Arts and Politics of Basketball Modernity,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 39, no. 4 (2015): 276. 23 building, and power throughout other avenues. This dissertation draws from several areas of scholarship addressing the relationship between sport, identity, and global capitalism. Basketball Goes Coast to Coast The evolution of basketball into a global phenomenon occurred through professional leagues, technological shifts allowing for television and radio broadcasts, as well as the incorporation of transnational corporations such as Nike and Adidas which capitalized off of the growing popularity of the sport. For the crossover appeal of Black bodies balling, look no further than the sneakers and apparel donned worldwide. More than likely, they display the emblematic Nike swoosh and iconic Jumpman logo 52 made famous by Michael Jordan, current-day “multinational icons of cool.” 53 Walter LaFeber defines this as a "virtual integration" – where African American athleticism meets white executive business leaders to create crossover appeal packaged in a variety of endorsements. This integration occurred most successfully in the 1980s and 1990s through Michael Jordan. 54 The desire to "Be Like Mike" became a mantra echoing across Gatorade commercials, while Spike Lee pressed Jordan on whether or not his athletic prowess resided in his shoes. Several scholars have argued that Jordan ushered in an era where the athletic Black body reached previously unknown levels of acceptance, prominence, and commercial appeal. 52, Add in the visual trademark of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and what you have is the trifecta of global capitalism. As Naomi Klein writes in No Logo, “Logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have to an international language, recognized and understood in many more places than English.” (loc. 509) 53. Doug Merlino, The Crossover: A Brief History of Basketball and Race (Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2011: loc. 1069. 54. Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 64. 24 David L. Andrews and Ron L. Mower argue that "[Jordan] thus became a figure complicit in the advancement of the racially pernicious neoliberal project, the enduring popular potency of which provides clear ideological linkages between the Reagan revolution and Obama's America." 55 Jordan morphs into a figure of postracial success, proof that racism can be overcome in the United States if one can merely "be like Mike." In the wake of the hypervisibility of Jordan’s success both on and off of the court, basketball (among other sports) shifted the economic potential of athletic success. Robin D.G. Kelley writes that instead of leisure as a means of escape from labor, for some Black inner-city youth, play has become a job in itself at an early age, not merely a form of expression. 56 He considers the urban playground as the genesis for both hip hop and basketball, which become two visible pathways “out” for Black youth. 57 This is often visible in music or sport features where an athlete or artist (almost always Black and male) "overcomes" the pitfalls of a lower- income, inner-city neighborhood (often reeling from the fallout following the outsourcing of local jobs, the housing crisis, or the side effects of gentrification) through the power of play. The visuals accompanying the story – postindustrial wasteland, a basketball going through a netless hoop, graffiti-scrawled walls – reproduce and reinforce notions of blackness easily digestible, 55. David L. Andrews and Ron L. Mower, “Spectres of Jordan,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 6 (2012): 1061. 56. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Playing for Keeps: Pleasure and Profit on the Postindustrial Playground,” in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano, Kindle edition (New York: Random House, 1998), 197. 57. Sports documentaries such as Hoop Dreams (1994), Without Bias (2009), Benji (2012), and Lenny Cooke (2013) illustrate this dynamic between using basketball as an escape and the various barriers which can constrict upward mobility. 25 and by the end of the three-minute feature, easily remedied through "overcoming adversity." 58 As Kelley argues, this fantasy of escape through hip-hop or hoops does not operate equally for girls and women seeking economic mobility. In this dissertation, I consider how basketball is imagined (or not) as a "way out" for girls and women, especially those who identify as Black. Additionally, I note how those who pursue the sport professionally cross over into mainstream celebrity as they also cross physical borders to compete internationally. In this project, I use the crossover, an offensive basketball maneuver, as a metaphor for the cultural, political, and economic strategies used to cultivate space by those within the world of women's basketball. The Crossover as Analytic The crossover, conceptually and analytically, is a means of making sense of some of the struggles faced by girls and women basketball players around the world. It is a framework that centers women and sport in interrogating various facets of gender and global capitalism as well as their interrelation. I argue that the experiences and strategies cultivated by communities of women situated across multiple identities, careers, and locations provide an instructive lens into the proliferation of basketball as 1) a global industry grounded in different modes of production, consumption, and mediation; and 2) a site of global spectacle, fantasy, and struggle. On both these fronts, girls and women basketball players and executives navigate, negotiate, and resist countless boundaries and obstacles. Amid institutional and economic inequities and gendered and racialized stereotypes, girls and women around the world create community and generate new forms of knowledge—new means of maneuvering, wiggling in and out and around 58. Ibid., 213. Kelley writes, “stories of black college players who were ‘discovered’ on the playgrounds of some horrific metropolitan ghetto have become stock narratives among sportscasters and columnists.” 26 defenders, sidestepping opponents, and as some would say on the basketball court, "putting the world on skates." In this dissertation, I use the crossover as an analytic to conceptualize the global flows of people and culture through basketball in three ways. The people who are at the center of this dissertation are young, transnationally mobile professional athletes; front office personnel working to market women’s basketball to the masses; and activists creating online communities for Muslim women in sport. Through them, I consider, first, the movement of culture and labor across physical borders (who can cross over), selectively permeating initially through colonization and imperialism, and continuously through commercialization. 59 These crossovers occur, for example, as athletes traverse borders to compete at the highest levels of the game, with some finding new forms of revenue while others remain barred through regulatory policies which constrict their ability to take the court. The crossover also refers to the global crossover appeal of basketball, that is how various industries and interest groups translate the spectacle of basketball for different audiences while simultaneously over-determining the market value and popularity of certain styles of play, as well as the profit potential of players. David J. Leonard writes that "Defining who can assimilate 59. In Josh Kun's TEDx talk with DJ J.Period titled "The Art of the Crossfade," Kun provides both abstract and concrete examples of the ways in which the crossfader -- a mixing technology used by DJs -- speaks to both the evolution of genre and sound, as well as to the potential of reshaping perceptions of society, economy, and global culture. He states that the transformations and power shifts of 21st century globalization – large-scale processes that include migration, deportation, proliferation of drones, militarization of borders, etc. – which allow for greater flows of money, products, ideas, and some but not all groups of people, require new ways of thinking and intervening. For Kun, the DJ's relationship to the crossfader is an analytic for interrogating crucial questions about society: for instance, how will humanity sustain itself if we cannot sustain a mix, if we cannot learn to live in the cuts and fades? How will we thrive if we are unable to create from the margins? Kun asks, "What is a society if it can't crossfade?" 27 into mainstream culture, and who is suspect, does not simply manifest itself in who will appear on the next cereal box but in the inequalities and injustices that continue to malign society." 60 Corporate desires to make women’s basketball more palatable and consumer-friendly to mainstream audiences has continued throughout the game’s evolution. For women athletes, marketability often means conformity – to white patriarchal standards of beauty, sexuality, and athletic competition. Those considered outside the realm of traditional femininity seldom receive the same opportunities, and even when women receive endorsements (primarily if they play individual rather than team sports), their “difference” is the sell, and their value is determined across racial and sexual lines. For girls’ and women’s basketball specifically, the proliferation of “marketplace feminism” – where gender equality is a mere purchase away 61 – continues to shape how women's sports are framed. As Victoria Carty and other scholars have noted, traditional femininity and feminism co-exist in sports marketing strategies emphasizing gender quality, independence, and self-determination while also upholding hegemonic norms of womanhood (especially as it applies to an emphasis on motherhood and proximity to heterosexual relationships. 62 Marketplace feminism is a comfortable commodity, ready-to-wear and driven by corporate sponsorships, empowerment events, celebrity culture, and its corresponding cults of personality. 60. David J. Leonard, “Never Just a Game: The Language of Sport on and off the Court,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7, no. 2 (2012), 140. 61. Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016); Rosalind Gill, “Post- Postfeminism?: New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–30. 62). Victoria Carty, “Textual Portrayals of Female Athletes: Liberation or Nuanced Forms of Patriarchy?,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 2 (2005), 133. 28 However, as I note in the following chapter, the causes deemed worthy of supporting are a top- down determination by the league and its teams, not by the players themselves. The Crossover as Black Cultural Production and Performance Beyond basketball, the most common use of the term crossover is rooted in one's ability to maneuver through various styles and genre – a musician's new album, for example, can be said to possess "crossover appeal." At the same time, it also denotes the potential for capitalist gain — more eyes, ears, and dollars as a singer gains new fans, heavier rotation, and global recognition. The title of this dissertation, "The Way We Ball," takes its name from a song title by rapper Lil Flip where "balling" is conveyed through both braggadocious bars which reference affluence as well as professional basketball franchises. 63 The relationship between rap and basketball, two cultural forms associated with blackness, vividly represent how play shifts from a site of expression into a space of profit. 64 Visual artist Arthur Jafa notes this relationship between black cultural production musically and athletically in an interview with cultural critic Greg Tate when he says, I think there are these modes of black expressivity [in music and sport] which are familiar. One is this whole idea of rhythm. Most people would acknowledge Black people have an acute sensitivity to rhythm. Most people would say that. Even the KKK would say, ‘yeah the niggers got some rhythm,' but there's all this other stuff that is much harder to get a grasp on, for example, there is an acute sensitivity to spatial arrays to how 63. Lil Flip, “Way We Ball” (Houston: Suckafree Records, 2002). Lil Flip is a Houston- based rapper who, in this verse, references the NBA and WNBA franchises of the Houston area, the Rockets and Comets, respectively. The Comets folded in 2008. 64. Gena Caponi-Tabery, in her examination of the relationship between basketball and another musical genre, jazz, considers the various ways in which these forms of Black expression collide. She writes in Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America, “Music, sports, and dance were entertainment, but they were more than that. They were ways of expressing ideas and feelings about personal and cultural identity. As they helped to express and form and new African American consciousness, they became the foundation of a shift in the social fabric of twentieth-century America.” 29 figures operate in space there's no name for it. We don't have a name like rhythm for it. I don't know maybe it comes from being in a slave ship chain next to people your acute awareness of space how you occupy that…like how you occupy in a fixed space. 65 As I collected research for this project, I found the intersections of Black cultural production through music and sport; hip-hop blared across basketball spaces in France and Russia just as they did in the United States. Music and sport have a lot in common – pre-established rules for what play and movement should look like; a range from the amateur to the elite; continuous mental and physical training at the highest levels; and a semblance of universality as a form of expression (though some forms are validated over others). 66 For me, hip-hop and basketball represent two specific forms of culture rooted in Black bodies and aesthetics, regulated by corporate interests, and packaged for consumption globally. Choreographing Black Feminist Thought in Basketball Kimberlé Crenshaw offers intersectionality as a means of denoting the construction of the social world through a multiplicity of identities that cannot be fully understood by looking at them individually. 67 This notion of lived experience through multiple identities is not unique to Crenshaw's intersectionality; the concept of interlocking forms of oppression is a foundational approach to Black feminist thought, whether in the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black 65. Gavin Brown, Arthur Jafa + Greg Tate in Conversation: Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, 2017, https://vimeo.com/209649169. 66. Anthony Bateman, “Introduction: Sport, Music, Identities,” Sport in Society 17, no. 3 (2013): 294. 67. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-. 30 Feminist Statement” 68 or Patricia Hill Collins's matrix of domination. I use a Black feminist lens not only because the majority of my participants are Black women, but because intersectional paradigms capture not only their experiences but the overall structuring of society and culture. 69 Collins argues that Black women's knowledge, often subjugated or excluded, finds alternative modes of expression through music, literature, and everyday behavior. I argue throughout this dissertation that sport also operates as one of these avenues for both expression and knowledge production. The crossover thirdly denotes a particular type of choreography, where girls and women find disruptive tactics to circumvent exclusionary practices designed to leave them on the periphery of the sport, whether as players, coaches, journalists, or staff employees. In her ethnography of a Detroit shelter for girls and women, Aimee Meredith Cox offers choreography as a possibility where Black women move through the various identifications attributed to their bodies – blackness, femaleness, youth, nationality, or poverty. 70 These categories, Cox argues, serve to remind Black women of where they do and do not belong, how they should or should not be seen, and most importantly, reinforce potential consequences for stepping outside of the boundaries which serve to define and contain these women. 71 It is within these various markers that her participants – and the majority of my own – maneuver constantly. 68. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader, ed. Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 254–59. 69. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000). 70. Cox, 28-29. 71. Cox, 5. 31 Whereas choreography is concerned with the ordering of bodies in space, it can, at its most radical, disrupt and discredit societal expectations by both predicting and exploiting them. In doing so, Black women create space for themselves and one another. 72 Fellow Black feminist scholar Brittney C. Cooper is getting at the heart of choreography when she writes that Black women, know what it means to love ourselves in a world that hates us. We know what it means to do a while lot with very little, to ‘make a dollar out of fifteen cents,' as it were. We know what it means to snatch dignity from the jaws of power and come out standing. We know what it means to face horrific violence and trauma from both our communities and our nation-state and carry on anyway. But we also scream, and cry, and hurt, and mourn, and struggle. 73 This is choreography, and within the hoops habitus, embodies the crossover in its final form. The crossover is what bell hooks is talking about when she writes, "we are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world." 74 In this project, I want to emphasize how women in sport operate within their own agency and generate forms of knowledge which allow them to strategically sidestep the perils of pursuing a career in a white, Western, heteropatriarchal industry. The crossover is about performance, in part about placing the body front and center as a challenge to regimes of power and social norms. It is rooted in the idea put forth by Aarti Ratna 72. Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 28-29. 73. Brittney C. Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Kindle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 3. 74. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 153. 32 that “Agency can lurk beneath the skin and/or become enacted within and through the body.” 75 It operates as a wide-ranging and challenging practice to define, taking shape across various temporalities. The crossover is a type of choreography, an ongoing series of gestures and behaviors at times without awareness. While the foundational strategies of the crossover may be used over and over, it also includes elements of change, critique, and creativity within these templates. The choreography of the crossover is bound up in a set of practices with structures, conventions, and styles which separate them from other social interactions of daily life even as they affect them as well. This choreography cements membership in a group of marginalized, excluded and stereotyped bodies. Choreography, then, becomes a sharing of codes rehearsed, repeated and incorporated. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor writes that performances transmit social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated actions. 76 Movement is an integral part of not only the crossover as an analytic but as a methodological tactic of this dissertation. In Chapter 3, this is foregrounded as Cierra Burdick, an American professional basketball player, plays for Kazanochka, a team in Russia. It is imperative to consider not only these global flows, and perhaps even more so, the nonflows which affect women at different intersections of the matrix of domination. In Chapter 4, I focus on the struggles of Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, a successful collegiate athlete barred from pursuing a professional career abroad because of FIBA's ban on the hijab, which has trickled down to privately-owned leagues around the world. 75. Ratna, "Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color," 201. 76. Diana Taylor, Performance, Kindle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 33 Ultimately, I am invested in uncovering these linkages across seemingly disparate locales and contexts, taking up Ratna's call to position women of color beyond the "mask and discursive production of difference." 77 This critical unmasking within the crossover is decidedly transnational, constantly self-reflexive and deeply invested in detangling asymmetries of power through critically listening and centering the voices of the participants and other women of color who inform this work. Ultimately, through observations and interviews with a variety of individuals involved in women’s basketball, this dissertation situates the physical, mental, and emotional labor of each participant as intellectual contributions which address important gaps in sport-related scholarly work. It also engages with feminist scholarship invested in elevating the expertise and voice of women of color, using the sport of basketball as a vehicle to interrogate the structural inequalities they face as well as the possibilities within their performances. Method How do Black women within the hoops habitus create space for themselves and others within an industry attempting to relegate them to the periphery? And how are efforts to expand women's basketball often co-opted by marketplace feminism? To answer these questions and situate Black women's experiences within transnational basketball institutions, I frame this dissertation through Patricia Hill Collins's Black feminist standpoint theory to interrogate various performances of race, gender, nationality, and religion. This standpoint emerges out of both racial and gender-based discrimination involving Black women's labor, political 77. Ratna, "Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feminism and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color," 202. 34 disenfranchisement, and media representation. 78 In Black Feminist Thought, she writes that one of the primary means of suppressing Black feminist thought is through the incorporation and depoliticization of Black women’s feminist contributions. 79 Throughout this dissertation, I argue that basketball operates as yet another regulatory mechanism to devalue both the knowledge production and labor of Black women while simultaneously attempting to subvert their activist practices for capitalist gain. Collins details four aspects of a Black feminist epistemology. The first two, lived experience must be a criterion of meaning, and the use of dialogue is emphasized. For this reason, this project engages with interviews and field observations to ascertain how Black women make meaning out of their daily interactions. The second two aspects address the ethics of personal accountability as well as the ethics of caring — both of these shapes this dissertation in meaningful ways. Reflexivity, while essential in any research practice, is of particular priority for qualitative scholarships centering the lives of marginalized folks. To remain personally accountable to my participants involves notes and memos which call into question how I affect the various rooms I enter as well as implementing an ethics of care which attends to the vulnerability of sharing their lives with me as well. A Black feminist epistemology does not seek to be generalizable; it aims to disrupt a white, Western male standpoint as the only means of contributing knowledge. 78. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000): 4-5. 79. Collins, 6. 35 In addition to a Black feminist standpoint approach, I also use narrative inquiry as a useful methodological and analytic approach throughout this research. Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly define narrative inquiry as "a way of understanding experience. It is a collaboration between researcher and participants, over time, in a place or series of sites, and in social interaction with milieus…Simply stated, narrative inquiry is stories lived and told. 80 As a negotiated practice, narrative inquiry is rooted in how people live and constitute their experiences. These narratives allow both researcher and participant to make meaning and sense of their existence, what Caine, Estefan, and Clandinin describe as “the practice and artistry of lives lived.” 81 Data sources for narrative inquiry research include field notes, interviews, autobiographical writing, letter writing, and participant journaling. 82 Narrative inquiry is particularly useful for several reasons. First, the ease of storytelling for participants allows them to express themselves through anecdotes which illustrate their perspectives and worlds. As a methodological and analytical approach, the way the story is told (the details included or excluded, for example) is its own source material; narrative inquiry allows for particularly rich data which has the potential to speak to several themes at once. 83 80. Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers, 2000), 20. 81. Vera Caine, Andrew Estefan, and D. Jean Clandinin, “A Return to Methodological Commitment: Reflections on Narrative Inquiry,” Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 57, no. 6 (2013): 576. In this article, they also describe engaging with experience as "a commitment to a form of togetherness in research that seeks to explore how we are living in the midst of our stories." 82. Maggi Savin-Baden and Lana Van Niekerk, “Narrative Inquiry: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 31, no. 3 (September 2007): 463. 83. Maggi Savin-Baden and Lana Van Niekerk, “Narrative Inquiry: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 31, no. 3 (September 2007): 467. 36 To flesh out the voices of institutions and individuals within the hoops habitus, I utilized semi-structured interviews, content analysis, and participant observation. These observations included prolonged personal engagement with athletes, team employees, and advocates in three cities and in an online conference to make sense of the meanings they place upon various actions, institutions, and discourses. As a Black American woman previously employed within the sports media industry, I found my identity frequently facilitated access to potential participants and sites. I found throughout my time in the field that as a woman studying women, I was afforded access because of my gender and race. Interviewees offered to let me stay in their apartments overseas to gain further insight, allowed me into the locker room, and shared their struggles to be heard by their male colleagues in ways which highlighted a certain sameness they felt I would share. I found myself sharing similar moments of exclusion or reluctant acceptance within either sport or academia, feeling a need to both divulge my own struggles as well as encourage those who shared particularly difficult moments where they felt isolated. In acknowledging my insider-outsider status and the power I inherently hold as the interviewer, I always remained aware of the responsibility I hold as a researcher to my participants as co- creators. In summer 2015, research for this dissertation began with a season-long role (four months total) with a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) team where I established connections with key members within the hoops habitus and interviewed team employees following my exit from the field. I continued to conduct interviews with professional athletes and sports journalists and attended games and other relevant women's basketball events. During that time, I discovered a second potential site – an overseas professional basketball league in Russia. I traveled to Kazan, Russia in January 2018 and conducted observations and interviews for two 37 weeks with a Professional Basketball League (PBL) franchise. During this time, I lived with one of my participants and shadowed her during her daily activities. In February 2018, I traveled to Paris, France to interview and observe a women's basketball journalist and advocate who organized recreational basketball leagues for girls and women across both Paris and her hometown in Dakar, Senegal. This dissertation culminated with an online conference for Muslim women in sport broadcast on YouTube. In each space, I found myself maneuvering through various spaces, styles of play, and the cultural and political contexts which shape the participation of girls and women within the sport of basketball. And through each chapter, I also found online and offline worlds continually colliding. My field sites were not predetermined; I followed athletes, journalists, and employees invested in carving out space for girls and women in the sport wherever they led. 84 Traveling to new teams, and at times, to new countries, each participant moved through and adapted to new cultural systems of play, professionalism, management, bureaucracy, and fandom. As these players, activists, and journalists traversed various borders of life, society, and business, I realized I needed to go with them, that I needed to understand the "choreography" (i.e., processes 84. Given the majority of my participants are very active on social media, I found sending direct messages (DMs) through Instagram to be the most effective method of requesting interviews. Athletes identified as ideal interviewees received the following message: My name is Courtney Cox – I'm a doctoral student working on a dissertation focused on women's basketball globally, and I would love to interview you about your life and career in the W and internationally. If you're interested, we can do a FaceTime/Google Hangout/Skype session whenever you're available. If you're interested, will you shoot me your email address? I'll send you more info about the project and the interview. Thanks! Interested interviewees replied with their email addresses, where I sent the full Institutional Review Board-approved copy along with additional details about the project. This dissertation utilizes a convenience sample, given both the specificity of the interviewees and the difficulty of accessing the participants necessary for this dissertation (e.g., professional athletes). This sampling strategy is coupled with snowball sampling, driven by successful interviews where participants steered me in the direction of someone they felt would be a fruitful source. 38 of movement, instruction, adaptation, and improvisation) which shaped their experiences within the hoops habitus. There were no simple trajectories, no easy flight paths to follow along the way. Instead, I relied upon my participants to not only illustrate their worlds across borders but to point me in the direction of who I should interview next. This collaborative process denotes the agency and contributions of the participants involved in the evolution and organization of this project. Participant observation took place on the court as well as off of it, in cafes, clubs, restaurants, and homes. Most of the participants in this dissertation were women in their 20s and 30s who either competed as athletes or supported women's basketball in some capacity (as journalists, employees, entrepreneurs, or activists). In addition to participant observation and interviews, I also analyzed their social media presence (along with affiliated institutions), considering how they framed their experiences within the hoops habitus. Several interview guides were developed to cover a range of potential participants; I asked athletes different questions than journalists or team employees (See Appendix A and B for sample interview questions). Interviews took place in person or online via Skype or FaceTime and were audio-recorded and transcribed. These semi-structured interviews ranged from thirty minutes to an hour and a half for each participant. Several were interviewed multiple times and across various locations, often as I felt it necessary to follow up on new developments or relevant material posted across social media platforms. While these interviews contained a wealth of information which guides this dissertation, a significant amount of data is derived from field notes and memos. Basketball took various forms throughout this project, from organized practices to league-sponsored youth events to professional games. While these case studies are in no way representative of all sporting spaces 39 within the realm of basketball, they do represent a variety of contexts, ranging from recreational to professional. While in these spaces, I identified myself as a doctoral student writing a dissertation on girls' and women's basketball and attempted to allow the observations and interviews to live separately until I analyzed them in tandem. That is, I conducted interviews more formally while abstaining from asking the majority of questions while operating as a participant-observer. In the chapters which follow, I use narrative inquiry to articulate how the crossover operates across four case studies located within the hoops habitus. 40 SECOND QUARTER | ADD WOMEN AND SELL: #WEAREWOMEN AND THE SPORTING ECONOMIES OF VISIBILITY “Stop tossing around empowerment like it’s anything more than a tool of capitalism.” -- Roxane Gay 85 “One of the main challenges is that women are still not respected as athletes, so it’s a really hard sell. People don’t respect it.” I’m sitting in the conference room of the Los Angeles Sparks’ headquarters, where Anthony, 86 an account executive, is describing the challenges of selling tickets to Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) games. His solution? To focus on informing potential consumers of what supporting professional women’s basketball might mean off the court – the potential end of sexism. In his thinking, the league might be able to entice prospective WNBA fans by positioning them as the agents of broader systemic change. Moreover, in the course of his explanation, he frequently uses the term “empowerment”– whether he is discussing fan attendance or the community service of the team’s players. Anthony’s use of empowerment mirrors similar discourses which have been taken up in a variety of industries. Within education, the proliferation of coding schools claims to offer new opportunities in technology for underrepresented populations. In the world of advertising, 85. Roxane Gay, “Why Would ‘Empowerment’ Be the Goal? It’s Entertaining Entertainment. Stop Tossing around Empowerment like It’s Anything More than a Tool of Capitalism.” Tweet, @rgay (blog), August 8, 2018. https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1027416501110767616. 86. All employee names have been changed. 41 commercials sell cars, tampons, and soap with a side of empowerment. 87 And recently, an op-ed declared women’s economic empowerment a “national security issue.” 88 In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, feminist scholar Sarah Banet- Weiser describes this current upsurge of empowerment campaigns as operating through what she terms economies of visibility. Whereas the politics of visibility highlight the marginalization of raced, gendered, or classed bodies, economies of visibility privilege and give value to individuals capable of participating in that economy. 89 There is inherently a buy-in element within these economies – one “invests” in their cause of choice through both financial support and/or by circulating media related to a particular cause. Retweets, hashtags and online petitions all reflect the proliferation of these economies of visibility. Since 2015, the project and discourse of “empowerment” has been taken up by the Sparks, in particular, through their season-long #WeAreWomen initiative. This campaign was designed to increase the team’s visibility and improve citywide interest in the team. It set an initial goal of selling out the STAPLES Center, the home arena of the Sparks, and making history with the highest-attended Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) game. In addition, #WeAreWomen allows fans to nominate and vote on a “Woman of the Year,” a local recipient who embodies the Sparks’ campaign through both community service and personal 87. Rikki Rogers, “2017: The Year in ‘Empowerment Marketing,’” Women’s Media Center, December 21, 2017, http://www.womensmediacenter.com/news-features/2017-the-year- in-empowerment-marketing. 88. Morgan Ortagus, “Women’s Economic Empowerment Is a National Security Issue,” Text, The Hill, March 28, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/435926-womens- economic-empowerment-is-a-national-security-issue. 89. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Kindle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), loc. 709. 42 success. The promotion also features a pregame festival composed of organizations and businesses either owned by or catered towards women. All of these elements were housed under the premise of selling out a Sparks basketball game; by purchasing a ticket fans could “empower” both WNBA players and moreover millions of women within the greater Los Angeles area. This chapter asks, how do U.S.-based professional women’s basketball teams attempt to access and choreograph old and new “economies of visibility” through such empowerment initiatives? How do these strategies ultimately emphasize or obscure the athletes themselves? I answer these questions by examining the Sparks’ season-long #WeAreWomen marketing campaign. Of particular interest are some of the achievements, lessons, and inherent contradictions that became apparent within this endeavor. Despite the team’s ideological attempt to challenge and reshape mainstream ideas about women’s basketball, in execution aspects of the campaign reified gender norms and dominant notions of femininity. Charlotte Bunch’s famous quote, that “you can’t just add women and stir,” ultimately was taken to heart. The Sparks’ campaign offers a generative point to unpack the influence and impact of postfeminist ideals of womanhood on the WNBA and its efforts to both promote a very particular narrative and image of gender equality and the uplift of women. What does it mean to pursue and cultivate new strategies of visibility for women athletes and female styles of play, athletic competition, and entertainment within a league and industry that is rendered nearly invisible within dominant optics of sport and the mediated sports production complex? And what would the resulting visibility of these women athletes mean for a team like the Los Angeles Sparks? Is it possible to sell empowerment one ticket at a time, and what is the cost of this endeavor? The Los Angeles Sparks, in their attempt to cultivate visibility for their players and 43 the league as a whole, inadvertently obscure the game on the court by emphasizing empowerment as a reason to support the team. About the WNBA “With all the good news that it has to shout about,” William C. Rhoden writes, “the WNBA may be the quietest professional sports league in the United States.” 90 In his article for The New York Times, he quotes current and former players, team owners, and league executives who each offer their own explanation as to why the league continues to fly under the radar and what could potentially cause a commotion in the future. This notion of “quiet” is misleading; the muffled voice of the league is by design. Barely a whisper in sports media, and hushed within the history of sport, the Women’s National Basketball Association can hear a pin drop when it comes to their pop culture relevance. The lack of noise in this twelve-team league is no accident; rather, the muted media and historical presence is due to numerous larger mechanisms within the global media sports complex, many of which became apparent during my time with the Sparks. The WNBA emerged in a moment marked by rampant growth within the women’s game; by the mid-to-late 1990s women’s basketball in the United States had reached its zenith of cultural influence. The 1995 University of Connecticut basketball team’s undefeated season and Team USA Women’s Basketball’s gold medal victory at the 1996 Summer Olympics had drawn national and global attention. These achievements significantly elevated women’s basketball, both economically and culturally, far above any other time in history. Multiple business interests aimed to leverage this attention and excitement at a grander scale, and subsequently two 90. William C. Rhoden, “Amid Successes, W.N.B.A. Is Still Facing Challenges,” The New York Times, October 7, 2012, Online edition, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/sports/basketball/amid-successes-wnba-is-still-facing- challenges.html. 44 women’s basketball leagues were established – the American Basketball League (ABL) in 1996 and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in 1997. 91 The WNBA, backed by the National Basketball Association, utilized NBA arenas during their 34-game seasons 92 and offered lower salaries than the ABL, which provided players with a full seven-month season in the fall through late spring and base salaries in the six figures. 93 Early on, the WNBA harnessed “girl power” to sell the league to young girls, born out of a postfeminist moment which aimed to shape girls into powerful consumers capable of representing a primary market, influencing family purchases, and creating future markets. The league’s inaugural marketing campaign declared “We Got Next!” – a clever triple-entendre that spoke to the idea of the entrance of women broadly and women basketball players specifically into the global arenas of business, popular culture and power, and which moreover was an appropriation and nod to streetball 91. In the United States, women’s professional basketball has been around since the post- World War I All-American Red Heads (1936-1986), a barnstorming team which played 180- game seasons, often against men. Other leagues and teams later emerged, including the Arkansas Travelers (1949-1965), Women’s Professional Basketball League (1978-1981), Women’s American Basketball Association (1984), National Women’s Basketball Association (1986 – disbanded before season), and the Liberty Basketball Association (1991 – played a single game). Dyed hair, lowered rims, and lycra unitards are just a few of the gimmicks which littered these leagues. 92. WNBA seasons, played in the summer, are significantly shorter than the NBA’s 82- game seasons and the majority of men’s and women’s professional leagues outside of the United States. This schedule is due to the WNBA’s beginnings as a direct offshoot of the NBA, which allowed the women’s league to use NBA arenas and other resources during the NBA’s offseason. 93. Tina Thompson, a senior at the University of Southern California during the premiere of the two leagues, found herself torn, with the ABL offering more money and a conventional seven-month season in the fall and spring, while the WNBA boasted the NBA’s support and the potential for long-term success. She pondered, “Would I choose the longevity of the WNBA or the high salaries offered by the ABL?”, which at the time were four to five times higher than the money being offered by the WNBA for marquee players. She would eventually choose the W, becoming the first player drafted into the league in 1997. 45 culture where players call “dibs” to communicate use of the court after the current game or to relay that they intend to play the winner of the current game. In the aftermath of the WNBA’s founding, numerous feminist thinkers articulated that they were skeptical of the league’s efforts to depict itself and its mission as progressive and aligned in the interest of gender equality. Scholar Julianne Malveaux maintained that despite the WNBA’s rhetoric of change, it remained grounded in the “patriarchal underbelly” of basketball, 94 which I read as the various ways in which even a seemingly progressive league remains engulfed in the norms and practices of an industry which continuously devalues women athletes’ labor, performance, and voice. This patriarchal underbelly is also heavily racialized, and as both Jennifer Hanis-Martin and Sarah Banet-Weiser argue, the WNBA was frequently portrayed and celebrated for playing the game “the right way” – with team-oriented basketball which followed coaches’ game plans, respectful interactions with officials and opponents, and impeccable behavior off of the court. This style of play and performance was tacitly juxtaposed to its presumed opposite, the style of play of the NBA, and more broadly, of basketball in the United States. By the late 1990s, some people believed that the men’s game in the U.S. had been sullied by corporate entities, hip-hop, and urban aesthetics of play, which were deemed as reflecting a nihilistic, selfish, me-over-team disposition prioritizing flash and pageantry over teamwork and sacrifice. The white basketball unconscious uses the WNBA as the “correct” way to play in order to situate the NBA as deviant and corrupt; at the same time, the WNBA as a league also 94. Julianne Malveaux, “Gladiators, Gazelles, and Groupies: Basketball Love and Loathing,” in Basketball Jones: America above the Rim (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 52. 46 challenge the standards of this apparatus. The white basketball unconscious as a domain for white, Western, straight, Christian men is confronted by an organization comprised of women, the majority of which are Black, while others hail from all over the world, and a significant number who identify as lesbian or bisexual. Within this framework, they are often positioned as too masculine, sexually deviant and outside of the confines of a marketable feminine heterosexuality. 95 Off of the court, the WNBA stands as the most diverse league in professional sports, with 52% of positions held by women, including six head coaches (two of which are Black), 14 majority or minority owners, six CEO/presidents, and six general managers. 29.5% of positions at the vice president level or higher are occupied by women. Women also comprise 80% of the head trainers and 58% of team staff positions. 96 However, while the diversity represented in these figures surpass the front office figures of every other U.S. professional league, the WNBA largely replicates previous eras of women’s basketball where heteronormative femininity and depictions of family dominated marketing strategies. This occurs not only within the play on the court, but affects those in the stands. Through interviews with over fifty lesbian or bisexual WNBA fans, Susannah Dolance found that they offered a queer reading of the league, heralding the presence of lesbian players, coaches and fans 95. Mary G. McDonald, “Queering Whiteness: The Peculiar Case of the Women’s National Basketball Association,” Sociological Perspectives 45, no. 4 (2002): 382. 96. Richard Lapchick, Brett Estrella, and Zachary Gerhart, “The 2018 Racial and Gender Report Card: Women’s National Basketball Association,” The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (Orlando: University of Central Florida, October 25, 2018), https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71e0e0_40c980bc9dcd4a7e97d04fdb1e218c7c.pdf. 47 as a space by and for them. 97 This notion of queering the space is taken further by a staged kiss- in held during a Minnesota Lynx game to protest the heteronormativity surrounding the “Kiss Cam” segments broadcast on the JumboTron during games. Tiffany Muller writes that lesbian Lynx fans were situated as a threat to the enforced heteronormativity of the league. 98 A similar campaign operated during nationally-televised New York Liberty games, where a staged kiss-in occurred during timeouts in order to raise queer visibility in the space, which McDonald writes mirrors the logics of late capitalism, rooted in identity-based visibility politics which fails to disrupt the heteronormative structures at play with the Liberty. 99 Hence, the sporting culture which emerges from the WNBA offers a narrow kind of progress, where the empowerment of women and girls becomes a buzzword linked to profit. Similar logics are at work with the #WeAreWomen campaign from the team’s perspective. As more sports organizations implement strategies to attract women (perceived as an untapped market) inside of arenas and into branded apparel, many of these campaigns use essentialized, stereotypical, and reductive notions of womanhood to sell tickets. Among various hockey, baseball, and basketball teams in the United States, “Ladies Night” promotions run rampant. Teams offer sponsored wine tastings, spa treatments, and informational sessions about the rules of the game in an attempt to lure women to stadiums. This is often done via condescending 97. Susannah Dolance, “‘A Whole Stadium Full’: Lesbian Community at Women’s National Basketball Association Games,” The Journal of Sex Research 42, no. 1 (February 2005): 82. 98. Tiffany K. Muller, “Liberty For All? Contested Spaces of Women’s Basketball,” Gender, Place & Culture 14, no. 2 (2007): 197–213. 99. Mary G. McDonald, “Rethinking Resistance: The Queer Play of the Women’s National Basketball Association, Visibility Politics and Late Capitalism,” Leisure Studies 27, no. 1 (January 2008): 77–93. 48 promotional themes such as “Hourglass Appreciation Night,” and mantras such as “There’s no crying in baseball, but there’s plenty of wine” (see Figure 2). With the proliferation of these events (and the resulting critiques from female sports fans and journalists), several sports organizations have shifted from mere pedicures at ballparks to explicit campaigns aimed at branding themselves as inclusive and progressive advocates, what I refer to throughout this project as strategies of popular feminism. Figure 2. Promotional material from the Washington Nationals’ Ladies Night As #WeAreWomen asks for consumer activists to participate, the terms of empowerment are unclear – support seems firmly rooted in selling out an arena for a women’s professional basketball game, but as the resulting attendance would show, being present for the game itself was not conveyed. Considering that the most visible forms of popular feminism are white and heterosexual 100 , the Sparks, along with the other 11 teams of the WNBA, struggle to fully access this particular moment of marketability. 100. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Kindle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018): loc. 452. 49 About the Sparks The Sparks’ home games take place in the STAPLES Center, the same arena where fans can watch LA’s two NBA franchises, the Clippers and Lakers. The latter teams frequently sell out their regular season home-games. (although they also employ campaigns of difference and themed nights throughout their season). The Sparks, on the other hand, now struggle to fill the lower basin of the same arena, and regularly close off the “nosebleed” most affordable sections of seats located at the top of the venue. In an effort to counter the state of the team’s now- regularly sparse attendance, the #WeAreWomen game was planned as the only time during the 2015 season that all sections of the stadium would be open. The Sparks are one of the WNBA’s founding franchises. They played in the inaugural game of the league on June 21, 1997 at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California in front of a crowd of 14,284. Over the league’s first decade such high numbers of attendees at a Sparks game was part of a general trend which saw WNBA game attendance thriving across the country. 101 The Sparks averaged over 10,000 people in attendance per game over the course of five seasons (2002, 2004, 2009, 2011, 2012) and maintained a higher attendance in their first five seasons as an organization than in 2015, where they averaged 7,464 per game at the conclusion of the season. This trend is league-wide, as WNBA attendance has dropped dramatically across the league, with an average of 7,184 fans in attendance per game during the season I studied the 101. Donald F. Staffo, “The History of Women’s Professional Basketball in the United States with an Emphasis on the Old WBL and the New ABL and WNBA,” Physical Educator 55, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 187–98. A Houston vs. Charlotte game later that fist season packed in 18,937 fans. 50 Sparks. This is in sharp contrast to the NBA, who in 2018, broke league attendance records for the fourth consecutive year and averaged 17,987 in attendance per game. 102 To put the WNBA’s historical attendance numbers into context, for several of those earlier, higher-attended seasons, the WNBA expanded into new cities and venues while competing with other professional women’s basketball leagues (the American Basketball league from 1997-1998 and the Women’s American Basketball Association in 2002) for fans and players. In the mid-2000s, the WNBA saw significant decreases in spectator attendance across the WNBA, resulting in the demise of four founding teams and a lack of financial security for those who remained. The ebbs and flows of the Sparks, as well as the WNBA, are particularly susceptible to the financial booms and busts which coincide with their existence. The prosperity of the 1990s allowed for the existence of multiple professional women’s leagues to exist as wells as the expansion of the WNBA to 16 teams by 2000. However, following the bust of the dot-com bubble and the NBA releasing WNBA teams to the open market for new potential owners, several teams changed hands or folded altogether. The league would also face several major changes between 2007-2009, influenced by the economic downturn of the Great Recession in 2008. More recently, the Sparks could not avoid the reality of market plummet. Citing severe financial losses (majority owner Paula Madison claimed she had lost $12 million since taking over the team in 2007), 103 the franchise’s ownership in 2013 explored their options in either 102. Jessica Golden, “NBA Has Baller Season Attendance, Ratings, Merchandise See Huge Uptick,” CNBC, April 12, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/nba-has-baller-season- attendance-ratings-merchandise-see-huge-uptick.html. 103. Associated Press, “Madison: Sparks ‘Had a Tough Time,’” ESPN.com, January 3, 2014, http://www.espn.com/los-angeles/story/_/id/10238678. 51 relocating the team to another city or selling their interests. With the potential to be purchased by the same ownership group as the NBA’s Golden State Warriors and transplanted to the Bay Area, a last-minute purchase by the Guggenheim Partners kept the team afloat in LA. 104 However, the team remained on shaky ground during the 2014 season as the newly-established owners scrambled to assemble a temporary front office. The 2015 season marked the first year of relative stability of personnel off of the court. The new ownership and front office’s decision to introduce #WeAreWomen reflects their desire to reinvigorate the Sparks’ fanbase and ticket sales through the economies of visibility present in popular feminist trends. This is reflected through their usage of “empowerment” throughout each element of their campaign which aligns closely with marketing strategies used both within and outside of sport. Much of the data for this chapter was culled as a result of an internship I held with the LA Sparks over the course of 2015 season. Throughout the season leading up to the #WeAreWomen game, I analyzed the economic, social, and cultural factors involved in “selling” the Sparks, and more broadly, women’s basketball. I was initially asked to work on this event by the Sparks’ vice president of sales and service. I had applied as an intern for the team in a different department in the hopes of securing access to research the communication strategies of a professional sports franchise. However, after learning about the specificity of my research interest and doctoral pursuits during my interview for the position, the interviewers and other executives created a position distinctively for me. This position was organized around my 104. Guggenheim Partners, a global investment and advisory financial services firm, also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers and boasts Earvin “Magic” Johnson as one of its most visible investors who can be often seen at Sparks and Dodgers home games. 52 interest in the #WeAreWomen game and my previous professional experience working in sports media. From May-September 2015, I worked a minimum of three days a week in the office, primarily in the sales department, reporting to the vice president and president of the team. I also attended and worked each home game, primarily at a sales table located on the arena’s concourse advertising the #WeAreWomen game. I also represented the Sparks at community events and assisted in marketing #WeAreWomen at business meetings. I recorded field notes and kept relevant information, including emails, pamphlets, and other marketing materials. The Sparks offices, where I spent the majority of my time, are located within a business park in a predominately middle to upper-class Black neighborhood in central Los Angeles. Around a dozen employees occupy the office at any given time, including the general manager, president and team vice presidents. Departments included sales, communications, marketing/partnerships, game operations, and community relations. Sparks games took place in downtown Los Angeles at the STAPLES Center, the home arena of the Sparks as well as three other teams, the Clippers, Lakers, and Kings. Table 1. Interview participants from the Sparks' front office 53 As a #WeAreWomen intern, I was specifically tasked with assisting the vice president of sales in making the campaign a success. Much of my work involved helping the social media producer and videographer for the team shape each one of the Sparks’ platforms online to promote the 8.30 game I also handled communication each week with the ambassadors. The ambassadors, influential women around the Los Angeles area, were tasked with promoting #WeAreWomen through their own networks as well as finding common ground with the campaign for joint community endeavors. They were also responsible for selling or purchasing a significant amount of tickets. I also served as an additional coordinator for all of the planning, marketing, and execution of this campaign, which included partnerships with marketing firms and other companies to pull the events together. I documented my time with the Sparks through a season-long participant observation and conducted seven semi-structured interviews with team employees at the conclusion of the season. Each interview averaged around 30 minutes and was held at the Sparks facilities in an empty conference room following the season. Participants reflected upon their work experiences, their knowledge of the WNBA before working for the Sparks, their perception of the #WeAreWomen campaign from conception to conclusion, and their predictions for the future of the league. Interviews were recorded and transcribed to ensure accuracy. Breaking Barriers, Breaking Records? The Sparks’ #WeAreWomen campaign consisted of two taglines incorporated into its logo and used throughout the season: “Breaking Barriers. Breaking Records.” The “records” portion of the tagline describes the team’s attempt to sell out the arena for the first time in Sparks history. The specific “barriers” that they intend to break however are never fully disclosed. The other “motto” of the campaign was communicated via three hashtags: #WeAreStrong 54 #WeAreWomen #WeAreLA. This mantra is echoed throughout the various multimedia elements of the campaign, with each video, social media post, and print element bearing these words. Online and in print, the #WeAreWomen campaign was explained: As a women’s professional basketball organization, we understand the importance of the empowerment of women within our communities. Our #WeAre campaign highlights all of the things that women are to this community. On [August 30 th ] join us as the LA Sparks break a new record for the highest-attended game in WNBA history. Let’s stand together: #WeAreStrong #WeAreWomen #WeAreLA! There are two ways in which I read the emphatic declaration of womanhood here, especially applied in tandem with strength. The first is a response to those who would question these athletes’ identity as women. This occurs through talk show hosts such as conservative talk show host Don Imus calling the 2007 Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” 105 or former NBA player Gilbert Arenas calling the majority of the league “bean pies.” 106 The second is through a form of collectivity solely rooted in gender. There are no accompanying platforms or causes which require women to “stand together.” Even the notion of 105. For more on this, see Cheryl Cooky et al., “It’s Not about the Game: Don Imus, Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Media,” Sociology of Sport Journal 27, no. 2 (2010): 139–59. 106. Cindy Boren, “Gilbert Arenas Doesn’t Care If People Hate His Idea to Sex up the WNBA - The Washington Post,” The Washington Post, December 17, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/12/17/gilbert-arenas-doesnt-care-if- people-hate-his-idea-to-sex-up-the-wnba/. In a series of Instagram posts, Arenas offers his suggestions for improving the WNBA. In the first post, a video of women playing basketball in thongs is accompanied by a caption which reads: “NOW this is what america was hoping for when they announced the #WNBA back in 1996… not a bunch of chicks running around looking like, cast members from #orangeisthenewblack…dont get me wrong,they have few #cutiepies but theres a whole alotta #beanpies running around hahahahahaha if #skylardiggins came out like this, I dont care if she missed every layup..imma buy season tickets and I dont even know where the fuck #tulsa is hahahaha #2016newwnbaoutfitPLS and if u think this is sexist,9 times out of 10 u the ugly one and we didnt pay to come see u play anyway #donkeykong …smdh #thiswillbeawesome #soldouteverywhere” 55 who “we” entails is lost in this generic phrasing. Like other recent movements rooted in economies of visibility, the lack of clarity intentionally offers three hashtags as “catch-alls” designed for spreadability, not specificity. It is important to emphasize that every aspect of #WeAreWomen campaign – the festival, the award, the ambassador – was rooted in maximizing ticket sales. Vendor packages for the festival included tickets. Campaign ambassadors were responsible for committing to purchasing and selling a predetermined number of tickets and sharing #WeAreWomen throughout their networks. Award honorees were selected in part by how many potential tickets they could bring in due to their popularity or influence. And every space inside the arena (seats, billboards, etc.) was available for sponsorship. Each day, there were clear markers that reminded me just how capitalistic “empowerment” has become. For example, central to the campaign was its honoring a “Woman of the Year.” Candidates were nominated through an online form and voted on by Sparks fans throughout the season. Once the nominations were received, there was an internal review process, where a chart was created of the top candidates for Women of the Year, as decided by the team president. In the email which followed, there was seemingly a “one of each” strategy at play. Next to each potential nominee, their demographic was noted (i.e. “African American/LGBT,” “Latina,” “White, Affluent”) placing them across multiple axes of identities. The next column, read “Sales Reach?” (with a yes or no listed underneath). Only the “yes” responses ended up as as potential “Woman of the Year” finalist. The nominees selected neatly aligned with a marketing logic where mutual respect for a variety of experiences, professions, and narratives were celebrated equally (with a consumerist undercurrent visible in the “Sales Reach?” column). One nominee was successful lawyer with a lengthy pro bono resume; another worked as a stay-at-home mom. 56 There is a desire to render every “type” of woman visible without denoting any other related cause to support. This also occurred through the photoshopping women of various ages, races, and ethnicities into #WeAreWomen packets next to Sparks players in uniforms as to “diversity” the Sparks as a team with a starting lineup comprised of Black women. Besides the “Woman of the Year” contest, the Sparks’ front-office utilized other methods to generate awareness about the #WeAreWomen campaign. A chief tool was social media. On specific days the team released exclusive content, which included “Women of Basketball” posts on Saturdays, as well as Motivational Mondays and Women’s Wednesdays posts. The “Women of Basketball” posts featured players like Lisa Leslie, heralded as the first woman to dunk in the WNBA, Hall-of-Fame college coach Pat Summitt, Sparks GM Penny Toler (the first woman to score a basket in the WNBA), Becky Hammon, the first woman to coach in the NBA, and Lusia Harris, the only woman officially drafted by the NBA. 107 Many of these posts juxtaposed women’s basketball, in one way or another, to the men’s game. However, the NBA seldom found these same parallels and connections to the WNBA in their marketing. Attempts to create crossover appeal too often relied on comparisons to men’s players, reifying women’s status as outsiders within the game. This also occurred within the Sparks office, where I often heard sales staff contextualize the league’s athletes through their male counterparts, with one employee describing Candace Parker, a key star for the Sparks and the WNBA as “like Kobe Bryant” (a well-known former 107. In 1969, Denise Long was selected in the NBA Draft by the then-San Francisco Warriors; the pick was quickly blocked by league president Walter Kennedy and rescinded by the team, whose owner and president Frank Mieuli would later comment, “We weren’t trying to belittle the draft or the caliber of players available in the late rounds. We didn’t intend to use her in NBA games.” Eight years later, 6’3 center Lusia “Lucy” Harris-Stewart became the first official woman drafted into the NBA, picked in the seventh round of the 1977 Draft by the then- New Orleans Jazz. She would opt out of playing in the league due to pregnancy. 57 NBA player for the Los Angeles Lakers). Another employee told me during the interview that when she tells friends and family members she works for the Sparks, there is a lack of interest or recognition until she mentions part-owner and former NBA player Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Even at Sparks games, NBA players sitting courtside were often recognized on the JumboTron and celebrated for merely attending the game. In the same way, the #WeAreWomen videos posted to the Sparks’ YouTube channel rarely featured its players or their accomplishments on the court. Rather, the short promotional clips included interviews with front office personnel, Women of the Year nominees, and other recognizable figures, including Cookie Johnson, Magic Johnson’s wife. Of the few videos involving Sparks players, one repurposed interviews from the NBA’s #LeanInTogether campaign, which combined Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” philosophy from her best-selling book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, with popular NBA and WNBA players. In the book, Sandberg focuses on what women should do to obtain success in the workplace – “what we can do as individuals” – rather than addressing structural inequalities which hinder them in the first place. To “lean in” is to grab opportunities assertively, abandon imposter syndrome, and challenge oneself to ascend the corporate ladder, or as she likes to call it, a jungle gym of possibilities. While Sandberg describes the book as a feminist manifesto of sorts, critics of her philosophical approach to gendered economic equality find “lean in” to be a neoliberal sermon manufactured for a select group of women able to accelerate their corporate careers, cleverly marketed as a feminist text for all. In a scathing critique of the book, Zoe Williams writes, “This book isn't offering a new spark for a feminist revolution. Rather, it says, your revolution has stalled – why don't you try getting what you want my way? Perhaps predictably, this involves a 58 lot of flexibility, and even more smiling.” 108 Susan Faludi writes, “That Lean In is making its demands of individual women, not the corporate workplace, is evident in the ease with which it has signed up more than two hundred corporate and organization “partners” to support its campaign.” 109 Feminist theorist bell hooks has called the book “faux feminism” and accuses Sandberg of “effectively [using] her race and class power and privilege to promote a narrow definition of feminism that obscures and undermines visionary feminist concerns.” 110 For each of these women, Sandberg’s work and companion leanin.org website fail to incorporate decades of feminist literature which addresses the role of capitalism in sustaining the gender status quo. Instead, she recommends women mimic their male counterparts and attain individual success rather than dissecting larger structural inequalities and their effects on various intersectional identities. In the NBA’s “Lean In” TV and print ads, male fans are encouraged to “stand” with the women in their lives (mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters are used as examples), that is to acknowledge the important roles played by women in everyday life and to become allies in the larger movement towards gender equality. The Sparks’ weekly #WeAreWomen promotional newsletter also circulated such messages. One newsletter included a video titled, “Lean In as we celebrate Father’s Day.” The video featured Nneka Ogwumike, one of the Sparks’ star players, 108. Zoe Williams, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg – Review,” The Guardian, March 13, 2013, sec. Books, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/13/lean-in-sheryl-sandberg-review. 109. Susan Faludi, “Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not,” The Baffler, May 12, 2014, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/facebook-feminism-like-it-or-not. 110. bell hooks, “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In,” The Feminist Wire (blog), October 28, 2013, https://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/. 59 her sister Chiney, who also plays in the WNBA, along with their father, who described flying from Nigeria to see them play basketball. In the video, he declares raising his daughters to be strong women, his contribution to “leaning in” to them. The Ogwumike family’s #LeanInTogether video, albeit originally produced for a different purpose, was one of the only multimedia elements which included women on the Sparks roster, calling into question who the “we” includes in #WeAreWomen. While the team wanted some players to participate in the videos, they didn’t involved players in the creation or planning of these and other campaign materials. In fact, as I worked with the team’s video producer to create an original #WeAreWomen video featuring point guard Kristi Toliver, the head of Communications/PR admitted that Kristi wasn’t familiar with the campaign, months after #WeAreWomen launched. An executive in the office responded, Most people when we talk about the campaign we feed them some lines on it. It was here where I realized the athletes themselves were completely excluded from this campaign, even as #WeAreWomen claimed to be in part about “breaking barriers” for them. When the interview finally occurred, she was asked questions such as, “What advice would you give to young women?”, “What are your thoughts on the We Are Women campaign?” and “What will it mean to you to play in front of the largest crowd in WNBA history?” It makes sense here that the actual video featuring Kristi Tolliver is organized more around portraying her as a representative of the team, rather than hearing her honest response to the campaign itself. When asked what inspires or motivates her, Kristi responded, “I’ve been playing basketball for a really long time and at this point I don’t really need any extra inspiration. 60 I just love and enjoy the game, and I put a lot into it…” 111 In each answer she provides, she rejects empowerment logics in various ways – not “needing” extra inspiration, for example – complicating the neat narrative of #WeAreWomen which claims a sellout game would empower the Sparks and the women of the city simultaneously. In addition to featuring only a couple of Sparks players throughout the campaign, much of #WeAreWomen failed to focus on the actual game or opponent for that day. Over the course of the season, I could only find two marketing elements provided over the course of the season which even mentioned the actual game, one of which was a mini-flyer which mentions, “On August 30, 2015 we plan to break the record for the highest-attended game with 22,100 fans in the building as the Sparks take on San Antonio.” The rest of the flyer is dedicated to the festival. In the final push to August 30 th , an email was sent which invited fans to “Join us for a day of empowerment, excitement, and of course, Sparks basketball.” The game itself became a backdrop to the notion of empowerment and the visibility attached to it. Educating the Public Throughout this campaign, whether making phone calls, talking to casual patrons at games, or wearing Sparks apparel in public, I experienced firsthand how difficult it is to sell the WNBA when so many people don’t seem to know they exist. There were many times that I spent a considerable amount of time explaining to lifelong Angelenos who the Sparks were and where (and when) they played. In other moments, it became difficult to communicate the main talking points of the #WeAreWomen campaign itself given there was such a lack of understanding when it came to the WNBA and its athletes. In the interviews which followed the season, several 111. The Official Page of the Los Angeles Sparks, #WeAreWomen: Kristi Toliver (YouTube, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDdiCrTVfFo&feature=youtu.be. 61 employees used the term “education” to describe the additional labor of selling the Sparks in Los Angeles. An account executive told me, “My challenge a lot with our other reps is educating people out there that just don’t understand what we’re about. Once we talk to them about the empowerment of women, looking at our players not just as women players but as role models in our city, in our town, in our country…they have a better appreciation.” Their play on the court was seemingly not a sufficient reason to support the team for many people in Los Angeles, so the creation of #WeAreWomen was intended to fill in this gap. This occurred even as I worked behind the sales table at Sparks games or stood outside of the team’s arena. “Selling” the Sparks often included selling everything but basketball, including meet-and-greets with players, tours of STAPLES Center, and group packages. Christy, who primarily worked in group sales, told me, “we have the STAPLES Center so a lot of times you sell experience instead of the team…sometimes I sell a lot of groups that come out and they don’t even care about the team.” When I asked her about the challenges she has in selling Sparks tickets, she responded, Because I focus so much group sales, I [don’t] really have a lot of challenges just because I was providing them with an experience. So the game was a little plus thing that they got. But we do have challenges where people are like, ‘well, we don’t wanna come watch women play basketball. But once they come and see how fun it is, you know that goes kind of away. But they have to experience it. Providing an education and an experience highlighted two major elements of the sales team, where I primarily interacted with Sparks employees. This notion of selling the “experience” of empowerment rather than the game itself became a major element of #WeAreWomen, but in many ways, operated in tandem with the status quo of the sales department. Media Coverage Some of this additional labor of “educating” is a result of meager media coverage of the Sparks. Broadcast coverage of women’s sport only receives 2% of sports coverage on 62 SportsCenter, ESPN’s flagship show. It is therefore unsurprising that like other women’s sports, the WNBA is marginalized within the sports-media complex. 112 Cheryl Cooky, Michael Messner, and Michela Musto found that in July 2014, during the WNBA season before this ethnography took place, a mere 10 stories related to the WNBA (totaling 7:11 in total run time) aired across KABC, KNBC, and KCBS (local Los Angeles affiliates); ESPN ran four stories on the WNBA (5:59 total run time). Out of season, both local affiliates and ESPN ignored the league entirely, with zero total stories. For comparison, in July, the same local stations ran 68 stories about the NBA (48:53) during its offseason. ESPN ran 16 NBA stories during July, dedicated over 40 minutes of offseason airtime during SportsCenter. 113 A Sparks sales employee saw the lack of local and national coverage as a huge detractor to the growth of the team, and more generally, the WNBA to larger audiences. She told me after the season, “I would like to see the W be on local channels and the news. I feel like it doesn’t get covered enough. Like I mean if you have cable you hear about it, but I mean, we just had the championship and I don’t think I heard about it.” When the Sparks are discussed across traditional or social media, it’s often negative. Another employee in sales told me, As a league, being around for 20 years now, I think our willpower to keep moving forward, regardless of all of the things that are thrown at us in the media or there’s a lot of negative that comes towards the WNBA but we oversee that, we avoid it, we ignore it, 112. In the early stages of this dissertation process, I emailed a friend who works for a popular publication about possibly pitching WNBA-related work in the future. She responded cordially, but wrote, “Yes, we’re always looking for submissions, but the WNBA is a hard sell, so it’d have to be a good fit for our audience” (emphasis mine). 113. Cheryl Cooky, Michael A. Messner, and Michela Musto, “‘It’s Dude Time!’: A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows,” Communication & Sport 3, no. 3 (2015): 271. As one of the examples provided in the article, the authors documented a local sports anchor’s comment as he tossed back over to the desk: ‘‘Mark and Michelle, the Sparks: 3 and 9, their worst start in quite some time. They keep that up, we might not show ‘em again! This is a town of winners!’’ 63 we keep moving on. I think that’s a big strength, because it’s so easy to say yeah, maybe we shouldn’t be here. The relationship of the WNBA to the sports-media complex emerges as marginal, oppositional, and fraught. In understanding the sports-media complex’s interconnected entities, the WNBA represents a league with unresolved tensions and disconnects between three factions - the media organizations and the league, the league and its players, and the W and its audience (and more specifically, its most loyal and knowledgeable fans). 114 This speaks to the continued marginalization of women’s sport, especially the WNBA, consistently inequitable, inadequate, and drenched in misogyny. Sparks employees detailed the challenge of convincing media outlets to cover the team, with Jason, a staff member in the communications/PR department telling me, The challenge is that the media sees the league as a whole, so rather than looking at individual teams and their amazing talent as players it’s seen as ‘oh, it’s women’s basketball, it’s comparable to women’s college basketball.’ But I don’t agree with that. And I know a lot of media outlets don’t agree with that either, but not enough people to say that the WNBA isn’t as well-respected as any other sport. So that’s a huge challenge and bringing media to cover it is probably one of the greatest challenges. If you don’t have anyone to cover it, then the word doesn’t go out. Over the course of the season, there were several moments which spoke to both the lack of crossover appeal for the Sparks as well as the front office’s unwillingness to focus on creating economies of visibility based on basketball. Almost every employee I interviewed or interacted with pointed out how the Sparks are perceived differently than their male counterparts within the Clippers’ and Lakers’ organizations. Angie, less than six months into her time with the Sparks, 114. A Twitter account dedicated to covering women’s basketball, @hoopism, tweeted, “The NBA is always keeping the league in the public eye, year-round. What would happen if the WNBA did that?” Another fan quote tweeted, replying, “I’d settle for a Twitter account that can tell the difference [between] the Dream and the Sun.” 64 had already experienced the marginalization of the team in Los Angeles. “We’re a huge basketball and baseball city with two professional men’s basketball teams so I feel like people just kind of push us under the rug,” 115 she told me. Another sales employee spoke of being “taken seriously” when she told me, I guess I would like people to take us more seriously, as a women’s sports team. I think it would be great it people would give it a chance and see what it’s all about. I think that the way women play basketball – why couldn’t it be the same as a Lakers game or a Clippers game? It would be nice to see that happen…I want people to be more serious about the whole league itself. When asked why they thought the Sparks struggled to crossover into mainstream basketball culture, Laura, an employee in game operations told me, “I think there’s a huge element of the unknown with the W. I think somewhere along the line there was a very stereotypical image placed on the WNBA, placed on the Sparks, placed on any women’s sport and because we don’t hold a symbolism like a sex symbol attached to something with women, for some reason in this society it doesn’t appeal to people off the bat.” Game Day A week before the #WeAreWomen game, all of the tickets had been sold. Throughout the campaign, many employees had shared doubts that selling out the game was even possible. When I asked how they felt when they found out that they had actually sold out, one group sales specialist told me, “It created that great feeling that you know what, the WNBA can run out of tickets.” A junior account executive said, “The fact that a week before the game even happened, we didn’t have anything else to sell…that was amazing. It was kind of like a weight had been 115. Karen Crouse, a New York Times sports reporter, wrote a commentary piece in an issue of Communication & Sport responding to the findings of Cooky, Messner & Hextrum’s longitudinal study on media coverage of women’s sports and asks, “When the Dodgers cannot keep up with the web traffic of the Lakers in Los Angeles, how are the Sparks going to make inroads?” 65 lifted. It was a relief.” Leading up to the game, the office felt upbeat about the campaign, everyone seemingly motivated by the sellout crowd to come. This feeling of excitement persisted into the day of the #WeAreWomen game. That morning, the team president sent an email to the entire Sparks staff, which read: Today is literally a movement. A movement that says: • That our players are world class athletes and they deserve a full house just as much as their male counterparts • That empowered women and the men that support them can truly change the world when we come together • That Each young girl (and boy) can look to all these amazing women that have led this charge, and that we are honoring today and know they can do anything they put their mind to! This electronic motivational speech seemingly suggested that the day’s event had world- changing possibilities. On the day of the game, I found myself overwhelmed by the difference a sellout crowd makes compared to all of the other home games I worked that season. The preparation felt different; from the security staff to concessions to Sparks employees – everyone had to be at their best and everything took a bit longer to do. When the game started, I couldn’t wait to wrap up my duties outside at the festival and head inside to see a STAPLES Center full of cheering Sparks fans, from the rafters to courtside. However, this excitement was curbed once the game began. While some people may have bought into many of the ideals of #WeAreWomen, they didn’t buy into the game itself. Despite the 19,000 tickets that were purchased, only around 8,000 people attended the game. I could only surmise (because they weren’t in attendance for me to ask) they felt as if their philanthropy in supporting women’s empowerment began and ended with the purchase of their ticket. They didn’t see the value in going to the game itself. Their ticket wasn’t worth two hours at a WNBA game. In the many hours laboring over selling #WeAreWomen as more than a game, perhaps the Sparks front office failed to push the point that attending, enjoying and consuming 66 the game matters, too. Maybe they assumed ticketholders would know because we (myself included) knew. We saw these athletes playing each week in front of meager crowds and with minimal media coverage. We discussed how much more they deserved – bigger crowds, bigger salaries, bigger status within the world of sport. And yet, it didn’t come across to several thousand people that afternoon. It doesn’t come across to millions of sports fans every season. Why? I asked employees how they felt about less than half of those that bought tickets showing up. A few tried to remain upbeat, but others were visibly frustrated, with an account executive telling me: I was a little disappointed. It just…you know, as salespeople it was great because the dollars were there but at the end of the day we care about people touching our product, being a part of our product. We put so much hard work into this – a lot of hours, lot of planning, lot of meetings, lot of selling. It was just tough not to see people there like we expected. The work was put in; the tickets were sold. It was just kind of disappointing. Another told me, “I felt that they just didn’t appreciate it. It hurt us, it hurt me personally…for them to not take advantage of that was kinda tough.” A group sales specialist said that she felt “sad. We didn’t get what we expected. The one thing I felt proud about is that we didn’t give the tickets away, we sold them. I just felt that we could have had a lot more.” When I asked Sparks employees why they thought that less than half of those that bought tickets attended the game, they offered a few possibilities. One employee in sales told me, “I think a lot of times when companies buy the tickets and give them out to employees it doesn’t create that sense of urgency.” Another echoed this sentiment – “I think it’s that a company buys tickets for the staff. If you get something for free, there’s no value. There was no value for them.” This may get a bit closer to another major issue – value. The lack of individual investment for some of the ticket recipients made them less likely to buy in to the campaign or the actual game on the court. 67 The lack of commitment to attending the game also seems to point to a lack of normalization when it comes to the WNBA. Laura, the director of game operations gets at this when she says, Part of me thinks that people are still not convinced. You know it often takes a village to convince people to do something, or masses of people to do something that is somewhat against the norm because let’s face it, sometimes women’s sports can be considered against the bigger…whatever that looks like…I think I’ve partially chosen to let it go because I’ll get angry and it’s very unfortunate. In articulating women’s basketball as “against the norm,” Laura is situating the Sparks at the periphery of the hoops habitus, and in my time with the Sparks this occurs not only because of issues of desire or media visibility, but the team’s (and more generally, the league’s) own refusal to focus on its own players and the game itself as worthy in its own right. Scant #WeAreWomen marketing focused on the matchup between the Sparks and the San Antonio Stars. In discussions with potential patrons or sponsors, I rarely heard any mention of who the Sparks would be playing that day. Even in the exit interviews I conducted, the game itself was seldom framed through the competition on the court. Only one employee even mentioned San Antonio at all in the aftermath of the game. The Future of the WNBA Throughout a variety of media, including interviews, broadcasts, blogs, books, and social media posts related to the WNBA, the phrase growing the league is constantly invoked by a myriad of individuals within the sports-media complex. There remains a disconnect in terms of what “growing the league” actually looks like; some define growth in terms of economic expansion, while others define growth as cultural relevance, popularity, and full reverence within the hoops habitus. In an op-ed for espnW, Atlanta Dream guard Layshia Clarendon writes, “Continuing to grow this league is going to take serious solutions that will elicit real change. We 68 need to be honest: It's not about dunking. It's about the system. We need to band together as a league and say we're enough. Because we are.” 116 The “system” Clarendon is speaking to here involves a mediated sports complex which defines sport as male-centric where particular styles of play are valued over others. The lack of financial investment and media coverage across women’s sports dictates the growth of this league more than dunking. As Davis Houck writes, proving one’s abilities on the court by mimicking their male counterparts merely reinscribes the hoops habitus as being for men in the same way that “leaning in” within the workplace fails to address larger ideologies of corporate culture. He writes, “By attempting to play above the rim, by co-opting the NBA’s style of play, both women’s leagues implicitly rescrub the dominant male order - in this case, the hypermasculinized world of dunking.” 117 Part of what Clarendon seems to reference in terms of the “system” also resonated across the interviews with Sparks employees. Laura told me, I feel like often times with the W, I’ll say we as individuals in this whole group, we often stick up for what we’re not, but what are we? Who are we? And I feel like a lot of times the W is defending something they’re not, but I want to hear them speak out for what they are. And I think that’s something that if I heard the female athletes maybe have a bigger voice…I want people as a household name to know more than just Lisa Leslie. I want people to know more than just Candace Parker. I want the athletes, I want the W to speak louder for who they are and not just who they aren’t. This notion of who they are and not just who they aren’t is often about rebuffing attempts to conform to either the men’s game (by playing above the rim) or to the male gaze (by shortening players’ shorts). Here, Laura is speaking to the reactive nature of the league rather than its ability 116. Layshia Clarendon, “Layshia Clarendon: ‘It’s Not about Dunking. It’s about the System.,’” espnW, April 1, 2016, http://www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/15112298/layshia- clarendon-says-lower-rims-not-answer. 117. Davis W. Houck, “Attacking the Rim: The Cultural Politics of Dunking,” in Basketball Jones: America Above the Rim (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 163. 69 to project its own value as intentionally different from the NBA and worthy of fans who appreciate its players and style of play rather than conformity to societal gender norms. After the #WeAreWomen game, employees gathered in a room inside of STAPLES Center for an informal session with then-league president Laurel Ritchie. 118 She gave a short speech of congratulations for pulling off the event and selling all of the tickets, as well as her thoughts looking forward into the league’s twentieth season. We were then able to ask her questions we may have about her job or the league in general. I raised my hand and asked, What do you think is most important to growing and sustaining the WNBA over the next twenty years – economic growth or becoming a larger part of popular culture? I asked the question following several debates I encountered online, in the stands, and within the Sparks ranks on how exactly the league should proceed in terms of increasing its relevance (or, to reference Rhoden’s description at the beginning of this chapter, its volume) within mainstream basketball discourses. She paused for a moment before choosing culture as the most important aspect to keeping the league intact and afloat in the future. The #WeAreWomen campaign, in many ways, did little to increase the economic or cultural capital of the WNBA. The players are relegated to the background, few elements of the campaign inspired future investment in the team, and meager media coverage remained consistent throughout (and following) the season. Since leaving the field, I’ve consistently returned to one response from Jason, an employee in the PR/Communications department. I asked him at the end of our interview, “If 118. Laurel Richie served as the third president of the WNBA from 2011-2015, becoming the first African American to lead a national professional sports league in the United States. Before joining the WNBA, she served as Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Girl Scouts of the USA. 70 you could change one thing about the WNBA, what would it be?” He thought for a moment before responding, “Take out the W.” We both laughed (a bit awkwardly) before he continued, Ok. So because it is the game of basketball, I think we have to compare it to the standard of what else is around, so the NBA, maybe European leagues, where the season has to be roughly the same amount of game, so that fans understand that they’re not playing half a season, they’re playing a full season and this is a competition. Playoffs, the way it’s played out in terms of series, best of 7 instead of best of 5. Arenas, they need to be placed in legitimate arenas. Maybe not thrown into a college place, or a side arena because this coliseum is being reconstructed. Thrown into another solid coliseum, you know. In that nature, I think the WNBA could become greatly respected. It’s already respected, but greatly respected by those pundits or those people that are on media outlets that are like, ‘it’s the WNBA.’ We don’t want to hear that anymore. In noting several of the significant differences between the WNBA and other leagues, Jason points to the internal inequalities of the league. Formatting, facilities, and a full season other the league as much as the identity of the W in its acronym. For Jason, the league’s identity is too often marked by being or having less, and as he says here, “respect” (a common theme referenced even in the opening anecdote of this chapter). He turns to the league to set the tone, both in logistics and perception: Having the players -the players, not the league, not the organization, the players and maybe the fans, but mostly the players - step up and say we can compete with anyone else if you throw us onto that court. I can tell you right now if you Maya Moore was in the NBA, she would light it up. I could tell you if anybody challenged Ronda Rousey – same level of training, she could stand with best of them. Same thing with Serena Williams. I understand that biologically there may be studies, examples of why women can’t compete with men in certain aspects, but this is sports. Your gender does not dictate how well you can perform alone. It’s effort and grit and skill and I think the players need to bring that up to the media and have the media understand fully that this isn’t a sport for women. This is a sport for all ages, a sport for anybody, and we can go out there and do it as damn well as anybody else. He’s passionate in this response, emphatic in his “damn well” as his voice raises for the first time during our interview. Bringing in other athletes such as Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter 71 Ronda Rousey and tennis champion Serena Williams, he ties in the WNBA’s struggles for equality with other female athletes and acknowledges the gender bias which permeates the sports-media complex as a whole. In this instance, Jason is asking for players to assert themselves as equal while simultaneously calling out the industries which continue to frame women as lesser than. His responses represent the more radical view within the office, but given his age (early 20s), experience (fairly new to working within sports organizations), and even more so, his status as the desired demographic of the Sparks (18-35 male sports fans), Jason’s comments are worth noting for the future of the WNBA. Discussion By focusing on an individual sports organization, this chapter reifies many of Jennifer L. Hanis-Martin’s findings in her ethnography of a professional women’s basketball team, where even a diverse front office can uphold the white basketball unconscious by focusing on the male 18-35-year-old audience as the target demographic, which dictates marketing strategies across the team. In studying this campaign, which mirrors so many others both within and outside of sport, I found an ambivalent feeling in both my participation in planning the event as well as the disappointing result. In offering a critique of this campaign, it would appear that I am ungrateful for the time, money, and resources dedicated to to improving gender disparities in sport. Quite the opposite. I, like other critics of popular feminism, recognize the societal shifts necessary to even inspire the creation of these events. But I am often stuck in a “what now?” or more cynically, “so what?” position. Banet-Weiser captures this when she writes, “the visibility of popular feminism, where examples appear on television, in film, on social media, and on bodies, is important, but it often stops there, as if seeing or purchasing feminism is the same thing as 72 changing patriarchal structures.” 119 While Sarah Banet-Weiser’s concept of economies of visibility speaks to the investment in the ticket, but not the team, I believe there is also an opening to consider how the failure of this campaign exposes the limits of popular feminism, which in itself can be helpful for scholars interrogating the shallowness of sheer representation. Since the inaugural campaign in 2015, the Sparks continue to designate one game per season for the #WeAreWomen campaign, occurring around the same time each year. As top-down team strategies tinged with social change are lauded by the NBA/WNBA headquarters (often through visits by league officials), player-driven movements for change, on the other hand, have received a significantly different response. In 2016, several WNBA teams reacted to the murders of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and several Dallas Police Department officers by wearing shirts honoring the memories of all three during their pregame warmups and their post-game press conferences. The WNBA issued an email to each team office warning them against wearing apparel outside of their official uniform policy. The New York Liberty, Phoenix Mercury, and Indiana Fever responded by wearing plain black shirts with a small Adidas logo – their official sponsor – during their warmups. The league issued $5,000 fines to each team and fined each player $500. This is in stark contrast to the NBA (housed under the same commissioner, Adam Silver, as the WNBA), which allowed its players to wear “I Can’t Breathe” shirts pregame following the non-indictment verdict in the murder of Eric Garner and celebrated the voices of superstars LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony in the press which followed. Following public outrage about the fines, then- league president Lisa Borders (a Black woman in her first year as head of the WNBA) rescinded 119. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, Kindle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018): loc. 305. 73 the punishments, but the message was clear: campaigns for change are a top-down affair. It is also important to note that the protests against police brutality, while deemed outside the the WNBA’s preferred visibility, precede former quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the 2016 NFL season but are seldom placed in conversation with his activism. This marginalization aligns with the history of women, especially Black women, across social movements. Patricia Hill Collins writes that, maintaining the invisibility of Black women and our ideas not only in the United States, but in Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and other places where Black women now live, has been critical in maintaining social inequalities…This dialectic of oppression and activism, the tension between the suppression of African-American women’s ideas and our intellectual activism in the face of that suppression, constitutes the politics of U.S. Black feminist thought. 120 The invisibility of these women’s political thought (and the blatant attempts to silence them) stand in stark contrast to notions of “empowerment”; however, considering the low economic visibility of a campaign surrounding police brutality, it is hardly surprising that the league attempted to quell their actions. More recently, in 2018, following the rise of popular feminist forays into on-the-ground activism such as the Women’s March, the WNBA created a new empowerment initiative titled “Take a Seat, Take a Stand,” 121 where for every ticket purchased, the WNBA would donate $5 to 120. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader, ed. Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 254–59. I am also reminded here of the Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement”, where they write “As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. For example, we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ‘ladylike’ and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people.” 121. Following the 2018 season, the league announced a joint initiative with the NBA called “Her Time to Play.” On the Her Time to Play website, the campaign is described as “a national grassroots initiative created by the WNBA and NBA to inspire the next generation of girls, ages 7-14, to play basketball in a positive and healthy way. Through sports, girls learn important life skills such as teamwork, leadership, and self-confidence. However, twice as many girls compared to 74 organizations such as GLSEN, Planned Parenthood, and The United States of Women. On their website, the league boasts that, The WNBA was inspired to launch Take a Seat, Take a Stand by the millions of girls and women raising their voices in the current women’s movement. For over 22 years, the WNBA and its players have been on the front lines of progress for female empowerment, gender equality and LGBTQ rights, and the league has been a diverse and inclusive organization since its inception. With Take a Seat, Take a Stand, the WNBA is now taking it up a level by bringing the women’s movement into the arena and uniting as a league to take a stand. 122 The new initiative seemingly allows political participation (even including footage of the 2017 Women’s March in their television commercial), as long as the league is in control of what causes are supported and receive visibility. Over the course of my time with the Sparks, there was a recurring conversation surrounding the difficulty of marketing a league comprised of players who compete internationally during the offseason (fall through late spring -- what is commonly referred to as the “regular” basketball season) in leagues offering salaries which surpass the WNBA maximum (currently $117,500 123 ). One Sparks employee mentioned it as a strength, because “these women work 24/7.” Another employee agreed, saying that “Our women don’t just play here in the summer, but once our season ends they go back to Europe and play overseas. For a lot of boys drop out of sports by the age of 14 (Women’s Sports Foundation), which can be attributed to societal barriers that are primarily faced by girls. It is also important for young girls to have female mentors in sports, their local communities and everyday lives, but only 28% of youth sports coaches are women (The Aspen Institute). Her Time To Play aims to increase opportunities for women in coaching and athletic leadership across the youth sports landscape.” 122. “Take a Seat, Take a Stand - WNBA.Com - Official Site of the WNBA,” accessed March 1, 2019, https://www.wnba.com/takeastand/. 123. “Women’s National Basketball Association Collective Bargaining Agreement” (WNBPA, 2014), 34. $117,500 is the league maximum for veteran free agents with six or more years of “service” who is designated as a “core” player. 75 women, it’s a year-round job.” He spoke about this within the context as a positive aspect, an attribute which proves their work ethic and worthiness as basketball players traversing various spaces. However, he was also forced to reckon with the inherent invisibility of these players in U.S.-based media coverage given their absence from the WNBA for the majority of the year. While working a Sparks preseason event, I was assigned to escort Cierra Burdick, a recently-drafted rookie through her first media day as a professional athlete. Throughout our time together, I learned a lot about her as well as and her relationship to basketball. She perceived her career as many professional women’s basketball players do – year-round and international. Unlike her male counterparts, who typically focused on the NBA Draft or a career abroad, Cierra understood her trajectory as requiring the versatility to succeed in both domains for the majority of her professional livelihood. Cierra and I spent the day going through hair and makeup, a variety of green screen activities, and interviews. At the end of a long day, we swapped phone numbers. I would invite her to a few events during her short tenure in Los Angeles (she was traded to the Atlanta Dream before the season began) and we kept in touch throughout the season and in years to follow, as she played for several teams in the WNBA and internationally across Italy and Israel. Following her 2017 WNBA season with the San Antonio Stars, she moved once more to Kazan, a city in the Russian republic of Tatarstan to play for Kazanochka, a team in the Professional Basketball League (PBL). Near the end of our first Skype interview, she invited me to Russia. In the next chapter, I consider the global crossovers involved in women’s basketball for the majority of WNBA players who compete in overseas leagues each season. 76 THIRD QUARTER | TRANSLATING TIMEOUTS: THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF PLAYING OVERSEAS “We had to go to a communist country to get paid like capitalists.” -- Diana Taurasi 124 The previous chapter illustrated the challenges for one WNBA team marketing professional women’s basketball, as well as the struggle for players to receive compensation and media coverage commensurate with that of their male peers. This chapter, on the other hand, explores another significant aspect of being a professional women’s basketball player: the necessity and reality of playing in professional leagues outside the United States. This chapter follows Cierra Burdick, an American professional basketball player competing overseas in Kazan, Russia during the 2018-2019 season. Cierra’s international career allows her to pursue the game she loves while receiving higher compensation than her WNBA salary each season. In examining Cierra’s career competing year-round in both the United States and Russia, I argue that close attention to her experiences offers a generative entry point to ruminate further on the choreography of women’s professional basketball, specifically considering its transnational, geopolitical and international particularities, challenges, and dynamics. This chapter moreover centers the timeout as an analytic and metaphor of sport and choreography (that is of competition, movement/stasis, and communication) that helps frame the challenges of translation and tactics of maneuver that U.S.-based players endure and enact. 124. Josh Weinfuss, “Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi on Pay Scale: ‘WNBA Always Finds a Way to Mess It Up,’” ESPN.com, July 24, 2019, https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/27208574/phoenix-mercury-diana-taurasi-wnba-finds- way-mess-up. 77 There are few aspects of sport which embody the urgency of a timeout. During a “timeout,” players rapidly huddle around a coach and a handheld whiteboard, where a play is furiously scribbled, described, and in the best case scenario, executed moments later. Often lasting less than a minute, timeouts require quality, efficient communication, leadership under pressure, and trust. The “timeout” then, to some degree, offers a useful way of thinking and theorizing about the experiences and periods of “time” U.S. players spend outside the U.S. playing in non-U.S. basketball leagues. What is of particular interest to me here are the different tactics of negotiation and maneuver (through national and ethnic difference, linguistic and cultural (mis)translation, compensation, identity and subjectivity, and moreover happiness) required by U.S. women’s professional basketball players who compete outside the United States. This is even more complicated by Cierra’s identity as a Black American woman playing in Russia. As this chapter relays, for many of these athletes, even depositing a paycheck or receiving what was supposedly guaranteed in their contract requires a high level of wit, ingenuity, thrift, resilience, and a knack for constantly being able to, reassess, re-affirm, and legitimize their economic and cultural value. To even attract potential teams abroad, lesser- known players compile and publish their own highlight reels to YouTube for heightened visibility. In this chapter, I interrogate how the movement of American players overseas reflects the additional labor of translation – both on and off of the court – for those navigating dual careers in basketball. This is made apparent as I watch Kazanochka in a timeout. Two American players stand in the midst of a huddle while their incensed coach screams commands in Russian. One teammate attempts to translate the coach’s game plan (and complaints) to them. However, in 78 the midst of passing this information along, the buzzer sounds; there is seemingly not enough time for translation in timeouts. Theorizing the Timeout Both Frederic Jameson and David Harvey acknowledge shifts in time and space as central to postmodernity; for Jameson, this crisis is marked by space dominating time, where we cannot keep up. 125 Harvey situates this aspect of the postmodern turn through time-space compression and flexible accumulation. 126 Flexible accumulation marks a post-Fordist shift in labor no longer bound by the rigid constraints of the eight-hour workday or the processes of consumption of the first three quarters of the twentieth century. This flexibility extends beyond labor to markets, products, and consumption patterns. The time-space compression, defined as the acceleration in turnover time of production, causes a simultaneous ramping up of exchange and consumption. This, coupled with the rise of new communication and information systems, advances in distribution, and electronic exchanges of money have sped up the when and where of everyday life. What I am interested in interrogating in this chapter are the various time-space compressions which make translation difficult, if not impossible, as well as the ways in which these athletes travel and spend their time out of the country, out of the gym, and at times, out of sync with their environment, shaping not only their sense of self, but the various places where they play basketball. 125. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 126. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Hoboken: Wiley, 1992). 79 Global Sporting Labor Current global processes have created an interdependence connecting people across disparate parts of the world, a defining aspect of how elite modern sport is practiced and consumed. Alek Sekot writes the global sports nexus is technological, migratory, economic, mediated, and ideological in scope. 127 This vibrant sporting labor market has not only created new opportunities on the court, pitch, or field but in offices where lawyers, accountants and agents gauge global interests and consult athletes on international contracts. 128 Sporting labor is particular marked by this current global scene, where the mass movement of athletes in particular convolute notions of citizenship and belonging. The relocating – and dislocating – of sporting bodies is affected by talent, of course, but is also restricted by the matrix of domination, 129 where race, gender, and national identity shape both the ability to maneuver across borders as well as the reception once an athlete arrives. 130 Aleš Sekot writes that “Sport migrants may mostly have little sense of attachment to a specific space or local community. Their status and market value is derived mostly from the ethos of hard work, differential rewards and a win-at-all-costs approach.” 131 Notions of identity, allegiance to country, and success become deeply entrenched in economic potential, whether through teams 127. Aleš Sekot, “Sport Mobility in a Changing Europe: A Global Aspect,” European Journal for Sport and Society 1, no. 2 (2004): 107. 128. Sekot, 113. 129. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000). 130. Sekot, “Sport Mobility in a Changing Europe: A Global Aspect,” 111. 131. Sekot, 113. 80 which gauge Black American players as inherently more athletic or players who attain dual citizenship for higher salaries and tax breaks. In The Global Sports Arena: Athletic Talent Migration in an Interdependent World, John Bale and Joseph Maguire argue that, “In some ways…these migration patterns are nothing new. It appears however, that the process is speeding up.” 132 They consider how the speeding up of time, space, and exchange affect global sporting labor. For example, given the higher salaries overseas and the year-round labor demanded of WNBA players who wish to supplement their salaries abroad, the risk of overuse injuries is higher for these athletes. This is why perennial All- Star Diana Taurasi’s team in Russia, UMMC Ekaterinburg, paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2015 to sit out the WNBA season. Whereas the WNBA league maximum that season was $107,000, Taurasi made $1.5 million in Russia; her decision was not only prudent for her body, but for her wallet as well. 133 This is also made apparent through a recent injury sustained recently by WNBA star Breanna Stewart during a Euroleague championship game (playing for a different Russian team, Dynamo Kursk); her ruptured Achilles tendon rippled across not only her team on the court in Hungary, but throughout the WNBA as well. 134 Her summer season stateside ended before it 132. John Bale and Joseph A. Maguire, eds., The Global Sports Arena: Athletic Talent Migration in an Interdependent World (Newcastle, UK: University of Keele, 1994):5. 133. Kate Fagan, “Diana Taurasi’s Decision to Sit out Should Affect WNBA Salaries,” ESPN.com, February 3, 2015, http://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/12272036. 134. Howard Megdal, “Breanna Stewart Shows the Toll of Pro Women’s Basketball’s Never-Ending Grind,” The New York Times, April 21, 2019, sec. Sports, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/sports/breanna-stewart-achilles-wnba.html. 81 began as she spends the remainder of the year rehabilitating her body and preparing for not only another season abroad, but the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics. However, like many other texts dedicated to sport and globalization, The Global Sports Arena largely omits women migrants and women laborers. The editors acknowledge this gap, stating: and others within the book, the editors write, The study of gender and sports migration is one direction in which future research must go. Other areas include comparative analyses of the experience of athletes overseas, the ways of adjusting to change, the new perceptions athletes obtain of foreign countries as a result of temporary sojourn and the images they have of the countries they have left behind. Concern with the experiential aspects of sports migration must also be combined with consideration of issues of political economy and of what the process of sports labour migration reveals about broader questions of globalization. 135 This chapter addresses this void by exploring particular forms of sporting labor and migratory patterns by U.S. women professional basketball players who compete in non-U.S. based leagues. Furthermore, I take a different conceptual approach than other scholars who have examined women’s basketball. While the few scholarly articles which exist have primarily concerning professional women’s basketball players analyzed data and media content about women’s basketball, this chapter’s relies on empirical and ethnographic analysis of players’ experiences and even more on these players’ explicit ideas, viewpoints, testimonies, and autobiographical information, what can perhaps be understood as a their own standpoint about the game and their role in it. 136 In documenting the lived experiences of these players competing abroad, I ask, how do are these women’s bodies read as they cross over borders to play basketball? How does the white basketball unconscious translate globally as women – in this case, a biracial queer 135. Bale and Maguire, 18. 136. Amadu Jacky Kaba, “African Americans in the US Women’s National Basketball Association, 2006: From the NCAA to the WNBA,” Sociology Mind 2, no. 1 (2012): 95–108. 82 American – take to the court internationally? And how do these women choreograph careers and lives beyond the expectations and constrictions placed on them within these leagues? Given the lack of scholarly attention given to professional women basketball players competing abroad, previous knowledge generated about the lived experiences of these athletes is acquired through their autobiographies and social media, where they detail their schedules, conflicts, and emotions surrounding their careers. Choreographing a Career Before the ABL and WNBA debuted in the late 1990s, women who desired to play professional basketball had to travel overseas to compete in international leagues located primarily across Europe and Asia. Former WNBA player Fran Harris, who graduated in the late 1980s following an undefeated season and national championship, imagines how her career would have played out had she been a male player in her book Summer Madness: Inside the Wild, Wacky World of the WNBA: I would have played for fifteen years in the [NBA], made multiple All-Star teams, and battled the Indiana Pacers’ Reggie Miller for the league’s Free Throw Shooting Champion award. I would have had a sneaker named in my honor, The Stroke Master, or something like that. Something that would let you know how automatic the jumper was back then. My agent would have secured hefty endorsement deals with McDonald’s, Spring, and Gillette. In 2000, I would have retired to a multi-million-dollar broadcasting deal with NBC and smiled daily at my bulging bank account and hefty investment portfolio. But best of all, I would had the whole wide world right in my capable little hands. 137 For Harris, gender dictated the disparity between her career trajectory and the men who attained the economic and cultural clout in the NBA. In contrast to the lush lifestyle of sold-out crowds, shoe deals, and a post-career broadcasting career, she describes the journey for women ballers as: 137. Fran Harris, Summer Madness: Inside the Wild, Wacky World of the WNBA, Kindle edition (BadAss Media, 2013), loc. 122-127. 83 [traveling] over 3,000 miles from home to a team where English was the third language and the women smoked cigarettes in the locker room during halftime. No cable? No shopping malls? No call waiting? No thank you. But I succumbed and left for Italy, as did most of my peers. And while the Italians treated me like the queen I was, I wanted to play on my own soil, in front of people who knew me. 138 Whereas men who chose to play overseas often did so after failing to secure an NBA spot due to a lack of elite talent or a marred reputation, the top U.S. women players in the country were forced have to continue their careers outside of the U.S. abroad out of necessity. Even after the WNBA offered players like Harris the opportunity to play in the U.S. professionally, the majority of players today continue to play year-round in order to supplement their meager salaries in the W, using various strategies in order to choreograph their careers on the court and their lives off of it. Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, four-time WNBA champion and Olympic gold medalist, played abroad in Spain and Italy beginning in the late 1980s and embraced her overseas career, despite late night practices to accommodate her Spanish teammates’ work schedules and a significant communication gap with her head coach in Valencia, who didn’t speak English. When she began playing in Italy, she fully embraced the culture, becoming fluent in Italian, traveling around the country on her off days, and fully immersing herself in her environment. She eventually relocated her nephew and niece to live with her to Italy, creating space for them to access an exceptional education system and improved quality of life. In crossing over consistently to the same country and team, Cooper-Dyke asserts: I began to think Italian and act Italian, using my hands to gesture when I spoke. Italy became such a familiar and comfortable environment for me that I’d face a bigger transition returning to Los Angeles at the end of one season than going back to Parma at the beginning of the next. My family and friends were still living in Watts. Over time, it 138. Harris, loc. 128-131. 84 became harder for me to relate to the things they were going through. Spending seven or eight months overseas every year had expanded my horizons immensely. 139 Beyond highlighting just how successful Cooper-Dyke was at adapting and acclimating to life in Italy, the above quote also subtly reveals the difficulty in traversing between two discordant spaces. Cooper-Dyke’s increasing comfort and new life in Italy hindered her ability and opportunities to connect with loved ones back in her hometown. The cultural transformation she made speaks both to her success navigating the challenges faced by athletes who play outside the U.S. and the collateral effects such “success” can on an athlete’s relationships back stateside. Moreover, Cooper-Dyke’s experience is not necessarily the norm; many U.S athletes do not reflect upon playing outside the U.S. in the same fond tone as that of Cooper-Dyke. This is documented in books, short films, and webisodes which detail the months-long grind of these athletes as they labor abroad. 140 One example, for instance, is that of former WNBA player Chamique Holdsclaw. Describing her first season playing for Kookmin Bank in Cheonan, South Korea in the early 2000s, she states in her book Breaking Through: Beating the Odds Shot after Shot: It felt like I was living the same day over and over. I would wake up, go to practice, eat, and then head back to my room to prepare to do it all over again the next day. I would 139. Cynthia Cooper, She Got Game: My Personal Odyssey (New York: Warner Books, 1999), 112-113. 140. For more, see Lisa Leslie and Larry Burnett, Don’t Let the Lipstick Fool You (New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 2009); Devereaux Peters, “Down & Dirty with Devereaux,” YouTube, n.d; The Second Jobs of WNBA All-Stars: Seimone Augustus in Russia (Vice Sports, 2017); WNBA Star Brittney Griner’s Evolution, E:60 (ESPN, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJhnghKpgd8; Brittney Griner and Sue Hovey, In My Skin: My LIfe On and Off the Basketball Court, Kindle edition (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014). 85 call home to talk to family or listen to music in my free time. There wasn’t much for me to do in the city where I played, and the walls began to close in on me. 141 She describes herself as being in a “dark place” while in Korea, but contrasts that experience with the following season in Valencia, Spain, where she competed with a current WNBA teammate and brought her college roommate with her. “Valencia had a good social scene and Murriel, who was fluent in Spanish, showed us around. Zakiah even rented a dance studio and taught hip-hop dance to the locals. We made friends and it really felt like home.” 142 Creating community with other Americans, and later bringing a companion with her, helped enhance allowed her to shift her experience crossing over into a positive one. Eventually, for Holdsclaw, playing overseas in Poland thousands of miles away from her personal problems as a famous athlete in the United States actually became a source of solace. 143 More recently, professional players have taken to YouTube to create their own videos describing their experiences playing in non-US leagues and living in non-U.S. countries and territories. Chelsea Davis, a player who has competed in Ecuador, Spain, and Romania, has a YouTube channel where she chronicles her life abroad. In one video, titled “It REALLY Ain’t fo’ Errybody,” Davis expresses the pros and cons of playing overseas outside the U.S. Traveling to see the world while playing the sport you love is the best thing about playing internationally for her. On the other hand, as she competes around the world, she’s noticed that she’s treated differently because of her nationality. “As Americans, we get held up to a certain level of playing 141. Chamique Holdsclaw, Breaking Through: Beating the Odds Shot after Shot (Chamique Holdsclaw LLC, 2012), 205. 142. Holdsclaw, 208. 143. Holdsclaw, 221. 86 and it has to be full on, score 20+ buckets per game no matter how many minutes you play. That’s all good and dandy, but if they don’t like your playing style you’re not going to be playing many minutes.” 144 Here she signals how Americans specifically are expected to thrive within any system of play, and should they fail to succeed, their minutes (and potentially their careers) are cut short. Multiple players I interviewed during this process shared the same opinion, that their value on international rosters demanded they outperform local players and prove themselves each game in order to maintain their position on the roster. A failure to translate one’s game also affects how players’ bodies are officiated by referees, sometimes resulting in fouls or other penalties. The latter often occurs through traveling calls as players replicate the style of play native to the NCAA and WNBA. In a video, Chelsea uses the “spin move” as an example of an evasive maneuver condemned by overseas leagues. “In America,” she says, “you want to use the spin move so you can get from one place to the other. In Europe, if you want to do that you have to do the Eurostep.” In the video, Davis is signaling the various ways in which bodies are read through nationality and policed through regional regulations, requiring the ability to translate one’s skills to a different game. Whereas the spin move (where a player maneuvers around defenders while holding the ball in a circular motion) is perceived as a legal move in the states, the Eurostep (a long lateral move where two steps are taken in separate directions after a dribble) is frowned upon by some basketball fans as traveling (an illegal basketball move). 144. CCSIX3, It REALLY Ain’t Fo’ Errybody⎮Overseas Women’s Basketball Pros and Cons Part 1 (YouTube, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6oE8wxSah5sXLWXb0seHxQ. 87 Both of these plays, like the crossover, are designed to evade defenders, but they are read very differently across leagues. Part of the additional labor required of these women is to translate their game to each country while also learning how to evade both defenders and varying forms of officiating. Basketball in Russia Weeks before I depart for Russia, I run into an interviewee from a previous research project on Black basketball players competing internationally. He tells me he’s recently starred in his first film which required him to spend a significant amount of time in Russia during shooting. The film, a sports drama titled Going Vertical, recounts the men’s gold medal basketball game at the 1972 Summer Olympics between the Soviet Union and United States. Cast as a member of Team USA, he described the surreal feeling of recreating what is considered Russia’s version of “The Miracle on Ice.” Whereas the United States heralds the 1980 medal- round hockey victory over the Soviet Union in that year’s Winter Olympics – dubbed the “Miracle on Ice” – as a cultural victory over a Cold War foe, Russia’s own “miracle” occurred on the hardwood in 1972. The United States, on a 63-win streak in international play, lost to the Soviet Union in the last three seconds on a controversial clock reset which remains one of the most contested moments in Olympic history. The game has been called “sport’s Cold War,” 145 but can perhaps can only be considered a singular battle in a much larger, longer sporting warfare between the two countries, with battles 145. Yekaterina Sinelschikova, “‘Sport’s Cold War’: 3 Seconds That Shook the World - Russia Beyond,” Russia Beyond, January 11, 2018, https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/327234- sports-cold-war-basketball. 88 taking place across the women’s game as well. 146 Sport also served as a tool of propaganda leading up to this infamous game, as the U.S. State Department deployed Black athletes as political agents through goodwill tours which aimed to cast the United States as a beacon of racial equality. 147 Within a month of its release, Going Vertical became the highest-grossing domestic film of all time in Russia. Less than two weeks after the film opened in theaters, When I arrived in Russia, Lera, one of the managers for Kazanochka, told me she had already seen the film twice. The popularity of Going Vertical reflects the nostalgia of the Soviet Union, which as Adele Marie Barker argues makes obvious that new Russian consumer remains engaged with artifacts and stereotypes of the past, in part as a connection to the lost Soviet subject. 148 146. Cynthia Cooper, She Got Game: My Personal Odyssey (New York: Warner Books, 1999): 91. Hall-of-Fame basketball player Cynthia Cooper writes in She Got Game: My Personal Odyssey, “America had boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow; the Soviet Union had responded by boycotting the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The Soviet Union had won gold in 1980 with the Americans absent; America had won gold in 1984 with the Soviets absent. Which was the better team? Everyone in the sport wanted to know. The teams had been like two heavyweight boxers avoiding a title fight. When the big test finally came, it was scheduled on the Soviets’ home court [for the 1986 FIBA World Championships]. In the eyes of many who followed women’s basketball, that fact alone made America the underdog. Team USA would beat the Soviet Union 108-88 in the FIBA World Championship final. 147. Damion L. Thomas, Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 148. Adele Marie Barker, “The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia,” in Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 12–46. This also occurs as I visit a visa submission center in West Hollywood specializing in Russia’s paperwork. Because of the holiday, I received a gift with the purchase of processing my tourist visa – a cookbook titled CCCP Cookbook. Containing over 60 recipes from the Soviet period, ranging from the meals of the proletariat to the elite, with classic cultural cuisine sprinkled in, the cookbook offers a historical lens of Soviet culture through food and also reflects the nostalgia which remains for many in Russia today. One reviewer describes the book’s target audience as a “post-Cold War generation [who] grows up intrigued by a period which many older than them would rather forget.” 89 Before I arrived to Kazan, Cierra posted a video to her Instagram story where she realizes, in trying to talk to her teammates about Russian president Vladimir Putin, that “Putin” is pronounced differently in a Russian context; her attempt to engage in a political discussion with them was lost in translation from the beginning. The timing of her travel and attempt to engage in political dialogue with her teammates is an important one: news headlines circulate daily detailing Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with constant updates and evidence suggesting the current administration is a byproduct of foreign tampering. Within sport, Russia’s role in administering performance-enhancing drugs to its athletes had recently been documented in detail through the Oscar-award winning documentary Icarus and punished through the exclusion of athletes competing under the Russian flag during the most recent Olympic Games. In the winter of 2018, as the country prepared to host a FIFA World Cup, Cierra’s time in Russia offered her an unparalleled perspective located at the intersection of sport and politics, but not always with the correct pronunciation. Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, is the sixth most populous city in Russia, with over 1.2 million inhabitants. Located less than 500 miles from Moscow, it is considered the “sports capital of Russia,” given its role as host city to a variety of global sports tournaments (eight world championships over the past eight years). Kazanochka, the city’s professional women’s basketball team, was founded in 1946, and competed during the 2017-2018 season in Russia’s Professional Basketball League (PBL). While located within the most competitive league in the country, Kazanochka is considered an underdog to the aforementioned Dynamo Kursk and UMMC Ekaterinburg, two teams whose owners offer some of the highest salaries in the world to attract top foreign talent, especially from the United States. Kazanochka, on the 90 other hand, has struggled to maintain its status both financially and athletically within this league. Lost in Translation I'm standing in the baggage claim area in Kazan International Airport (Международный аэропорт Казань), waiting for my luggage. As the conveyer belt jerks to life, I look around me. Above the rotating luggage are two ads – one for Coyote Ugly, the other for Twin Peaks – staples of the American breastaurant complete with images of women wearing cowboy hats and flannel shirts tied up to their cleavage. I'm fascinated at the thought of these two franchises making it to this small airport 500 miles from Moscow. As the waiting crowd dwindles, I begin to think the worst – my baggage didn't make it. The conveyer belt halts suddenly; no more bags. I then find myself in a small office with a middle-aged woman and a man in his early-20s who work for the airport. She is visibly exasperated by my lack of Russian as we complete the claim form together. Her coworker and I frantically use our translation apps in an attempt to figure out how to exchange basic information to procure the bag. As we struggle to communicate, it all begins sinking in. I'm in a new country. I don't speak the language. I don't have any clothes on this continent besides the ones on my back. How am I going to figure any of this out? For a brief moment, I experience on a small scale what it's like to be one of the thousands of women who travel each fall across borders, through airports, and into gyms around the world to compete in professional basketball leagues. I step outside of baggage claim where Cierra is waiting for me; a familiar face after over 24 hours of travel. I explain my situation to her, and she enters the baggage claim office attempting to communicate with the two employees who seem even more confused that now not one, but two Black women are in this office who cannot speak Russian. It is just past one in the morning, but Cierra decides to call her team manager in the 91 hopes that she can translate the situation for all parties involved. When her manager groggily answers, she is kind enough to negotiate the appropriate answers for the airline and arranges to have my bag delivered, should it appear, to the gym. Cierra’s apartment, eventually entering into a spacious one-bedroom condo belonging to her team’s owner. The original apartment she lived in had loud daytime construction which kept her from recovering between practices, so her team moved her to a condo usually inhabited by the owner’s son. I slip into a borrowed t-shirt and basketball shorts, where Cierra instantly laughs at my petite frame drowning in fabric. It is a unique insider-outsider status; there is an apparent appreciation from her to have some semblance of familiarity, a relic of home given I am a Black American woman who speaks English and is familiar with so many facets and figures within the game we both love. At the same time, I am distinctly an outsider as a non-athlete; my stature typically renders me at least six inches shorter than the shortest player on the court. I wash the only clothes I own, hang them to dry, and try to drift off to sleep despite the jet lag. “An outsider, a foreigner, an alien” At my first practice, I meet Merritt Hempe, nicknamed “Lil Mama” by Cierra, who is the only other American on the team. At 6’4, she hardly lives up to her nickname. She ties her long, blonde hair into a high ponytail and ties her shoes as Cierra explains to me that this is their second time as teammates. The first time, almost a decade before, was on an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team when they were both in high school. Since then, they’ve played with or against each other in varying capacities fairly often. For many Americans competing internationally, they find comradery with other Americans, not only due to their status as outsiders, but because many have competed with or against one another over the course of their careers. 92 Merritt joined the team a month before Cierra, and has a significantly different impression of both Kazan and Kazanochka, given she felt ostracized immediately. As we sit together on the gym floor after practice, she tells me, “People wouldn’t try to speak with me, people wouldn’t invite me anywhere. It was completely like, me…and everybody else. I definitely gave up trying to build friendships…at the beginning before Cierra and Lena [the other foreign player, who is from Montenegro] were here, I just gave up. I was like I’m just here to do my job and I’ll never see them again.” She described herself through her Russian teammates eyes as “an outsider, a foreigner, an alien, basically.” The relationships foreign players have with locals on their team vary significantly from one country to another. The previous season, Merritt played for a team in Germany, where almost all of her teammates spoke English and her coach was an American. Given her family is German and she had relatives living in Munich, the transition to playing overseas was much easier. In Russia however, she has struggled to navigate this team and relied on Cierra, Jelena “Lena” Vucetic (a player from Montenegro and the only non-Russian), and a team manager named Valeria “Lera” Shuvagina, often referred to as “L,” in order to survive socially. Cierra, on the other hand, has adjusted to her life in Kazan and is easily one of the most popular players on the team, both on and off of the court. As we enter practice or the locker room, her Russian teammates light up and greet her warmly; she is seen as the bridge between the Russian nationals and the imported players, and she navigates this role effortlessly. In an interview, Cierra mentioned that there is sometimes animosity when Americans join international leagues because their presence means that a local starter will automatically lose her position. In Italy, she faced one particularly contentious teammate who refused to acknowledge her off of the court for a significant portion of the season. Other players, she told me, felt as if the presence of 93 foreign players, especially Americans, increased their chances of winning and advancing to a championship, so they were less possessive about relinquishing their starting role. Translating Labor Despite differences in their outward appearances, Cierra’s and Merritt’s responsibilities on the court are both read and judged by the team’s coaches and management in similar terms. As American athletes, both players are expected to outperform their Russian teammates and bear the bulk of responsibility of securing team victories each game. Merritt explained: Before every game here, they’re like, pulling me aside and telling me it’s such an important game and we have to make playoffs this year…You’ll see them say it to Cierra, too and like nobody else. Definitely last year [in Germany] if we lost, it was my fault that we lost even if I had 20 points, 16 rebounds, did everything I could and my person didn’t score it was my fault we lost…basketball has always been a crazy passion and now I really have to look at it as just as a job. She seems disappointed in seeing the game as “just a job,” but acknowledges the difference in the expectations she faced as a college athlete in the States and her labor here as one of the highest-paid athletes on the court. While Merritt and Cierra negotiate six-figure contracts, their teammates make significantly less, which also correlates to the expectations levied towards them in practice and during games. These expectations also extend outside of the court. One day, as Cierra prepares for practice, I notice her taping her own hand and ankles with no medical professionals in sight. As a WNBA athlete, athletic trainers attend every practice and game and state-of-the-art technology assists in preventing and rehabilitating injuries. “We have a masseuse, but no athletic trainer,” she tells me. “We have to tape everything ourselves.” In the same way the levels of talent vary across teams and leagues, so also do the facilities, medical resources and training schedules available for players. Baked beans are often served for breakfast on the road before game day and players are responsible for their own athletic training before practice and games. When 94 Kazanochka's assistant coach overhears Merritt complaining of insomnia, he suggests she drink beer before bed to ensure a good night's rest. In another moment, Cierra complains to Merritt about walking into the gym and seeing trash in the bleachers and unracked basketballs – she notes that it’s not her job to pick up after other people, to which Merritt replies, “Girl, you are overseas – everything is your job.” In transitioning to playing overseas, these players seemingly have to evaluate their standards surrounding the game, as well as the established norms and courtesies they enjoy stateside. These discrepancies in medical care and training facilities often place these athletes in a precarious position, especially in the case of injury or illness. Earlier in the season, Cierra injured her knee during a game, but didn’t feel pain until dinner that night with the team. When she told Lera, one of the team managers, Lera responded, “What do you want me to do?” Cierra told me, “She was basically like, ‘shut up, you’re fine.’” Lera, who was driving us as Cierra recounted this story, defended her inaction to help her, claiming she was unaware of how dire the situation had become due to the fact that Cierra finished the game and walked out of the gym seemingly okay. After dinner, Cierra waited until everyone had left the table before trying to get up, not wanting anyone on the team to see her struggle or know she was injured. She tells me, I got up and tried to walk, I can’t even take a step. I can’t put no weight on it. So I’m trying to call Merritt so she could come back and help me because I wanted everybody else to leave. I didn’t want anyone to see me…I’ve never had pain in my knees like that before and I’m kind of scared because…I’m in a foreign country I don’t just trust these doctors as it is. I have all of these emotions at once so I only want Merritt to see me like this. Here, Merritt is perceived as the only person who can “see” her like this because of their longstanding friendship and her ability to understand what’s at stake as a foreign player. Merritt and Lera help Cierra make it to her apartment, but she ultimately decides to seek treatment in the 95 United States to ensure she’s able to finish out the season and returned to the team after treatment and therapy with her own doctors. Merritt had also faced a health scare earlier in the season, falling severely ill within her first weeks in Kazan because she had no idea she should not consume the tap water at her apartment. Having played the previous season in Germany, a country with higher water standards, she didn’t question the safety of her faucet, nor did her teammates or managers alert her to the risk of drinking water that had not been boiled. Cierra and Merritt’s experiences point to the potential risks of playing abroad, not only in terms of their physical health but their job security. In both cases, the team’s response to their health concerns remained rooted in their value on the court – the decision of whether or not to cut them from the team depended upon the terms of their contracts and the length of time predicted for their recovery. Learning from the Locker Room The Basket-Hall serves as the home arena for both Kazanochka and a men’s professional team, the Unics. Riding into practice with “Mama” Vika, one of the best Russian players on the team, she comments sarcastically, “we practice more, they [the men’s team] play more games.” Cierra agrees, noting the constant two-a-day practices and sparse game schedule, often involving away games with long commutes. “The men’s team has nicer stuff and more money,” Cierra tells me. We walk to the practice facilities across the hall; she’s right. Later on, in the women’s weight room, I’m told that all of the equipment consists of hand-me-downs from the Unics. The sexism of the hoops habitus is seemingly one of the most consistent translations throughout my time with Kazanochka. After practice one day, the team heads down to the locker room, dubbed “The Dungeon” by the players, and for good reason given its location down several sets of stairs and an 96 unmistakable dampness in the air. 149 As a researcher attempting to find my place in such an intimate space, I suddenly realize I have no protocol for how to conduct myself within the locker room. Beyond the typical power dynamics of researcher/participant, I quickly consider how this is now amplified given I am fully dressed as the team undresses, showers, and changes. Once inside, I realize there is a way for me to sit behind a sort of partition comprised of tall lockers which would obscure my view of the team. I would essentially sit next to Alex, the masseuse, as he waits to address any lingering requests post-practice. I feel this is a happy medium of involvement without discomfort for any parties involved. And then I hear one of Cierra's teammates ask, "Where is your friend? Why isn't she here?" Cierra replies, "She was just going to wait over there with Alex until we're all changed." I hear a murmuring of Russian amongst her teammates and then an indecipherable whisper of English, which leads Cierra beyond the locker wall to me, where she says, "They want you to hang out in here with us." I walk over and several players gesture towards a chair located in the center of the room. As soon I sit, conversation resumes and the locker room emerges as a therapeutic space to decompress after a tough practice or game, make social plans, or complain about coaches. It is a central space of connection for these players; they leave gifts for one another, critique one another’s game, and ultimately, bond over basketball. This chair, in many ways, embodies much of my anxiety in conducting this 149. It's a strange feeling to have déjà vu in a place you've never been. Walking into Kazanochka's locker room, I am immediately transported to a scene in Gina Prince-Bythewood's cult classic Love and Basketball (2000) where the main character, Monica (played by Sanaa Lathan), is a professional basketball player playing abroad in Spain, millions of miles away from her friends and family. In the film, Monica is shown sitting alone in a corner of the locker room, taping her ankle as the coach delivers an emphatic pregame speech in Spanish. At one point, his voice lowers as he points at Monica with pride and smiles. Following his impassioned pep talk, Monica approaches one of her teammates and asks, “Luisa, what did he say?” Luisa simply responds, “he said to give the ball to you.” She processes this, and with one expression seems to realize both her role and responsibility as the star of the team as well as all of the elements of being on a team she misses in translation each day. 97 research, navigating how and where my presence changes the environment or imposes upon others unnecessarily. It also represents an opening for considering how to gauge trust and maneuver access and consent, especially amongst research participants whose first language is not my own. I was encouraged by the locker room invitation, an early sign of good standing. Translating the Game Watching Kazanochka practice, I settle into a seat on the sidelines, taking in the rhythm and fluidity of those on the court. There is a rather simplistic beauty in basketball – so much is unspoken in the repetition of hand slaps after each rotation, offering up an unspoken mutual respect. While there may be language barriers between Cierra and her teammates, there is seemingly a communicative power of sport which erodes any verbal miscues which may arise…for the most part. As the coach barks out the next drill, Cierra makes eye contact with me and shrugs; she has no idea what he’s saying. Both Merritt and Cierra described the difference in playing overseas and how they’ve had to translate their approach on the court. Merritt told me that the slower tempo of the game in Russia (and in Europe in general) creates a more methodical style of play, where plays are more controlled and improvisation is discouraged. As they run plays, the head coach yells directions in Russian, and teammates take turns translating to Cierra and Merritt, often without enough time to relay the message. Timing feels off the entire practice; there is no sense of hustle, no attempt at urgency in retrieving errant balls or resetting for drills. Merritt and Cierra are both visibly frustrated. Several times, Cierra attempts to intervene during horribly executed plays or ask follow up questions about where she should be, only to be shrugged off or misunderstood completely by her coaches. I can feel the tension in the gym; the lack of cohesion seems concerning given the game the following day against Kursk, one of the best teams in the league. 98 By the end of the practice, the coach is visibly upset, as are the players. As he ends practice, he yells at the team in Russian. When I asked about the practice the next day, Merritt told me, “if he’s screaming, I don’t even ask for the translation…I don’t even want to know.” Kursk, Kazanochka’s next opponent, is considered a significantly better team. They spend more money, bring in better players, and in Cierra’s opinion, do more to prepare for each game. In the last game against Kursk, Kazanochka may have been outmatched on paper, but had a chance on the court. “We could have won that game – we were down by 20 and ended up losing by five. We just didn’t prepare,” Cierra laments. In basketball, preparation takes the form of watching film on both the opponent and your own team, critiquing and adapting your own game while strategizing against your opponent by looking for patterns of play. Cierra tells me that for games against powerhouses like Kursk or UMMC, the coach doesn’t watch film on those teams or Kazanochka, in essence considering the game an unavoidable loss. This obviously frustrates Cierra, who sees every game as winnable, especially given she’s expected to dominate regardless of the amount of preparation, the opponent, or the resources provided to her and her teammates. She described the moments leading up to the game to me as the “calm before the storm…or the blowout.” Learning the Lingo Lera, looking to shift into broadcast journalism, has her first Unics game as sideline reporter coming up and asks Cierra to tutor her on her “basketball English” in order to interview the non-Russian players and coaches. In a café, Cierra begins drawing up a basketball court and a list of terms in order to teach Lera commonly-used hoops phrases such as “slam dunk,” “man-to- man defense,” and of course, “crossover.” 99 Figure 3. Cierra sketches out basketball plays during her English lesson with Lera She also coaches Lera on how to ask coaches and players questions about their performances and we both offer a list of dos and don’ts after we realize one of her drafted questions for the losing team’s coach is “Why did you lose the game so badly?” While sport is often described as a lingua franca connecting us through the shared values of the game, discussions surrounding preferred playing styles, feedback in practice, and the social understandings of press conferences reveal the myriad of ways in which the hoops habitus is shaped by both local and global factors. Here, Cierra becomes a translator of sorts, converting American sports slang and sports media etiquette into easily digestible pieces. Translating Politics In a different way, Merritt is also translating her experiences abroad into a global understanding of not only Russia, but global labor migration. She told me that in playing overseas, you just have these experiences and these understandings of other people and I think it’s made me so [much] more open-minded. Not that I was ever like ‘nobody can come into America,’ you know. I’m a very open person about helping others, but you know, I try to bring that to my family, too. I came over here to have a better opportunity to play basketball. I don’t want to, but I don’t play in the WNBA, and you know I’m coming 100 over here for a job opportunity so why do people feel like we should deny other people of job opportunities in America? So for me, being so open-minded to other cultures and then trying to bring that home with me has been the best part for me. In perhaps her most optimistic response during our interview, she confronts conservative rhetoric which suggests that those migrating into the United States are “taking” away from everyone else, and in bringing up conversations with her family, suggests her “open-mindedness” affects both her experiences crossing over various borders as well as challenging the discourses she receives through both media messages and conversations at home in the United States. Cultural crossovers create space for this greater understanding, this “open-mindedness” that Merritt refers to as the best part of playing overseas. However, in the same way, these cultural collisions also reveal the global nature of racial stereotypes and assumptions. Lera, the team manager for Kazanochka, reads the American players through her perspective as a Russian. and During our interview, tells me, “Most of the Black people, they’re just very lazy,” she tells me. Unsure if there is a language mishap to blame for her blatantly racist statement, I follow up, asking her “do you think Black people are lazy in general?” She backtracks, stating that she didn’t want to say every Black person is lazy, but that when she dated a Black player from the Unics, the men’s team which shares the arena with Kazanochka, she felt he never cared about what was happening in Kazan. I ask her if this is maybe not a symptom of laziness, but feeling removed and not connected to the city culturally. She complained that he only wanted to watch Netflix all day, which is why he (and by her extension, an entire race of people) was considered lazy to her. When I followed up again and questioned his competitive nature on the court as perhaps a reason why “lazy” might be the wrong word, she admitted his talent and work ethic challenged this notion of lazy, and that “lazy people can’t play basketball.” I found her allegations of laziness most interesting due to the fact that she had just rattled off so many Black 101 American players she’s worked with that offered a variety of crossover experiences. It seems as if Lera reads foreign players (especially those who identify as Black Americans) through their interest in experiencing Russian culture; there is a potential for mistranslation on her behalf (and mine) in this particular moment. 150 Community Crossovers Approaching the gym doors for the final night practice before the game, we realize we will have to wait before entering; Dynamo Kursk, Kazanochka’s opponent, is still practicing. When the doors eventually open, we file into the gym as the players of Kursk break out of their final huddle. Far from the hostility of future foes, I see Cierra approach Angel, Epiphany, and Nneka, three Black Americans playing for Kursk. She’s played with each of them as teammates, whether on national teams, in AAU leagues, or in the WNBA. I also see Cierra’s Russian teammates embracing several of Kursk’s players as well; it’s fascinating to see these warm embraces the night before a game. I greet Nneka (who I knew previously from my time with the Sparks) and introduce myself to Epiphany and Angel. Angel immediately ask me about my hair and how I handle wearing it natural in a Russian winter with a questionable water supply. We begin exchanging hair products and regimens; and in that moment, I forget I’m in Russia. Through these and other interactions, I notice the ways in which there are support networks 150. The history of blackness in Russia is complicated by a variety of factions, including Black communists crossing over to Moscow and interacting with various activist groups, the recent rise in Neo-Nazism, and the usage of Black hotep logics in Russian bots designed to tamper with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. For more see Jane Mayer, “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump,” September 24, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for- trump; Kara Lynch, Black Russians (Third World Newsreel, 2001); Being Black in Russia (BBC, 2018), https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-44253936/world-cup-2018-being-black-in- russia; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978). 102 amongst American players, especially Black women, whether in eating dinner together before or after a game, FaceTiming one another, or offering support on Instagram posts. There is also a sense of familiarity which also dictates the decorum of the game. When Cierra falls down taking a charge, Nneka is the first of offer to help her up instead of a Kazanochka teammate, perhaps speaking to the comradery of their shared identity as Black women over the jerseys they wear. 151 This shared understanding also affects how Black American teammates care for each other in moments of peril. Nneka later tells me that a few years ago, she and two other American teammates (all Black women) were stopped by Russian police while standing near their team hotel for no apparent reason besides the rarity of a group of Black women walking in Russia. Insistent that they could not possibly be patrons of the hotel, they demanded the women’s passports and proof they were staying at the hotel. When they refused and began walking away, the officers grabbed Nneka player by her backpack and pulled her towards his vehicle. The other player was roughly apprehended by the other officer, while the third ran toward the hotel to find help from the hotel or her team. Eventually, the women fought off the police officers and escaped. For Nneka and her teammates, the use of excessive force by police officers is unfortunately a familiar crossover, whether at home or abroad. As I interviewed several Black women players competing around the world, they often asked me who else I had talked to or recommended other athletes who would be open to sharing 151. Watching Nneka help Cierra up reminded me of a similar scene I witnessed years ago in Barcelona, Spain at an FC Barcelona men's basketball game. During a heated exchange between a Black FC Barcelona player and an opposing player of Spanish descent, I saw the Black player on the opposing team step in the midst of the altercation and pull the FC Barcelona player to the side to avoid a quickly escalating situation. In that moment it seemed his allegiance was to ensuring a fellow Black athlete didn’t cause a melee or risk injury rather than siding with his teammate, the Spanish player. 103 their experience. In a Skype call with Elizabeth Williams, a Nigerian-American player who called me from China, I mentioned I would be heading to Russia to observe Cierra. She told me she had just talked to her through WhatsApp the day before. Outside of the country, these players constantly communicated and kept in touch, bound by their shared identities and unique experiences abroad which were not always understood by friends and family. Time Out of the Country One day, after practice, Cierra settles in to start yet another career, as a graduate student. She’s beginning an online master’s program in Sports Leadership at Northeastern University. We sit side-by-side one evening, as I go over field notes from the day and she logs onto Blackboard to download readings and interact with her classmates on their discussion board. The online degree program is only one of the ways in which modern technology allows Cierra to connect with those in the United States. Throughout the day, I constantly saw her use FaceTime, WhatsApp, and Instagram to connect with friends and family or to document her daily life overseas. 152 Cierra primarily used WhatsApp to keep in touch with fellow players competing overseas and to receive workout details from her trainer back home. Almost every day, he sent workouts to be completed outside of her Kazanochka schedule. This, Cierra said, was to keep her in shape for the WNBA season due to the elevated expectation of physical conditioning stateside. Having recently signed her contract to play for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces as soon as she leaves Russia, she is always already looking ahead. To play year-round is to be constantly in a state of preparation for the upcoming season, whether physically in disciplining the body, 152. Instagram also served as the primary mode of communication for my own participant outreach, given athletes were more likely to frequently check Instagram than email while abroad. 104 economically in securing the next contract, or mentally, as she completes coursework to determine what life after basketball looks like for her. On FaceTime, Cierra connected with loved ones around the world, most often her mother and brother in North Carolina or her girlfriend Arron, a fellow professional basketball player competing in Israel. Given the close time difference – only an hour apart – Cierra and Arron spent a significant amount of time “living” together virtually during their non-practice time. After a couple of days, I found myself involved in these conversations, chiming in on the day’s events and getting to know Cierra’s family and partner as they dealt with the distance. 153 Translating Citizenship Although they both cross over as professional basketball players, Arron and Cierra inhabit very different spaces in their respective countries. Both occupy a certain duality as they navigate between various teams and their own identities; Cierra joked that her team would be "so confused" when her mom, who is white, came to visit. Arron, a Jewish-American from New Jersey, applied for dual citizenship before joining her team in Israel. Dual citizenship in the majority of leagues offers players the opportunity to earn more money partially through less taxes on their salaries. It also allows their team to become more competitive given that most leagues only allow two or three foreign players. Freeing up one of those roster positions for another foreigner allows for better players to join the team, which is why teams assist players in acquiring dual citizenship and cover costs related to this process. 153. Merritt describes dating is something she’s “putting off” until she finishes her overseas career, due to the additional stress that distance would place on a relationship. She’d also like to date someone who plays internationally who would understand the uniqueness of her career, but describes her male counterparts as a “limited pool” due to the age and personalities of the men who compete overseas. 105 For her dual citizenship application, Arron had to prove she was raised Jewish and is currently part of a congregation. Her rabbi wrote a letter for her, detailing her involvement in the synagogue and confirming she attended Hebrew School. She then had to interview and detail her intentions for acquiring dual citizenship. Having played in the Maccabiah Games (described by Arron as the “Jewish Olympics”), in the interview she said she had fallen in love during her short time previously in Israel and wanted to return not for basketball, but to “experience the culture.” However, upon arrival she signed with a team and operates in this "in-betweenness" as Jewish- American, evaluated differently by both Israeli players and non-Jewish Americans. “I always say you’re as good as your Israelis, because your Americans kind of cancel each other out,” she told me. “But then if you have Jewish-Americans who are considered Israelis, you’re as good as those players.” In making this distinction, she’s pointing to a loophole which teams to acquire Jewish-American players with dual citizenship as a means of signing more American talent to their team (considered the “best” globally). As a Jewish-American placed in a hierarchy between foreigners and Israelis, Arron acknowledges that she is most likely to lose playing minutes should she fail to maintain a steady contribution to the team. “If we make any mistakes the Israelis will play over us…and they know the Israelis…they’ve seen those girls play since they were young or they’ve coached them or, you know, they know them previously so they trust them more.” Sporting citizenship takes a variety of forms, and in Arron’s case, her religious beliefs coupled with her previous basketball experience and status as an American allow for expedited access to full freedom and belonging in a region where for many, citizenship, voting rights, and the ability to move freely remain far from reach. 106 Translating Finances One night, Cierra mentions she is struggling to access her money within her Russian bank account and is concerned about paying important bills – such as her mortgage for her home in North Carolina and her cell phone bill – without transferring funds to her U.S. bank. In previous countries she’s played in, all of her money is directly deposited into her U.S. account. However in Russia, her Kazanochka employers required she open a bank account in Kazan, which has significantly impacted her relationship to money and her control over her own finances in this country. She mentions all of this in passing, but the next day she tells me at breakfast that she fell asleep and woke up thinking about it. While playing overseas for higher salaries than the WNBA offers, Cierra finds herself unable to cover her domestic expenses. She notes that she’s cautious about wiring herself money from her Russian bank account to her U.S. account due to a previous incident where she inexplicably lost $700 USD and is afraid of replicating the same process. After a significant amount of research, she and I discover this occurred as result of the exchange rate changing drastically between the processing of her initial transfer and its arrival to her bank account; the time difference between the countries affected the translation of the currency when the markets reopened, costing her hundreds of dollars. This moment represents the difficulties of navigating global markets as an athlete also required to compete at the highest level, attend multiple practices almost every day, and find time to train for the upcoming season in the states. In between practices, Cierra stayed at the gym and attempted to determine the necessary resources and timing to access and transfer her money, but after over an hour attempting this transfer online, she asks Lera if she’d be willing to call the bank and translate with the Russian tellers in order to transfer her money safely. 107 When Lera negotiates the transfer, she is asked to photograph and send sensitive financial information electronically, which included Cierra’s social security number. As she conducts all of these transactions on her phone, Cierra reminds her of the sensitivity of the information and asks her to delete the photo as soon as everything is sent. However, at dinner that night, Lera hands her phone to Cierra to look at some pictures, and then heads the bathroom. As she scrolls, Cierra sees that Lera did not delete her financial information and seems visibly frustrated. As she deletes the photo, she and Merritt tell me that in addition to requiring a Russian bank account, the team (primarily through Lera) is able to see all of their transactions. This often results in awkward conversations where Lera approaches Cierra and/or Merritt with detailed information of their whereabouts, with questions such as, “I see you ate at [insert restaurant name] yesterday – invite me the next time you go!” Both of them are resentful regarding the team’s surveillance on their spending, but feel they cannot assert themselves in any substantial way. The instability of their positions as players prevents them from full control of their finances and privacy. The Business of Basketball One day as we prepare to head home after practice, Merritt and Cierra receive word that Lena, their teammate from Montenegro, missed practice due to the sudden death of her father. As the third non-Russian player (the PBL allows three non-Russians per team), Lena is closest to both Americans. They find out Margerita, a member of Kazanochka’s front office, has given Lena three days to bury her father and return to the team or her contract will be terminated immediately. Merritt expressed anger over Lena receiving such a short amount of time to grieve her father’s death, especially given Kazanochka had more than a week before their next game. Merritt mentioned that many foreign players’ contracts include a harsh penalty should they leave before the end of the season; Merritt’s contract requires she pay Kazanochka $30,000 USD if she 108 quit. For players who experience a variety of hardships (such as the injury or death of a loved one which requires their immediate attention), navigating these financial penalties is difficult. In discussing how these leagues treat their foreign players, Arron told me: I think there's a way to make it a business but also you know these are people's lives you're dealing with. It's not like the corporate world where someone living at home has their family, has their own apartment, their own friends, you know everything. You're literally bringing someone across the whole world by themselves and putting them in a situation that they may not be comfortable with. I think there is a way to do both. While on Instagram that evening, Merritt sees the Kazanochka Twitter account created a bereavement post dedicated to Lana and her family. Both she and Cierra discussed how hypocritical it was to posture as if they supported their players while simultaneously requiring them back in Russia in 72 hours. Figure 4. Kazanochka's Instagram post dedicated to Lena's father In Globalization and Sport: Playing the World, the authors write that “Labouring bodies are the principal objects of sports. They are selected, trained, disciplined, bought, sold, monitored, 109 invaded, celebrated, desired, and despised.” 154 These bodies represent the nation (and the corporate) deployed through symbols which reinforce hegemonic ideals of racial integrity, the economy, technology, and gender, among others. In considering the business of basketball in Russia, I argue the value and terms of these women’s labor are constantly monitored, regulated, and (when they’re winning, of course) celebrated and desired as bodies which represent athletic dominance read through race and national identity and mediated across various platforms. Discussion I land in Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport (Международный аэропорт Шереметьево) just after nine in the morning for a layover on my way back home. Reaching my gate, I notice a T.G.I. Fridays – the U.S.-based casual dining chain. With almost 1,000 restaurants in around 60 countries, T.G.I. Fridays’ establishments feature a décor of overwhelming American nostalgia, which often strangely includes non-American figures such as Bob Marley and The Beatles. The excessive Americana references clutter the eyesight as patrons order menu items such as Jack Daniels ribs, which appear drenched in both national pride and high fructose corn syrup. As I gaze into the restaurant, I see a statue of the embodiment of global sports dominance. Except...he appears a little differently than I remember. 154. Toby Miller et al., Globalization and Sport: Playing the World (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2991), 31. 110 Figure 5. A Michael Jordan statue in the Moscow airport TGI Fridays Michael Jordan, placed in this Moscow T.G.I. Fridays, is wearing a Bulls jersey with the number 32 (Michael Jordan's iconic basketball number is 23); poorly translated yet ripe for consumption by airport passersby. Cierra, in translating her career overseas, is immediately read (and even misread) through her nationality and race; for Kazanochka, these identity markers signify athletic superiority while simultaneously signaling the need for surveillance. Her team’s policies towards foreign players mirror other leagues which seek to regulate their roster, especially those imported to play, often through financial means which threaten their livelihood. Cierra’s ability to cross over is limited, however, by these global flows. As she traveled back to the United States for training camp with the Las Vegas Aces, she realized that the team’s roster would significantly change once their star players returned from their overseas playing in non-U.S. leagues. Given the unevenness of these international leagues, Cierra’s early arrival to the training camp did not cement her a spot on the final roster, even as she competed on the team throughout the first weeks of the regular season. 111 The week before I was scheduled to visit her in Las Vegas, she warned me that I shouldn’t come because she knew she would be cut soon as soon as the last player returned from abroad. She was right. In traversing multiple countries, overlapping seasons, and diverse playing styles, she eventually experienced the nonflows inherently tied to the white basketball unconscious. Choreographing her career once more, she began preparing for her next season in Poland while coaching girls’ basketball in her hometown. In the following chapter, I examine how FIBA, the global governing body of basketball, enacts a ban against the hijab, and in doing so, prevents Muslim women who cover from competing in leagues such as Russia’s PBL. I consider how online platforms such as Change.org and YouTube allow women to collectively resist this Islamophobic policy, as well as the corporate interventions of companies such as Nike. 112 FOURTH QUARTER | HARAM HOOPS?: FIBA, NIKE, & THE HIJAB’S HALF- COURT DEFENSE “I don’t need Nike to make a hijab. We need people to just let us play. Muslim girls definitely hoop, too.” - Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir 155 A woman in a black-and-gray patterned hijab fixes her gaze upon a computer camera broadcast across YouTube. Seated in an elementary classroom, she says, “Hijab in general was difficult for me. At that time, of course, I didn’t understand the beauty of it. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t really understand Islam as a whole. So I just remember the only place where I felt like I fit in and didn’t care about what people thought about me wearing hijab was on the court.” The woman is Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, a former basketball player who became the face of FIBA’s hijab ban after the global governing body of hoops refused to allow religious headgear in international competition. The trickle-down effect of the ban prevented Abdul-Qaadir from playing professionally overseas after her college career for teams similar to Kazanochka, the Russian Professional Basketball League team detailed in the previous chapter. Her journey has been documented across several spaces, including multiple documentaries, the U.S. State Department, and in this instance, an online conference for Muslim women in sport. As the keynote speaker, Abdul-Qaadir delves into her journey as both an athlete, a devout Muslim, and a Black American through various negotiations which mark her experience in the hoops habitus. Partnering with dozens of other Muslim athletes for a campaign titled #FIBAAllowHijab, Abdul-Qaadir was among a group advocating to end the ban and ensure 155. Shireen Ahmed, “Bilqis Abdul-Qaaadir Is Fighting to Lift FIBA’s Hijab Ban,” Teen Vogue, March 27, 2017, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/bilqis-abdul-qaadir-fighting-fiba- hijab-ban. 113 future hijabi hoopers could pursue the game at the highest level, along with Sikh and Jewish players who wear turbans and kippahs. In 2017, as these women worked to raise visibility for their cause, sports apparel giant Nike announced the Nike Pro Hijab, a Dri-Fit head covering, and released an ad titled “What Will They Say About You?” featuring Muslim women competing in an array of sports. At the time of the Nike Pro Hijab announcement, ESPNw columnist Kavitha A. Davidson wrote, “Now that Nike has released this line of headgear, the hope is that FIBA, and the sports world at large, will start making Muslim women a priority, too.” 156 Nike, in producing the ad and athletic hijab in a particularly volatile political moment for Muslim visibility, has clearly taken a stand for the expanding the space of sport for these women. Or have they? Davidson and another sportswriter, Shireen Ahmed, 157 aren’t so sure. As they both note, less than a week before the release of the Pro Hijab, Nike announced a sponsorship with FIBA as the title partner for FIBA’s world rankings as well as licensing rights for apparel and merchandise. 158 Should Nike’s partnership signal an attempt to influence FIBA towards progress? Or is the Nike Pro Hijab and accompanying ad campaign an attempt to capitalize on the current political climate and resulting economies of visibility? 156. Kavitha A. Davidson, “Pro Hijab Gives Important Validation to Muslim Women Athletes,” espnW, accessed March 25, 2017, http://www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/18845880/nike-pro-hijab-gives-important-validation- muslim-women-athletes. 157. Shireen Ahmed, “Nike’s Pro Hijab: A Great Leap into Modest Sportswear, but They’re Not the First,” The Guardian, March 8, 2017, sec. Sport, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/mar/08/nike-performance-hijab-female-muslim- athletes. 158. “FIBA Signs 11-Year Strategic Partnership with Iconic Basketball Brand Nike,” FIBA, February 27, 2017, http://www.fiba.basketball/news/fiba-signs-11-year-strategic- partnership-with-iconic-basketball-brand-nike. 114 In this chapter, I dissect FIBA’s ban through the racialized, gendered, and Western discourses surrounding the hijab in order to consider how the white basketball unconscious renders these specific forms of religious expression inappropriate — and later unsafe — for the sporting space. As Yago Colás writes, the white basketball unconscious is not merely marked by race. It is also distinctly gendered (by and for men) and religious (through both its “birth” in a YMCA gymnasium as well as its utilization within Muscular Christianity). In analyzing the #FIBAAllowHijab petition and the online Muslim Women in Sport Summit, I center the voices of Muslim women, especially those who wear hijab, in order to explore the choreography of these athletes who campaigned against FIBA and in the process, attempted to create space for one another in the hoops habitus. Reina Lewis writes that, “matters of Muslim self-presentation have come to operate as the limit case in debates about citizenship and belonging, secularity and modernity, for both the majority non-Muslim (or, in Turkey, nonreligious) public and often for Muslim (religious) communities themselves.” 159 In this case, the hijab’s place in basketball (post)modernity — as well as the girls and women who choose to wear it — is constantly marketed, contested, and resolved through both corporate and institutional entities. Dual Hijabophobia Since 2003, the West has become particularly obsessed with legislation controlling the attire of Muslim women, from Germany banning teachers from wearing headscarves, to France and Belgium banning the burqa and niqab in 2011. Austria and Germany have followed suit, albeit with partial bans. And in 2017, Quebec adopted new legislation, Bill 62, which forbids 159. Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Kindle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), loc. 3. 115 anyone from giving or receiving public services while wearing a face covering. 160 Around the world, from the individual to the institutional, 161 discourses surrounding Muslim women’s attire continue to frame policies which constrict their movements within public spaces. Whereas Islam has become a symbol of female oppression in Western culture, 162 recent Islamophobic policies within Europe and North America seemingly restrict Muslim women in particular more than any religious text or leader. This also reverberates across media representations of Muslim women, where scholars such as Evelyn Alsutany detail how hijabi women are largely rendered invisible, and when they are depicted in U.S. media, they are read through what she calls simplified complex representations – strategies which give the impression they are producing complex racial 160. Matthew Weaver, “Burqa Bans, Headscarves and Veils: A Timeline of Legislation in the West,” The Guardian, May 31, 2018, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/14/headscarves-and-muslim-veil-ban-debate- timeline. In another article, Warda Naili told The Canadian Press that she doesn’t see how banning the burka and niqab in Quebec emancipates women, given it would then require her to rely on her husband for rides and mandates adjustments to what she wears every day. “I want to control who I give the permission to access my body. I think every woman, and every person should have this right.” For more, see Morgan Lowrie, “Quebec Women Who’ve Worn Niqabs Discuss Controversial Neutrality Bill: ‘It’s Part of Who I Am, My Identity,’” National Post, October 22, 2017, https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-women-whove-worn-niqabs- discuss-provinces-controversial-neutrality-bill. 161. These Islamophobic policies have also entered the workplace for women like Samantha Elauf, who was told her hijab kept clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch from hiring her as a sales associate due to their “look policy.” Her case would later go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in an 8-1 ruling in Elauf’s favor that her headscarf was a reasonable accommodation for employers. (See Marianne Levine, “Supreme Court Rules against Abercrombie in Hijab Case,” Politico, June 1, 2015, https://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/ambercrombie-fitch-hijab-case-supreme-court-ruling- 118492.) 162. Paul Eid, “Balancing Agency, Gender and Race: How Do Muslim Female Teenagers in Quebec Negotiate the Social Meanings Embedded in the Hijab?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 11 (2014): 1902. 116 representations designed to supposedly challenge former stereotypes and create a multicultural post-racial landscape. 163 When Muslim women wearing hijab do appear on TV, they are typically framed as victims of hate crimes or require saving from the patriarchal constraints of their faith. 164 Tropes of the “oppressed Muslim woman” or the gendered “good Muslim” are frequently positioned opposite the “bad Muslim,” most often depicted as a (brown, male) terrorist. 165 In an interview with sports journalist Shireen Ahmed, she told me she began covering sports because she was “sick and tired of the way Muslim women were being written up but also how Muslim communities were being written up. It’s all the same trope, all Muslim men are oppressive, and Muslim women are submissive. We’ve got to have more nuance.” In the same way that the WNBA depicts its players as an antidote to the Black masculinity of the NBA, media and popular culture’s depiction of the devout Muslim woman in hijab serves as a corrective to the perceived violent aggression of the Muslim terrorist. As Alsutany and others have written, both the “good Muslim” and “bad Muslim” tropes are read through a post-9/11 Orientalism which shape different Muslim and non-Muslim publics as utterly Other, culturally illegible and unable to cross over into Western cultural forms. 166 Women in the West who choose to wear the hijab seem to be accused in both subtle and obvious ways of false consciousness, while Muslim women who play basketball in Muslim-majority countries are accused of participating in what is considered forbidden, or haram, submitting to the influence of 163. Evelyn Alsutany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11, Critical Cultural Communication (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 38. 164. Alsutany, 71. 165. Alsutany, 71. 166. Alsutany, 92. 117 secular American culture, one dribble at a time. 167 Sociologist Paul Eid asks, “If the hijab is politically instrumentalized, both in the West and in the Muslim world, what room is left to Muslim women in the production of the social meanings embedded in veil wearing?” 168 The various forms of meaning attached to Muslim women’s decision to cover (or not) results in what Manal Hamzeh calls a dual hijabophobia – a gendered form of Islamophobia directed towards Muslim women – by both Islamic and non-Islamic factions. The racist, colonialist discourses of the West are defined as Islamophobic hijabophobia, while Hamzeh defines Islamist hijabophobia within the constraints of nationalist and religious groups who use hijabophobia to blatantly police women’s bodies in specific countries and contexts. 169 “These two hijabophobias,” Hamzeh writes, “construct the body of the Muslim woman as a threat to the nation’s unity and the purity of Islam, as well as, a threat to the secular notion of freedom, the security of the West, and playing sports or ‘the game.’” 170 These Islamophobic policies have crossed over into sport in the form of hijab bans, most notably within FIFA and FIBA, the global 167. In “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” Mahmood Mamdani writes that, “contemporary ‘fundamentalism’ is a modern political project, not a traditional cultural leftover.” It is not, as many would depict, a Middle East problem, a Muslim problem, a premodern issue. Countries dominated by presumed fundamentalist terrorist groups do not reside in the “past”; rather, they are the product of globalization and the political strategies and maneuvers of the West. For more, see Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002): 766–75. 168. Eid, “Balancing Agency, Gender and Race: How Do Muslim Female Teenagers in Quebec Negotiate the Social Meanings Embedded in the Hijab?,” 1903. 169. Manal Hamzeh, “Jordanian National Football Muslimat Players: Interrupting Islamophobia in FIFA’s ‘Hijab Ban,’” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 20, no. 5 (2015): 519. 170. Hamzeh, 519. 118 governing bodies of football and basketball, respectively. Throughout this chapter, I analyze how these dual hijabophobias shape the sporting landscape for Muslim women. Governing Bodies International sport is organized and governed by a hierarchical network of organizations ranging from the local to the global. At the top, international sport federations (IFs) are comprised of national sport federations organized by sport (such as FIFA or FIBA) or event (such as the International Olympic Committee, with smaller suborganizations for individual sports). 171 While these transnational organizations operate outside of government regulation, they are bound by the political climate and systems in which they exist. International sport becomes a mechanism connected to a broader global system and the nation-states which regularly take part in these mega-events such as the Olympics or World Cup. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, instituted a ban on the hijab in 2007. Law 4 of the federation’s laws of the game states that, “The basic compulsory equipment must not contain any political, religious or personal statements…The team of a player whose basic compulsory equipment contains political, religious or personal slogans or statements will be sanctioned by the competition organizer or by FIFA. 172 ” The ban’s genesis lies in the Quebec Soccer Federation’s exclusion of the hijab and any explicit religious symbols during play. It was first enforced against a group of 11-year-old girls where teams were forced to forfeit games if even one hijabi-wearing player took to the pitch. Within a year, the International Football Association 171. Scott R. Jedlicka, “Sport Governance as Global Governance: Theoretical Perspectives on Sport in the International System,” International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics 10, no. 2 (2018): 287–304. 172. “Laws of the Game” (Zurich, Switzerland: FIFA, July 2007),https://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/federation/laws_of_the_game_0708_105 65.pdf. 119 Board (IFAB) backed this ruling, taking the discriminatory policy global. 173 The federation’s policy on the hijab would later change to one of safety, arguing that the hijab posed a strangulation risk to athletes should they take the pitch to play while covered. Eventually, following a two-year provisional period, FIFA was forced to acknowledge that no medical research exists confirming any risk or incident of injury for athletes wearing headscarves. However, the influence of FIFA instituting the ban impacting other sports who had originally followed suit. Carolyn Prouse, in analyzing discourses surrounding the FIFA hijab ban, writes that: Through FIFA and IFAB’s codifications, the Muslim Female Footballer materializes as at risk of strangulation by her cultural choices while entrenching the centuries-old colonial and imperial structures of benevolence that celebrates male saviours...In an ironic yet unsurprising twist, FIFA’s regulation of the hijab as a safety concern strangles Muslim women’s voices in a continuing coloniality of racialized and gendered power. 174 Prouse argues that FIFA positions itself as a benevolent governing body allowing the hijab only if it passes a safety test, a self-congratulatory stance which frames the organization as both culturally sensitive and invested in player safety. 175 “Current contestations represent a new moment in a global field,” Prouse writes, “as notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equal rights’ are now being invoked to allow the hijab, albeit under conditions that insidiously reinscribe white patriarchal authority.” 176 The FIFA ban on the hijab can read as a microcosm of larger anti- 173. Curtis R. Ryan, “The Politics of FIFA and the Hijab,” Foreign Policy, February 28, 2012, https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/28/the-politics-of-fifa-and-the-hijab/. 174. Carolyn Prouse, “Harnessing the Hijab: The Emergence of the Muslim Female Footballer through International Sport Governance,” Gender, Place & Culture 22, no. 1 (2015): 32. 175. Prouse, 29. 176. Prouse, 22. 120 Muslim sentiments and cultural battles waged across Europe and North America, 177 shrouded in an neocolonial paternalism which reflects the white patriarchal structures imposed on these women as it does in other economic and political spaces. About FIBA FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, dictates how the game is played, who can play, and how the game is officiated. “We are basketball,” their motto declares, an apt statement given the role the organization has in shifting the rules, values, and culture of the game on a global level. 178 FIBA’s article 4.4.2 states that: Players shall not wear equipment (objects) that may cause injury to other players. The following are not permitted: – Finger, hand, wrist, elbow or forearm guards, casts or braces made of leather, plastic, pliable (soft) plastic, metal or any other hard substance, even if covered with soft padding. – Objects that could cut or cause abrasions (fingernails must be closely cut). – Headgear, hair accessories and jewellery. The FIBA rule rhetoric is allegedly driven by safety, not a religious imperative, although initially the federation told Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir that their policy was rooted in maintaining basketball as a religiously neutral space. Abdul-Qaadir responded to their reasoning by saying: Well, if you want to do that, then people who wear tattoos of crosses or scriptures or Biblical verses or whatever the case may be should have to cover those up. And with that response, they knew that they didn’t have a leg to stand on…all of a sudden they bring up this headgear rule that you could possibly injure someone with your scarf. And so you 177. Ryan, “The Politics of FIFA and the Hijab.” 178. FIBA was founded in Geneva, Switzerland in 1932 and was initially comprised eight countries: Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland. It is now represented by 213 national federations, divided into five commissions: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. Every four years, the association organizes a world cup for both men and women which rotates through various hosting cities, much like FIFA’s World Cup. 121 can’t battle, it’s hard to battle safety. As soon as an organization throws in safety, it sticks… 179 When FIBA failed to lift their ban after FIFA ended theirs in 2014, debates and petitions began to circulate in support of hijabi hoopers. 180 These discourses challenged notions which positioned Muslim women as essentialized “backward,” passive subjects donning a dangerous head covering, which was later used by FIBA and other governing bodies to legitimize Islamophobic policies as protective measures. 181 The continued ban at the federation affected leagues and teams not only in majority- Muslim countries, but also in the United States, seeping into sporting regulations at even the K- 12 level. Take, for example, Je’Nan Hayes, a hijabi high school player in Maryland sidelined during her team’s regional playoff basketball game after an official told her coach she would not be allowed on the court wearing a hijab. The coach lobbied to have the decision reversed before tip-off, but the referees refused, citing a rarely enforced rule requiring documentation in order to allow any religious headgear to be worn during play. Haynes had played the entire season in the same school district without issue; after sitting out the game, her story gained traction nationally, resulting in Maryland’s Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association revoking the discriminatory policy. After the incident, Hayes said, “I just want to be an advocate for boys or girls, anybody who is trying out for a sport and has a religion and they feel like their faith can 179. Tim O’Donnell and Jon Mercer, FIBA Allow Hijab (Uninterrupted, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E-SKXBnlJg. 180. FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, finally allowed religious head covers in 2014, following a two-year testing period to ensure the sport would remain “safe” for men and women wearing hijabs or turbans during play. 181. Prouse, “Harnessing the Hijab: The Emergence of the Muslim Female Footballer through International Sport Governance,” 26. 122 interfere with the way they play sports...because of rules like these, I feel like it makes people scared or turn away from sports, and I don’t want that to happen to anybody else in the future.” 182 The following season, Haynes joined the field hockey team, remaining in sports but perhaps wary of basketball after her experience within the hoops habitus. Basketball emerges as yet another vivid example of the ways in which the Muslim world is torn between its fascination with Western modernity and its struggle against colonial and neocolonial dominance. 183 Mahmood Amara writes that for female Muslim athletes in particular, “The international sports arena has become a privileged space where they can regain their status as full citizens and as role models,” 184 while also acknowledging that within the public sphere, these women are embodied proof of progress (in Muslim societies) and integration (in the West). 185 It would then seem that sport serves as less of space of freedom, but rather as a site of cultural tension, debate, and forum about these women’s perceived status. Amara believes that sport can serve as a negotiating space for Muslim and non-Muslim fans and athletes alike to traverse national and cultural borders, 186 but who stands to benefit (or lose) from these crossover moments? For sports institutions such as FIBA, these crossovers are defended through 182. Jesse Dougherty, “After Playing All Season, Maryland Girl Held out of Basketball Game for Wearing a Hijab,” Washington Post, March 13, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/highschools/after-playing-all-season-maryland-girl- held-out-of-basketball-game-for-wearing-a-hijab/2017/03/13/63fe82be-0767-11e7-8884- 96e6a6713f4b_story.html. 183. Mahfoud Amara, “The Muslim World in the Global Sporting Arena,” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 14, no. 2 (2008): 67. 184. Amara, 70. 185. Amara, 71. 186. Amara, 73. 123 regulations which aim to contain hijabi hoopers, governing their bodies as they attempt to compete on the court. Muslim Women in Sport Network The Muslim Women in Sport Network, established in March 2017, is comprised of athletes, journalists, coaches, researchers, and executives dedicated to influencing policy, programming, and engagement involving Muslim women. Their website’s mission declares, “It is time Muslim women instruct decision and policymakers on what it means to be a Muslim woman in sport and shed light on the diversity of Muslim women.” 187 In May 2018, the organization’s first online summit streamed on YouTube, and aimed to connect Muslim women from around the globe. The conference focused on issues such as athlete activism, sport for development, and sports leadership. Over three days, the virtual summit featured thirteen speakers across six time zones and viewers from 22 countries. During the conference, Shireen Ahmed said that one of the reasons the organization was developed is “because we were tired of people talking about us, we want to talk for ourselves.” I registered for the conference, unsure if it was ethical for me to participate, given there was no way for me to announce myself as an attending researcher – or non-Muslim – for informed consent without disrupting the live commenting format. 188 I ultimately decided to analyze the YouTube videos of the summit published publicly, which featured the speakers of the conference in full. I felt this both allowed me to access the conference – minus the live commenting – without feeling as if I was intruding upon a space intended for Muslim women to 187. “About Us: Muslim Women’s Sports Network,” Muslim Women in Sport Network, accessed April 10, 2019, https://mwisn.org/about-us/. 188. Annette N. Markham, ed., Internet Inquiry: Conversation About Method (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2008), 76. 124 share their experiences with one another. 189 The conference videos are considered a fully public environment, defined by internet research Malin Sveningsson Elm as “open and available for everyone, that anyone with an internet connection can access, and that does not require any form of membership or registration.” 190 The analysis which follows is structured by the notion that digital media continues to shift how we relate to ourselves and others in a myriad of ways. The relationships and group memberships which cross physical boundaries have the potential to shape new opportunities for self-expression and organizing which occurs through both the #FIBAAllowHijab hashtag as well as the Muslim Women in Sport Summit. 191 I consider the Muslim Women in Sport Summit (and its affiliated network) as a cybercommunity, 192 where shared value systems, norms, and a sense of identity bind these various women together and through these shared experiences, generate knowledge production often rendered invisible in mainstream discourses surrounding Muslim women. “Cybercommunity is not just a thing; it is also a process,” Jan Fernback writes. “It is defined by its inhabitants, its boundaries and meanings are renegotiated, and although virtual communities do possess many of the same essential traits as physical communities, they possess 189 . For more on this distinction, see Christine Hine, Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied, and Everyday (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 105 and Annette N. Markham, ed., Internet Inquiry: Conversation About Method (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2008), 84. 190. Markham, Internet Inquiry: Conversation About Method, 75. The conference itself could be considered a semipublic space according to the authors based on the fact that while public, it does require registration to attend. 191. Nancy K. Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, 2nd ed., Digital Media and Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 153. 192. Steven Jones, ed., Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998), 211. 125 the ’substance’ that allows for common experience and common meaning among members.” 193 Across the MWSN Summit, FIBA’s hijab ban and #FIBAAllowHijab, the resulting campaign, were recurring topics almost a year after the ban was eventually lifted. In many ways, the summit served as a way to “talk back” to the white basketball unconscious. Dana Abdulkarim, a hijabi netball athlete, addresses this during the summit in her critique of FIBA when she says, You have to look back to when and how these sports were created and invented. And the rules were written…by men for men. And so thinking about women, in the first instance, was not a factor. And then considering different men to white English men that were typically Christian. So because the governing body doesn’t change the rule books, they’re 153 years old. So it meant that when you then had the change happening they weren’t ready for it. They had to be reactive rather than proactive and maybe in some instances, they were scared that changing would change the fundamentals of where the sport came from. They didn’t understand that women, Muslim women in particular, wanted to access it. I think you’ve got the same issues with all of the other governing bodies; unless they’ve been presented with a you, or a me, or any of us who have played sport and challenged the norms, they don’t anticipate that there’s a barrier…sport is meant to be this microcosm of society, but sport was originally designed by men for men and done by men. While Dana acknowledges sport as foundationally designed to exclude Muslim women, she notes how some sports are easier to access for hijabi women, citing U.S. fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad’s success as an example of thriving in a “Muslim friendly” sport. “For others,” she said, they’re seen as something to be wary of, to be fearful of.” One of the primary fears, as she notes, is change – changing the sport, as well as where it came from. Given the white basketball unconscious is fundamentally rooted in a white, American, Christian masculinity, the inclusion of non-white Muslim women from around the world competing on the court would significantly challenge the hegemonic norms of who the game is for and how it can be accessed. The lack of knowledge surrounding barriers to entry for hijabi athletes is obscured from the policymakers at 193. Steven Jones, ed., Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998), 217. 126 the top of the game, Dana says. The athletes themselves are seemingly restricted from view as well. In a short film titled FIBA Allow Hijab (produced by Uninterrupted, an online media venture co-founded by the NBA’s LeBron James), there is a scene where Bilqis is told before speaking in front of the U.S. State Department that many are unaware of FIBA’s hijab ban, even fellow athletes who would join in advocating with her as allies. Shireen mentioned a moment where she realized the ban and resulting campaign hadn’t reached non-hijabi athletes, even players such as Essence Carson, a WNBA player for the Sparks who competes overseas in Turkey during the offseason. Much of this invisibility can be attributed to the lack of legibility within post 9/11 narratives which situate Muslim women as either victims of their religion or success stories after “escaping” the confines of Islam. Evelyn Alsutany writes that if a story fails to fit one or both of these molds, it is unlikely to gain any meaningful traction. 194 In fact, in responding to the stereotypical categories these women are placed within, there is little room to articulate their own experiences and agendas. 195 For Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir and Asma Elbadawi, the lack of knowledge regarding the FIBA ban became a significant barrier to their activism. In the Athlete Activism session, Asma recounted the lack of knowledge surrounding the ban and resulting campaign: Even ‘til now, I’ll have conversations with people and they’ll be like ‘oh, we didn’t even know there was a ban…in many ways, there was lots of signs that there was something in place that maybe isn’t allowing Muslim women to progress as high as the other women. Because we couldn’t see them on TV, they weren’t in the WNBA, they weren’t in the [overseas] professional leagues, and so no one really questioned why that was the case. And for me, I just thought ‘oh maybe it’s just a religious thing’ like a lot of these girls think you know it’s forbidden for us Muslim girls to play and it’s difficult for us maintain our modesty at the same time so it’s just best not to play at those levels and then suddenly 194. Alsutany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11,105. 195. Alsutany, 102. 127 it all made sense the moment that I realized there’s an actual ban…that’s why they’re not being seen. The lack of visibility was also attributed to the FIBA ban protest lacking the support of a significant political presence. During the FIFA hijab ban, the advocacy and financial support of Prince Ali bin Hussein of Jordan elevated activists’ voices to new levels; the FIBA ban lacked an equivalent supporter within the federation. This speaks to both the dearth of diversity within FIBA (geographically as well as in terms of gender) as well as the need to procure a wealthy, well-connected male insider to ensure change within the organization. Without any inside support, the #FIBAAllowHijab campaign relied upon grassroots advocacy, a strategy that Asma Elbadawi, the creator of the campaign’s petition believes showed the range of global support and challenged notions of where Muslim women live. During the Athlete Activism panel she said, “I think what helped was the fact that there was so many of us from completely different locations in the world. We had Nigeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and they’re supposed to be…doing [anything] at the moment.” In alluding to the perception of Saudi women as unable to advocate for themselves, Asma speaks to both the potential of these virtual campaigns to reach a global audience, but the efficacy and appropriation of these strategies within various economies of visibility is also an important aspect of online activism. #FIBAAllowHijab #FIBAAllowHijab operated across social media as a hashtag of support and a Change.org petition started by a group of Muslim women, including two of the summit’s speakers, Asma Elbadawi and Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir. Like the Los Angeles Sparks’ #WeAreWomen campaign analyzed in the second chapter, #FIBAAllowHijab focused on educating the public as a necessary form of labor to shift the status quo. Shireen said during the activism panel that, “Part of [#FIBAAllowHijab]…was just not only to actively campaign to strike it down was in the 128 process to educate which is really important the Muslim Women in Sport Network, you know, some of the catch words are advise, campaign, educate because that also seems to be what we’re doing.” Unlike the Sparks’ campaign, which aimed to generate ticket revenue for the team, #FIBAAllowHijab sought to disrupt FIBA’s power structure, deeply rooted in the white basketball unconscious. In using Change.org and social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, the economics of visibility for their cause ultimately translated to revenue for these sites. Change.org, the self-described “world’s platform for change,” is a website which hosts petitions which users can create or sign for a cause instantaneously. While it is often considered yet another version of slacktivism – described by Barbara Mikkelson in a 2002 New York Times article as “the desire people have to do something good without getting out of their chair” 196 – the website has raised awareness of several high-profile campaigns and influenced policy change at both the local and national levels. In 2009, Change.org shifted to an ad revenue model which collects users data, using it within the site to encourage more clicks (through an algorithm which suggests related causes after a user signs a petition) and to advertise sponsored products which continue to appear even after a “slacktivist” signs in support. 197 Change.org is also connected to other spreadable social media sites; once a petition is signed, it can be shared on Facebook, via email, or tweet with a singular click. Ultimately, through both sharing practices by users and revenue from advertisers collecting information about potential customers’ values and 196. Barnaby J. Feder, “They Weren’t Careful What They Hoped For,” The New York Times, May 29, 2002, Online edition, sec. N.Y. / Region, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/nyregion/they-weren-t-careful-what-they-hoped-for.html. 197. There is a Change.org petition to make Change.org a nonprofit organization. It closed with 26 signatures. 129 preferences, Change.org and its advertisers ultimately benefit financially from attempts to challenge institutional inequality. Figure 6. The Change.org petition page for #FIBAAllowHijab During her keynote address, Bilqis admitted she was hesitant to join the campaign. Indira Kaljo, a Bosnian-American hijabi basketball player, reached out to her about starting a petition against the ban. “I was very apprehensive because FIBA even said, ‘do a petition, it doesn’t matter. It’s not gonna affect us.’ And so I almost was like, I don’t even want to fight it…[Indira] convinced me, I joined in, and we got over 130,000 signatures and that didn’t budge FIBA.” Bilqis’s disappointment contrasts significantly with the otherwise optimistic perspective of the #FIBAAllowHijab campaign by other speakers; throughout the conference, she notes the various ways in which her visibility as the “face” of this campaign resulted in unacknowledged labor and more generally, the limits of visibility. During the Athlete Activism panel, Shireen asked Asma Albadawi, a Sudanese-British basketball player, if constantly working to either educate or advocate is tiring for her. She responded: 130 Yeah, because sports was the thing that I played and I wore the hijab in it but the hijab wasn’t the main highlight of me playing the sport. It was just the uniform I put on before I went to play or train. And then suddenly it became the main attraction and I got constantly asked about it. ‘So how does it feel to represent Muslim women?’ and all these things and honestly, I’d rather just go play and you know, get excited about making a three [pointer] again…It’s exhausting but at the same time, it’s kind of our job to do. She considered advocacy a “responsibility” for current Muslim women in sport in order to create space for future generations to benefit from their labor. Shireen responded, “When we decimate the systems of racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia, then [Muslim Women in Sport Network doesn’t] have anything to be active about anymore.” Asma responded, “Then I can actually focus on my threes again,” to which they both laughed. Although drenched with sarcasm, this exchange shows how the advocacy of both of these women prevents them from fully pursuing their careers through the emotional labor involved in their activist work. In her keynote, Bilqis similarly acknowledged the exhaustion of working within the economies of visibility which requires constantly creating content to circulate across various platforms: It was years and years of advocacy work, articles, news, video, blogs, whatever. And literally for the past four years I have been doing the same interview over and over. Can you imagine how annoying and irritating it was to answer the same questions to so many different people over and over and over again? At one point, I would say like a year and a half ago, I was so done. Her years of advocating against the FIBA ban will ultimately benefit future hijabi hoopers, but as an athlete in her 30s, she’s beyond the prime of her career, a bittersweet moment she acknowledged during her keynote: I miss basketball very much. I really do. Like I can’t watch it sometimes, because I want to get out on the court and play. And the thing is, I still can play. So it’s hard to kind of draw that line. However, I think I have more of any impact on not only Muslims, but non- Muslims as well, not that I’m speaking and sharing my story, and I’m able to break down these barriers between Islam and the rest of the world. 131 However, she also acknowledges the limits of her advocacy, especially when she eventually interacted with FIBA after the ban was lifted: I actually met with FIBA a few months ago…it was terrible. I was in a room full of men – no other women in this meeting. And after coming out of the meeting, I know exactly why it took so long [to end the FIBA ban]. These two representatives they had were very insensitive. They didn’t care about a Muslim girl trying to play basketball, it was evident. You know when I shared my story with them and you know, what the goal was was to try to get them in the future to maybe use a different process or different protocols to help these rules get removed faster if they ever came upon something similar to this situation. And they were like, ‘Why are we going backwards? What’s the point? The rule is gone, now get out of our face,’ basically. And I was just like I actually broke down in tears not because I was sad but because I was so angry I wanted to really slap all of them in the room. Her attempts to remedy the exclusionary policy-making protocols of FIBA failed to resonate with the gatekeepers of the white basketball unconscious and rendered her helpless in efforts to prevent future marginalization by the federation. What will they say about [Nike]? FIBA is currently sponsored by five companies: Beijing Enterprises Group Company Limited, Molten, Tencent, Wanda Group, and Nike, Inc. In February of 2017, Nike announced a multi-year partnership with FIBA, providing the apparel, footwear, and equipment for all men’s, women’s, and youth competitions, as well as the title partner for the governing body’s World Rankings and licensing rights. 198 From its early beginnings as Blue Ribbon Sports, Nike relied on global markets to succeed; Nike founder Phil Knight initially launched the brand through a partnership with Onitsuka Tiger (now ASICS) 199 distributing their shoes in the United States. As 198. “Nike and FIBA Partner to Grow Basketball Around the World,” Nike News, February 27, 2017, https://news.nike.com/news/nike-fiba-partnership. 199. Knight’s biggest competition in the United States at the time of the Tiger partnership was Adidas, the German sporting giant at the time. In a way, the 1960s and 1970s represented a World War II redux on the sporting good front. 132 they developed their own shoe and clothing products, Nike’s growth and eventual reliance on sweatshop labor reflect the expanding exporting of labor overseas prevalent across a variety of industries. Walter LaFeber, in describing the impact of Nike on the global cultural market, argues that by the late twentieth century, U.S. companies differed from the major corporations of previous generations due to the following factors – a surge in overseas production, a shift to the production of information over products, a dependence on world markets, reliance on massive ad campaigns, and ultimately, freedom from the bounds of single government accountability. 200 The blending of economic savvy and cultural capital has elevated Nike to new heights, largely due to the commodification of Black athletes, most prominently Michael Jordan. In aligning Black cool with the Nike check, the brand solidified its dominance with each innovative ad on an international scale, where a beginning as Blue Ribbon specializing in importing shoes bloomed into the global goddess of exporting American ideals. Today, Nike stands as one of the most tangible examples of creativity, capitalism and the commodification of cool. Its marketing campaigns considered legendary, the company has transformed since its birth in the 1960s to become one of the most iconic labels in the world – readily identified by sight (a check) or sound (a swoosh). Naomi Klein writes in No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The old paradigm had it that all marketing was selling a product. In the new model, however, the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand, and the selling of the brand acquired an extra component that can only be described as spiritual. 200. Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 55-57. 133 Advertising is about hawking product. Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence. 201 This transcendence takes a variety of forms, including marketing marginalized athletes or communities in order to harness the power of the underdog story even as a massive multinational corporation. Marketing the Marginalized As detailed in previous chapters, corporations appropriate social movements and cultural expression in order to create niche markets for consumption, especially in this current moment which often capitalizes on economies of visibility. Klein calls this “branding’s cruelest irony” – the co-optation of authentic scenes and sacred spaces in order to make their companies or brands mean something. More often than the original holders of these cultural relics would like (and even perhaps at times the corporations behind the brand creation), the consumption corrupts the original beauty, the realness towards what was once so cherished. Companies move along the the “next thing” to restock their cultural and economic resonance. 202 Nike’s 1995 ad, “If You Let Me Play,” captured the affective appeal of young girls competing in sports, as viewers receive a range of statistics read by young athletes detailing the positive physical and mental health outcomes of “letting them play.” Other marketing ploys would follow, including a reactionary campaign following conservative radio host Don Imus’s infamous “nappy-headed hos” commentary referring to the 2007 Rutgers University women’s basketball team. Nike took out a full-page ad which thanked “ignorance” for such empowering 201. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Kindle edition (New York: Picador, 2000), loc. 807. 202 . Klein, loc. 1020. 134 moments as “making an entire nation listen,” “reminding us to think before we speak,” and “unintentionally moving women’s sports forward.” The ad was accompanied by billboards, a website, and ads across television and online platforms. It is important to note that Rutgers is a Nike-sponsored school – which denotes a contractual agreement between the sporting good company and the university as the exclusive partner for team and fan merchandise. Nike and other advertisers use a human interest element in their marketing, which often circulate more rapidly and persuasively than their more straightforward campaigns, especially with today’s new media platforms. 203 What becomes more clear is that Nike is now in the “equality and empowerment” business, which simultaneously opens up opportunities for athletes to speak in support of or against a variety of causes while reproducing these notions of consumption within a rabid capitalist framework. As Nike’s massive swoosh marks the Pro Hijab, what is taken? What is lost? Nike Pro Hijab The Nike Pro Hijab, a Dri-Fit head covering emblazoned with the company’s logo, takes the activist branding framework one step further; in partnering with FIBA, it interjects the market into this discursive colonization, where the massive swoosh becomes a symbolic planted flag across the profile of the produced Muslim Woman Athlete. 204 Nuraan Davids argues the Pro Hijab has legitimized the hijab across two very different platforms. The first addresses the “hostile liberal democracies” which seek to “modernize” the Muslim woman by removing her 203. Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 6. 204. In “Harnessing the Hijab,” Carolyn Prouse writes “The Muslim Woman’s subject is again colonized, although this time through international institutions and discourses of safety. Whiteness and racialized Otherness are inherently tied to these benevolent actions and understandings of FIFA.” 135 hijab. The second responds to interpretations of Islam which renders the attire and actions of Muslim women incompatible with sport. 205 However, I would argue that a variety of other athletic hijabs have done the same, and Nike’s visibility merely propels them at the forefront of supposed activism on behalf of these athletes. In an interview I conducted with journalist Shireen Ahmed before the summit, she expressed frustration that the Nike Pro Hijab was heralded as the premiere modest headwear given that so many hijabi athletes had innovated their own for years prior, noting women and hijabi-run companies such as ResportOn and Capsters who have created athletic hijabs for years. “I was so fucking frustrated at how media kept saying, ‘Oh, the first sports hijab’ I’m like nooooooo…it’s like I’m literally shouting into the bro abyss of sports media,” she told me. A variety of women were already innovating modest sportswear for themselves decades before the Pro Hijab, she argues, and both the design and price point of Nike’s hijab were a cause of concern for her. She told me: It’s forty bucks for a hijab. Let me tell you, I’ve never paid forty bucks for a hijab in my life…I just think it’s important to know there is a name brand to things. And yeah, there’s women that definitely want this. My own daughter is like ‘Can I get a Nike hijab?’ and I’m like yes, you can get a Nike hijab…I’m not a big fan of the swoosh on the side of the head, I think that’s a little tacky personally…but that’s fine. And I get how brands and sport are really important…I also want people to understand that corporate culture. I don’t consider Nike to be allies of Muslim women in sport necessarily. She creates a distinction here between the early innovators of modest sportswear creating for themselves and other Muslim women and Nike as a corporate entity capitalizing on a moment, 205 . Nuraan Davids, “How Nike’s Hijab Sports Gear Is Taking on Islamophobia and Patriarchy,” The Conversation, November 2, 2017, https://theconversation.com/how-nikes-hijab- sports-gear-is-taking-on-islamophobia-and-patriarchy-86700. 136 which she argues is driven by the partnership with FIBA. In a particularly passionate moment in our interview, she compared the release of the Pro Hijab and FIBA’s ban with that of FIFA: FIFA at least went through the ruse and the ‘let’s do medical testing to make sure the safety is fine.’ FIBA didn’t even do that shit. They literally were contacted by Nike and were like ‘Hey, we’re going to make a sports hijab. Oh, let’s announce our partnership deal that FIBA and Nike are doing together and suddenly, poof, hijab is allowed and hey, there’s a Nike hijab. And I’m like, okay so if you sincerely had safety concerns IFAB actually mandated that the hijabs that the women wear while playing sports they’re not any name brand at all. They’re Capsters, they’re like, maybe $20 they just have to have Velcro. It doesn’t even have to be a specific company they just have to be removable with Velcro…and they have to be tucked into the kit. Those are the rules for IFAB so they went through the motions, they went through that research, they have to removable with one tug. Like FIBA, if you were sincerely concerned about safety…the Nike hijab doesn’t have Velcro, it’s a slip on. In this response, she addresses the frailty of the “safety” argument posed by FIBA given the federation failed to invest in scientific testing and argues the timing of the FIBA/Nike partnership and Pro Hijab announcement was transactional more than transformational. She also questioned how the production of the Pro Hijab also exploits women, questioning the labor practices of Nike, asking, Is it made in a Rana Plaza-type place in Bangladesh? Where is this hijab being stitched? Is it women that are stitching it and do the young kids know that it’s going to be sold for exorbitant prices to Muslims around the world? It’s a $40 hijab, that’s expensive. So I have all of these questions. And I said this to my daughter – do you know where it’s made? Why don’t you write the company? Because sustainable fashion should be a part of how Muslims live. In considering the material realities of the Pro Hijab, Shireen’s comments reveal the contradictions created by the hijab’s current visibility and promotion in sporting and retail culture. She compared the creation of Olympian fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad’s Barbie doll to the Pro Hijab announcement – both operating as highly visible objects of consumption hailed as innovative despite the creativity of marginalized women who have produced athletic hijabs or diverse representations of dolls for decades. She explains: 137 The whole idea that tokenizing Muslim women with a super problematic company that has literally gained off of the exploitation of women’s bodies historically have been whitewashed… we shouldn’t be saying ‘Oh, this is so great particularly when there are much smaller companies of doll makers – African Americans have been doing it, they’ve been doing it in Africa as well. Like why are we looking to Mattel and for me that sounded very similar to this Nike thing it was along the same lines like why don’t we support these grassroots companies like the Somali one called Asyia in Minneapolis. During a panel on modest sportswear innovation, Aheda Zanetti, the inventor of the burkini, offered a different perspective on the impact of Nike’s entrance into more diverse designs: There’s only one of me…compared to a big major brand that can do something with a click of a finger like that. That can change a completely new concept and market and thoughts. Which I should be thanking…I should be thanking Nike for that Nike hijab. In a way, it’s going to be lot easier for me to find these athletes that need my products because I believe that my garment is better...I’m a producer because I’m the market. I wear it. Aheda viewed Nike’s entrance into the market as a positive, convinced there might be some trickle-down affect to her own business. The other panelist, Dana Abdulkarim, a former England Rounders member and physical education teacher, saw the heightened visibility of Muslim athletes and new apparel as a sign of more inclusion within sporting spaces: I really hope that the likes of Nike might be listening to this summit this weekend, because actually, then they’ll see more than ever, people are asking for it, we are asking for it. As a community, we are expecting it, and instead of feeling inferior to our non- Muslim counterparts, who maybe have a plethora of opportunity. Work with us, collaborate with us, and then it doesn’t become this token one item, it becomes as many and as varied items of sporting wear, of modest sportswear for every woman that chooses to wear it. In each instance, these women read Nike’s entrance into modest sportswear differently, considering both the problems and potential of corporate intervention. Dana’s statement that she hopes that Nike is listening also connects how the summit and the Muslim Women in Sport Network in general aspire to cross over into policy and product development opportunities as these women choreograph new possibilities for Muslim women athletes. 138 Dual Hijabophobia in Hoops Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir clearly defines a dual hijabophobia of Islamaphobic and Islamic hijabophobic within sport. In her keynote address, she asserted: The prophet, Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him, who we follow, played sport. And he said, teach your children sports. Of course, back then they didn’t have basketball and soccer and things of that nature but he wanted that for our people. So it’s important that we number one, teach them or give them the opportunity so that if they do fall in love with it, they can go play. So that’s number one. And number two, I think the people outside of our communities need to accept us. Here, she addresses both the internal and external barriers to accessing sport for those within Muslim communities. Other speakers noted how the actions and attitudes of fellow Muslims as well as non-Muslims contributed to challenges in pursuing an active role within sports. Bilqis provided several examples of the types of external pressures and problematic discourses surrounding her decision to cover, even thought it would jeopardize her career as a professional athlete. “Many people would come up to me saying, ‘Well why don’t you just take your scarf off and then put it on after the game.” She often found herself defending wearing the hijab or explaining how it was more than a scarf, more than material which she wore each day. Shireen told me that on multiple occasions, people have told her that she’s “just trying to bring Shakira law into sports,” conflating sharia law with the musical artist Shakira. She laughed as she said, “When people tell me that I’m bringing Shakira law, which I love…like I’m down for Shakira law. It’s because they’re too ignorant to know what Sharia law is.” The lack of knowledge surrounding the hijab and Islamic law is not contained to everyday dialogues; it also resonates across the field of play, where ignorance surrounding athletes’ modest apparel decisions affects how they are perceived as competitors. In another Muslim Women in Sport summit session on modest sportswear, Dana Abdulkarim, a netball athlete, described external judgment due to the additional layers she wore during a local tryout in the United Kingdom: 139 I’m there in my tracksuit bottoms, my multi-layered long sleeve top that I fashioned to be covering most of my hair…a high necked top, my netball bib, and there I was trying to keep up with everybody else, be as fit as everybody else, thinking I’m playing really well. Little did I know, the selectors had already put a cross by my name assuming I was too lazy to get changed, too lazy to take it seriously, because netballers didn’t look like that…my quite arbitrary innovation to get on the court almost took me out in that scenario. Both Bilqis and Dana point to gatekeepers who failed to understand both the significance of the hijab as well as the additional labor and ingenuity required to take the court. Throughout the virtual conference and my interview with Shireen which preceded it, several women argued that at the highest level, FIBA’s hesitancy to revoke the hijab ban is rooted in a hijabophobia which failed to consider Muslim women’s ability to play basketball a matter of importance. In her presentation, Bilqis said, “it was on the back burner the whole time.” Part of this failure to prioritize the rights of these players, Shireen argues, is due to the lack of diversity at the hoops headquarters. “My critique of FIBA is that they had nobody on the inside, and they made this policy and it was ridiculous and had no basis, but they also didn’t feel moved to change it,” she told me. “FIBA have all men on their executive committee, they don’t give a shit if Muslim women in hijab play. They also sadly didn’t give a shit if men in turbans didn’t play…so for me, this is not only rooted in misogyny it’s rooted in xenophobia because heads of federations are all in Switzerland...” For these women, they are caught between not only the federations and lower organizations which dictate if they can take the court, but their own communities which seek to contain them. In my interview with Shireen, when I defined dual hijabophobia and asked her if she could provide examples over the course of her career as a sports journalist or an athlete, she became animated as she began to describe a question she received from a fellow Muslim in the crowd during a recent SXSW panel Q&A session. He asked, “What do you think of Muslim 140 women not being covered modestly because you can see the shape of their legs when they wear tights?” The question was obviously directed towards athletes like Shireen (a former soccer player) and Bilqis, who wears tights underneath her basketball shorts for modesty. She described her emotions in the moment: I was so frustrated. I was like, after all this shit. My face is legitimately like – I’m not good at pokerface – I was like scowling at the man. Bilqis is beside me trying to pat me under the table because she knows I’m about to lose it on this man and so she’s very polite like she’s measured, she’s good at media. She came from a place where she had never done media to speaking in front of executive committees in Switzerland. She’s like patting me under the table, ‘I got you. I’ll take this question.’ So then I get to him and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, who do you mean by people, do you mean Muslim men? Who is asking these questions about what Muslim women are wearing? First thing, stop asking these questions. What Muslim women wear is not your business.’ I was so pissed off. But that is a perfect example of what happens in our community and I’m not going to lie about it…they’re not off the hook. In this case, “after all this shit” refers to the struggles against regulations such as the FIFA or FIBA ban, where Islamophobic hijabophobia dominated. After all of the structural oppression the panel had just discussed, she had to also contend with the misogyny of the man’s question. She expressed hesitancy in addressing Islamist hijabophobia in front of a primarily white, Western audience because of the way that Islam is vilified as misogynistic within a Western context, but felt she had to speak up given that, Every community suffers from misogyny…issues in Nigeria of women not getting paid there – the national team after Nigeria won the African Cup, they hadn’t played in one year. The women had to do a sit in to get the money they were owed. Let’s fast forward to Denmark – the women went on strike and almost missed a World Cup qualifying match. Okay, let’s go to Ireland and talk about how the women had to wear tracksuits and take them off in the airport to hand the back to the federation. Let’s talk about Pakistan, how the federation there was blocking women from trying out overseas because they didn’t want them to…so my point is that there’s issues and instances of misogyny all across the world, but they way that it’s written up it’s easy for white people to point at folks and say “look at the Global South, they’re a mess” No, look at all of y’all; the US women’s team just sued US Soccer. You’re not immune to these systems, it’s literally misogyny everywhere. 141 As she rattled off the variety of sexist practices across geography and sport, she pointed to the hypocrisy of many of the experiences in light of how Islam is often portrayed within the media. In this quote, she also invokes how women of color are perceived as disadvantaged through a white, Western lens, illustrating the various intersections within Muslim women’s identities. Intersectional Islamic Identities During the Q&A portion of Bilqis’s keynote address, a viewer asked, “What would you say were the key lessons of this journey?” She replied: I learned that we cannot measure our success or our identity in the eyes of society because through that journey there were three things that I began to question about myself that I couldn’t change. Number one, that I was a woman. Number two, that I’m a Black woman, and number three, that I’m a Black Muslim woman. And in society’s eyes, I’m looked at at the bottom. We’re looked at as if we are not going to succeed at anything. It was a time where, you know, I didn’t want to be those three things. It’s really a disadvantage, you know, but I learned very fast to not measure my success or who I am in the world’s eyes. In her response, Bilqis acknowledges the racialized, gendered, and religious hierarchies which render her at the “the bottom.” In order to defend against the perceptions placed on her as a person read through these three identities simultaneously, she self-identifies how success appears for her as an athlete pushed to the periphery of the hoops habitus. A follow-up question posed by a viewer asked Bilqis, “How do you balance these identities in relation to sport? Do these identities ever challenge each other?” Bilqis responded by providing examples of a racialized Islamic hijabophobia where other Muslims would question if she was a revert or convert, certain that she couldn’t have been born Muslim. When she pronounces Arabic words correctly, other Muslims are at time surprised. “I’ve been taking Quran classes and Arabic classes since day one. Even within [Muslim communities], as an African American Muslim there aren’t places that we necessarily fit into so that’s definitely a struggle within itself.” In both of these responses, Bilqis is articulating her position “in the world’s eyes,” through both Muslim and non-Muslims who 142 read her as Other through a racialized dual hijabophobia. Shireen noted that when she interviewed Asma previously, “she was very clear to say that she experienced far more racism and anti-Blackness when she moved through Muslim communities as opposed to living in a white majority when she was younger.” Bilqis and Asma speak of their Black Muslim womanhood as interlocking, not additive, a distinction Patricia Hill Collins notes as key to considering how power and privilege operate. Collins defines the matrix of domination through axes which may include (but are not limited to) race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class. The experience and resistance of oppression operates on three levels, according to Collins – personal biography (Bilqis’s experiences as an athlete and Muslim), the group or community level (the Muslim Women in Sport Network or a local mosque), and the systemic level of social institutions (FIBA’s hijab ban). 206 Each of these levels has the potential to either push women to the periphery or create space for resistance. Near the end of my interview with Shireen, she notes her biggest frustration with Nike positioned as a sports savior for Muslim women: My thing with modest sportswear specifically is that it was born out of a resistance of women who wanted to help women and that’s where we know activism comes from. We know political activism is on the backs of Black women…we know this. We know that women of color organized and mobilized since the beginning of our existence because that’s how we do, we know this. In connecting this particular case to larger societal and historical norms which obscure the labor and activist practices of women of color, Shireen diagnoses commodity activism as yet another way marginalized women are rendered invisible by corporate interests. However, she also acknowledges, with hesitation, the role of capitalism in shifting perceptions along with profit: 206. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000). 143 I also am very cognizant of [the way this] this works. You’ve got [model] Halima Aden walking [the runway] as a hijabi and I hope to God she cleans up and gets that white man money because I want her to. That being said, I’m at this place where I want to be true to my beliefs, but also if Adidas comes to me and says ‘Yo Shireen, we’d love you to have some of our swag,’ I’m gonna take that swag, Courtney. I’m going to take it and I think that I want to see marginalized women and marginalized folks, women of color, I want to see them thrive. And under the current system, the only way to actually thrive is to actually get into the system and play it. Using fashion model Halima Aden as an example of a successful hijabi crossover star,” Shireen both concedes to the power of economies of visibility for those who can potentially access “white man money” while also contemplating how she would respond to the offer to “sell out” if given the right offer. In this answer, she seemingly acknowledges both the possibilities and limits of crossing over into mainstream branding narratives, describing the choreography of “get[ting] into the system and play[ing] it.” Discussion A viral Vine video which circulated across various social media platforms featured a teenage Somali-American woman named Jamad Fiin playing in a pickup basketball game in Boston, Massachusetts. Only four seconds long, the clip is long enough for the viewer to observe a few things: 1) she’s dressed in flats, an ankle length skirt, long sleeves, and a tan hijab, 2) she’s playing against a group of boys, and 3) she can ball with the best of them. As she drives through the lane to the basket, fabric flapping in the breeze, the court is hers. She scores effortlessly. The short video has millions of views and comments on each platform of its posting, with one user calling her performance “black hijabi excellence.” 207 207. Kevin, “Fam, She Did This in Flats. with Her Left Hand, Look How She Avoided the Nigga Trying to Block Her. Bruh This Is Black Hijabi Excellence. https://Twitter.com/saidjama5/Status/834846227623792641 …,” microblog, @selfcritics, (February 25, 2017), https://twitter.com/selfcritics/status/835331445224767488. 144 In Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki writes there are three capabilities of social movements in regard to power. The first is a narrative capacity, the ability of a movement to “frame its story on its own terms, to spread its worldview.” 208 This is about both persuasion and legitimacy. The second is disruptive capacity, “whether a movement can interrupt the regular operations of a system of authority.” 209 Finally, social movements address power in an electoral/institutional capacity, its ability to “force changes in institutions through both insider and outsider strategies.” 210 The #FIBAAllowHijab campaign, which utilized the stories and struggles of Muslim women athletes such as Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir and Asma Elbadawi in order to connect with supporters around the world. The disruptive capacity of the online campaigns and direct action of these women, ultimately failed to shift power structures at the highest level of basketball. However, I would argue the Muslim Women in Sport Network and its accompanying summit disrupt dominant discourses surrounding Muslim women and allow for community engagement and knowledge production which could serve as a disruptive organizational mechanism in the future. While unable to solely force change within FIBA, the end of the hijab ban signals new openings for hijabi hoopers such as Jamad Fiin looking to cross over into international competition. Online strategies to challenge structural inequality are complicated by fact that, as a group of Muslim women (primarily of color), they are utilizing platforms built upon a social and technological structure that has historically maintained “white, masculine, bourgeois, 208 . Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 192. 209 . Tufekci, 192. 210 . Tufekci, 193. 145 heterosexual and Christian culture through its content.” 211 To create space for one another in a hostile environment which either obscures their activism or leaves them open to dual hijabophobic attacks is in itself a form of choreography. The creation of the Muslim Women in Sport Network and its resulting summit open up online platforms where these women can share experiences and strategize against dual hijabophobia within sport. On the other hand, as new technological forms capitalize off of discriminatory policies and resulting outrage from users, platforms such as Change.org, Twitter, and Facebook (and their affiliates) continue to profit off of protest with every click. This, compounded with multinational corporations such as Nike cashing in on the economies of visibility reflects yet another example of the confinements and negotiations present within the cultural logics of late capitalism. In each of the case studies presented in this dissertation, my participants struggle under these constraints as they attempt to create space for themselves and others within a habitus designed to push them to the periphery. This occurs even in – and I would argue especially through – a moment marked by a popular feminism which taps into an established commodity activist framework. In my conclusion, “Postgame Press Conference: Seeing the Game Globally,” I summarize the theoretical and methodological contributions of this project, as well as the limitations of this work and its future directions. 211. André Brock, “Beyond the Pale: The Blackbird Web Browser’s Critical Reception,” New Media & Society 13, no. 7 (2011): 1088. 146 POSTGAME PRESS CONFERENCE “How are Black girls supposed to grow up to be Black women in love with themselves in a country built on the structural negation of Black women’s humanity and personhood?” - Brittney C. Cooper 212 I’m walking through Aubervilliers, a suburb of Paris, on my way to the Hoops Factory. To enter, I pass through a deserted alley, surrounded by colorful graffiti which declares “streetball never dies” and features a purple and gold shrine dedicated to Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant. As I walk into the building, I realize why it’s called a factory. The postindustrial product is U.S. basketball culture, manufactured here continuously and primed for consumption. In the front desk area, NBA highlights play on mounted screens, trendy streetwear magazines line the counters, and you can reference each employees’ shoes by name: Jordans, Kobes, and Lebrons. As I step onto the rentable basketball court (which costs 90 euros for two hours of play), I look overhead and see signs representing other famous courts closer to home – Venice, Rucker Park, MLK. In naming these private courts after sacred streetball spaces, Hoops Factory is seemingly trying to tap into a bit of the cultural capital of these spaces in the hoops habitus. 90s-era hip-hop blares across the indoor courts, seemingly the quintessential playlist of basketball around the world. It is here where I’m scheduled to meet Syra Sylla, who embodies so many of the attributes and practices detailed in the previous case studies. She’s a basketball journalist and the founder of Paris Lady Basket, a recreational basketball league exclusively for girls and women. It is the only dedicated space of its kind in Paris. She also runs an online store, LadyHoop Shop, which sells a variety of apparel and accessories centered around empowering girls through 212. Brittney C. Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, Kindle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 91. 147 basketball. Originally from Senegal, Syra uses traditional Senegalese fabric covered in screen- printed phrases such as “Girls Can Dunk.” As the last stop on my journey across the global hoops habitus, I find Syra embodies so many of the crossovers I’ve experienced in Los Angeles, Kazan, and online. Like the Sparks, she utilizes much of the can-do rhetoric of popular feminism, especially within the context of her online shop. The top of her home page reads, “Une touche de féminisme à peine dissimulée” (a touch of feminism barely concealed). She also traverses numerous borders to pursue her passion for basketball as both a journalist and organizer, bringing girls’ and women’s basketball leagues to both France and Senegal. Finally, although she does not cover, her identity as a Black Muslim woman affects how she is read in multiple locations within the global hoops habitus. She is celebrated in Senegal for bringing the game to girls in Dakar, but in Paris, she feels she has to continually assert herself when covering games or in meetings at the Hoops Factory with co- workers. Syra also expands the three previous case studies as I compare her online persona – seemingly an expert in exploiting economies of visibility – with her in-person standpoint, which offers a more radical feminist perspective. More palatable forms of popular feminism fund her more critical work, but both types represent her relationship to the hoops habitus in various ways. While her t-shirts and bags focus on the individual, her on-the-ground work remains concentrated on institutional change. She also operates across two “homes” – one in Senegal and one in France, tangled together by both colonial history and vibrant corners of the hoops habitus. It is here, in the Hoops Factory, where my fieldwork ended for this dissertation. However, in my time with Syra, I also found my future direction for this project. Informed by interviews and field observations, this dissertation also utilizes Instagram 148 accounts and YouTube channels. Annette Markham writes that, In this environment of swift, global transformations and marked shifts in disciplinary attention, it is vital to remain firmly rooted in and aware of the local – not just because all objects of inquiry are localized but also because it is only by examining one’s local premises, situated in a physical locale and saturated with certain particularities, that one can hope to recognize how one’s work is situated in larger contexts…It is at the local level where qualitative research contributes a wealth of possibilities, because it is uniquely developed to grapple with in-depth study of the individual case. 213 Here, Markham notes how case studies which consider the local’s relationship to the global can inform relational work. In establishing the hoops habitus as a means of describing the ecosystem of values within basketball, I primarily sought to create a framework which connected each case study across geographic and institutional borders. In doing so, I found similarities – participants across each chapter were always aware of discrepancies in the valuation of their labor compared to their male counterparts. They frequently discussed feelings of invisibility and maintained a contentious relationship with a sports-media complex which often failed to acknowledge their athletic accomplishments. Many of their perspectives confirmed the findings of previous literature. However, there were several essential distinctions within each chapter which relate to the choreography present within each case. With the Los Angeles Sparks’ #WeAreWomen campaign, I found the “quiet” of the WNBA described by New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden to be an intentional silence – not only by the lack of mainstream media attention to the league, but the W’s role itself in silencing its athletes and failing to promote the game itself. The Sparks’ marketing strategies were utterly different from the Kazanochka team in Russia I observed through Cierra, an organization with fewer resources but a greater focus on the game itself than the marketplace 213. Markham, 136. 149 feminism of its U.S. counterparts. In the final chapter, the intellectual contributions of the Muslim Women in Sport Summit speakers reiterated the importance of considering the power dynamics at play at the highest levels of the game. They pointed to the white, Western, male executives of FIBA and their corporate counterparts in determining who can take the court and who remains sidelined by racist, sexist, and Islamophobic policies. In each case, I saw how women within basketball fought to create space for themselves and others, sharing valuable information for their safety and livelihood, protecting one another, and amplifying each other’s voices. Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford have described the history of women’s basketball as a game itself, comprised of both shooting streaks and scoreless slumps as women navigate the sports-media complex on their terms and seek new opportunities to expand the game for the next generation. 214 The choreography of these strategies, as seen throughout this project, produces mixed results – sold-out WNBA games with half-filled arenas, for example. It also manifests in daily routines, such an English-speaking American player navigating games and practices in Russia complicated by a language barrier. And finally, it is now mediated more than ever by electronic technology, where connecting with loved ones, potential clients, or fellow activists across borders creates new possibilities for exchange. Rebounding as Praxis Throughout this dissertation, I experienced methodological challenges which required me to make swift decisions regarding my own access, ethics, and analysis. In Russia, I recall a particularly important moment which shaped my approach to my participants and the data 214. Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford, Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball (New York: The New Press, 2005): 3. 150 acquired during this project. Inside of a cold gym in Kazan, Cierra, my key participant in Chapter 2, is working one-on-one with the assistant coach, and as other players begin heading to the locker room, she calls out to me, “Hey Court! Will you come rebound for me?” While I don’t particularly pride myself on any concrete forms of athleticism, rebounding is easy enough. As she practices shooting the ball in various spots on the court, my job is to grab the ball – whether she makes or misses – and pass it back to her coach, who resumes the drill. It’s a simple act, but one which has resonated with me since she asked at that first practice I attended. Rebounding requires your attention to where the ball is going, and your job, while repetitive, is about focusing on allowing the shooter (in this case, one of my participants in this project) to find a fluidity, a rhythm, based on not having to chase down her own ball. My job, seemingly monotonous, is paramount to the overall point of the exercise. In rebounding for Cierra, I found a parallel to the researcher-participant relationship – I am to be reflexive, responsive, and in the moment, centering her in this action. I am, of course, on the court, involved, changing the space in which I occupy. But it isn’t about me. In rebounding for her, I don’t try to shoot the ball or dribble a bit to show off my handles. In the same way, I am conscious of my role as a researcher. I may change the spaces I observe with my presence, but I am deliberate and careful to center the voices of my participants to the best of my ability and avoid getting in the way with my preconceived notions and judgments as much as feasibly possible. Rebounding as praxis acknowledges the positionality of the researcher as well as the proximity required to comprehend and contextualize the experiences of those who ground our work. 215 215. Caine, Estefan and Clandinin say that “as narrative inquirers, we stay as close to people’s experiences as we can.” 151 Sporting scholars continue to produce quality work detailing and critiquing the coverage, branding, and compensation of athletes. However, there remains scant academic literature which centers the athlete’s voice in either qualitative or quantitative work. Admittedly, access is difficult, identifying ideal participants is tricky, and timeframes for tenure or publishing confine us to convenience. However, I believe the field benefits from the range of voices and perspectives most affected by the global shifts, policies, and technologies at play within sport. The richness obtained from interviews and field observations expands the possibilities of what is ascertained about the lived experiences of these athletes. It is impossible to rebound from outside the gym. Limitations Between 2017 and 2018, I attended two series of workshops in southern California hosted by USA Basketball, the U.S. governing body of hoops. Titled “Women in the Game,” the events were marketed as a means to generate new opportunities for women in sport. Industry leaders within coaching, marketing, athletic training, and broadcasting offered advice on how to break into these male-dominated areas of sport – think #LeanIn meets basketball camp. One of the speakers, a collegiate women’s basketball head coach, was asked during a Q&A session to describe the biggest challenge for high school players adapting to the college level. She explained the reoccurring struggle of star varsity players who only knew how to play the game with the ball in their hands; most stepped onto campus lacking the ability to understand their own role within a particular play and anticipate defensive strategies which may displace their teammates’ positions on the court. Their inability to see the full range of possibilities, what is often referred to as “full-court vision,” hindered their potential to adapt to the game as it 152 unfolded. Full court vision requires the ability to understand the established game plan while also maintaining awareness of the unfolding landscape as teammates and opponents traverse the floor. My players have to learn to see the game globally, she emphasized. I had never heard the concept described in this way, and her words continued to resonate with me as I researched and wrote this dissertation. What does it mean – for an athlete or a researcher – to see the game of basketball globally? Not only in terms of geography but holistically, as it shifts and expands. And in what ways does basketball, the second most popular team sport in the world, lend itself as a particularly useful medium to interrogate cultural, economic, and political issues which cross both borders and bodies on a constant basis? Throughout the process of conducting researching and writing this dissertation, I’ve sought to expand my own full-court vision, whether in the chilly Basket-Hall of Kazanochka or at STAPLES Center in downtown Los Angeles. In these case studies, I provide only a few examples of both the emancipatory and constricting potential of the hoops habitus. There are obvious limitations in this work, both in the geographical locations I interrogate as well as the organizations I utilize in my analysis. While this project does take a transnational approach and includes participants from several countries, the voices and perspectives centered in each chapter are (middle-class, English speaking) Americans. The hoops habitus operates differently for say, an international player on scholarship at an NCAA Division 1 university navigating the precarity of their labor or a non-governmental organization NGO using basketball to promote a leadership academy for Senegalese youth. In piecing together these locations, my hope is that this work functions as tapas, a taste of some (not all) of the various forms the crossover takes in the uneven, interconnected processes which characterize this current moment of impetuous globalization. To see the game globally is to 153 expand not only the sites of sport scholarship, but to incorporate a variety of voices, theoretical perspectives, texts, and methodologies to inform our work. Due to time and financial constraints typical of a graduate program, this project is also extremely limited methodologically in both its scope and depth. The variance in time spent in the field across each chapter, number of interviews, and a lack of translation assistance to interview non-English speaking participants create significant limitations to perspectives within the chapters of this dissertation. More quality observations, interviews, and archival data would offer additional thick description and further elevate the crossover as a useful tool for future research. Perhaps one of the most significant limitations of this dissertation aside from its geographic ones is a lack of engagement with postmodernist critical inquiry even as each chapter seems to be in dialogue with these debates. Research engaged with postmodernism and culture connects with ways of being and expression informed by daily life that, in many ways, reflects the findings of this research. 216 Future iterations of this project should offer a meaningful connection between these case studies and broader arguments concerning Black experience and critical thought surrounding postmodern culture. 217 Feminist scholar bell hooks writes that a radical postmodernism “calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc. that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy – ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.” 218 This is of particular 216. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 31. 217. hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 23. 218. hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 27. 154 importance with the continued openings within the sports-media complex, where new media outlets such as The Players’ Tribune, Uninterrupted, and The Undefeated offer unique opportunities to circulate these lived experiences of athletes. Future Directions Future research related to this project requires further access and attention to participants outside of the United States. The upcoming Summer Olympics in 2020 offers a unique opportunity to study national basketball teams competing in the Tokyo Games, from the individual to the institutional (including the International Olympic Committee and FIBA). I am also interested in the labor of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletes, where so-called “student-athletes” represent universities within regional conferences and national competition and in return receive meager compensation and access to higher education. For international students competing at NCAA colleges and universities in the United States, operating on a year-to-year contract is particularly precarious compared to their domestic counterparts. Future research could examine their experiences within the NCAA system in conversation with athletes like Cierra, who are U.S. citizens traveling abroad to compete in other countries. Given the many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which utilize sport for health, educational, and diplomatic initiatives, future research will consider how basketball NGOs such as SEED Girls, PeacePlayers International, Basketball Without Borders, etc. use sport for social change as well as include or exclude girls and women in their work. Throughout each new study, this project is connected across online platforms which require attention to how online and offline processes intersect and at times, contradict one 155 another. More work is needed to understand how the hoops habitus is integrated online in various moments, as well as how the three tenets of the crossover operate digitally. The crossover, a metaphor I use as an analytic throughout this project, considers the streaks and slumps for women off of the basketball court, understanding that, as Stuart Hall writes, it is never a zero-sum game. 219 Shifting from one side to the other and defying expectations, it about throwing off the hegemonic norms built into the hoops habitus, and more generally, larger configurations of cultural power. In doing so, may we continue to break the ankles of white supremacy, pushing past the patriarchy to create space for ourselves and those around us. 219. Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), 468. 156 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abdurraqib, Hanif. “It Rained in Ohio on the Night Allen Iverson Hit Michael Jordan with a Crossover.” In They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, 128–29. Columbus: Two Dollar Radio, 2017. Muslim Women in Sport Network. “About Us: Muslim Women’s Sports Network.” Accessed April 10, 2019. https://mwisn.org/about-us/. Ahmed, Shireen. “Bilqis Abdul-Qaaadir Is Fighting to Lift FIBA’s Hijab Ban.” Teen Vogue, March 27, 2017. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/bilqis-abdul-qaadir-fighting-fiba-hijab-ban. ———. “Nike’s Pro Hijab: A Great Leap into Modest Sportswear, but They’re Not the First.” The Guardian, March 8, 2017, sec. Sport. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/mar/08/nike-performance-hijab-female-muslim- athletes. Alexander, Kwame. The Crossover. Kindle. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Alsutany, Evelyn. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11. Critical Cultural Communication. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Amara, Mahfoud. “The Muslim World in the Global Sporting Arena.” The Brown Journal of World Affairs 14, no. 2 (2008): 67–75. Andrews, David L., and Ron L. Mower. “Spectres of Jordan.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 6 (2012): 1059–77. Anthony, Ariel, Steven B. Caudill, and Franklin G. Mixon, Jr. “The Political Economy of Women’s Professional Basketball in the United States: A Structure-Conduct-Performance Approach.” Theoretical and Applied Economics 14, no. 11 (2012): 107–26. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Araton, Harvey. Crashing the Borders: How Basketball Won the World and Lost Its Soul at Home. New York: Free Press, 2005. Associated Press. “Madison: Sparks ‘Had a Tough Time.’” ESPN.com, January 3, 2014. http://www.espn.com/los-angeles/story/_/id/10238678. Bale, John, and Joseph A. Maguire, eds. The Global Sports Arena: Athletic Talent Migration in an Interdependent World. Newcastle, UK: University of Keele, 1994. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Kindle. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 157 ———. “Hoop Dreams: Professional Basketball and the Politics of Race and Gender.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 23, no. 4 (1999): 403–20. Barker, Adele Marie. “The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia.” In Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev, 12–46. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Bateman, Anthony. “Introduction: Sport, Music, Identities.” Sport in Society 17, no. 3 (2013): 293– 302. Battenfield, Frederick L., Bosmat M. Dzaloshinsky, and Samuel Y. Todd. “The Demise of the WNBA in Florida: A Mixed Method Case Study of Newspaper Coverage about Women’s Professional Basketball.” The Sport Journal 10, no. 2 (2007). Baym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. 2nd ed. Digital Media and Society. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Being Black in Russia. BBC, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-44253936/world- cup-2018-being-black-in-russia. Billings, Andrew C. “Depicting the Quarterback in Black and White: A Content Analysis of College and Professional Football Broadcast Commentary.” Howard Journal of Communications 15, no. 4 (October 1, 2004): 201–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/10646170490521158. Birt, Linda, Suzanne Scott, Debbie Cavers, Christine Campbell, and Fiona Walter. “Member Checking: A Tool to Enhance Trustworthiness or Merely a Nod to Validation?” Qualitative Health Research 26, no. 13 (2016): 1802–11. Bloom, John. “‘Show What an Indian Can Do’: Sports, Memory, and Ethnic Identity at Federal Indian Boarding Schools.” Journal of American Indian Education 35, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 33–48. Boren, Cindy. “Gilbert Arenas Doesn’t Care If People Hate His Idea to Sex up the WNBA - The Washington Post.” The Washington Post, December 17, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/12/17/gilbert-arenas-doesnt-care-if- people-hate-his-idea-to-sex-up-the-wnba/. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Second., 427–40. New York: Routledge, 1993. Brabham, Daren C. Crowdsourcing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Brock, André. “Beyond the Pale: The Blackbird Web Browser’s Critical Reception.” New Media & Society 13, no. 7 (2011): 1085–1103. 158 Brown, Gavin. Arthur Jafa + Greg Tate in Conversation: Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, 2017. https://vimeo.com/209649169. Brown, Letisha Engracia Cardoso. “Sporting Space Invaders: Elite Bodies in Track and Field, a South African Context.” South African Review of Sociology 46, no. 1 (2015): 7–24. Bruce, Elizabeth McIssac. “Narrative Inquiry: A Spiritual and Liberating Approach to Research.” Religious Education 103, no. 3 (2008): 323–38. Buffington, Daniel. “Contesting Race on Sundays: Making Meaning out of the Rise in the Number of Black Quarterbacks.” Sociology of Sport Journal 22, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 19–37. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.22.1.19. Caine, Vera, Andrew Estefan, and D. Jean Clandinin. “A Return to Methodological Commitment: Reflections on Narrative Inquiry.” Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 57, no. 6 (2013): 574–86. Caponi-Tabery, Gena. Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008. Carrington, Ben, and Ian McDonald, eds. Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Carty, Victoria. “Textual Portrayals of Female Athletes: Liberation or Nuanced Forms of Patriarchy?” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 2 (2005): 132–55. CCSIX3. It REALLY Ain’t Fo’ Errybody⎮Overseas Women’s Basketball Pros and Cons Part 1. YouTube, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6oE8wxSah5sXLWXb0seHxQ. Clandinin, Jean, and Michael Connelly. Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers, 2000. Clarendon, Layshia. “Layshia Clarendon: ‘It’s Not about Dunking. It’s about the System.’” EspnW, April 1, 2016. http://www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/15112298/layshia-clarendon-says- lower-rims-not-answer. Colás, Yago. Ball Don’t Lie!: Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016. ———. “Getting Free: The Arts and Politics of Basketball Modernity.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 39, no. 4 (2015): 267–86. ———. “Our Myth of Creation: The Politics of Narrating Basketball’s Origin.” Journal of Sport History 43, no. 1 (2016): 37–54. 159 ———. “What We Mean When We Say ‘Play the Right Way’: Strategic Fundamentals, Morality, and Race in the Culture of Basketball.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45, no. 2 (2012): 109–25. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In Feminist Theory: A Reader, edited by Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski, 3rd ed., 254–59. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Cooky, Cheryl, Faye L. Wachs, Michael Messner, and Shari L. Dworkin. “It’s Not about the Game: Don Imus, Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Media.” Sociology of Sport Journal 27, no. 2 (2010): 139–59. Cooky, Cheryl, Michael A. Messner, and Michela Musto. “‘It’s Dude Time!’: A Quarter Century of Excluding Women’s Sports in Televised News and Highlight Shows.” Communication & Sport 3, no. 3 (2015): 261–87. Cooky, Cheryl, Michael A. Messner, and Robin H. Hextrum. “Women Play Sport, But Not on TV: A Longitudinal Study of Televised News Media.” Communication & Sport 1, no. 3 (2013): 203– 30. Cooper, Brittney C. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Kindle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018. Cooper, Cynthia. She Got Game: My Personal Odyssey. New York: Warner Books, 1999. Coventry, Barbara Thomas. “On the Sidelines: Sex and Racial Segregation in Television Sports Broadcasting.” Sociology of Sport Journal 21, no. 3 (September 2004): 322–41. Cox, Aimee Meredith. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-. Davids, Nuraan. “How Nike’s Hijab Sports Gear Is Taking on Islamophobia and Patriarchy.” The Conversation, November 2, 2017. https://theconversation.com/how-nikes-hijab-sports-gear-is- taking-on-islamophobia-and-patriarchy-86700. Davidson, Kavitha A. “Nike Pro Hijab Gives Important Validation to Muslim Women Athletes.” espnW. Accessed March 24, 2017. http://www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/18845880/nike- pro-hijab-gives-important-validation-muslim-women-athletes. Desmond, Matthew. “Relational Ethnography.” Theory and Society 43 (2014): 547–79. 160 Dolance, Susannah. “‘A Whole Stadium Full’: Lesbian Community at Women’s National Basketball Association Games.” The Journal of Sex Research 42, no. 1 (February 2005): 74–83. Dougherty, Jesse. “After Playing All Season, Maryland Girl Held out of Basketball Game for Wearing a Hijab.” Washington Post, March 13, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/highschools/after-playing-all-season-maryland-girl- held-out-of-basketball-game-for-wearing-a-hijab/2017/03/13/63fe82be-0767-11e7-8884- 96e6a6713f4b_story.html. Duru, N. Jeremi. Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ———. “Hoop Dreams Deferred: The WNBA, the NBA, and the Long-Standing Gender Inequity at the Game’s Highest Level.” Utah Law Review, 2015, 559–603. Dworkin, Shari L., Amanda Lock Swarr, and Cheryl Cooky. “(In)Justice in Sport: The Treatment of South African Track Star Caster Semenya.” Feminist Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 40–70. Eid, Paul. “Balancing Agency, Gender and Race: How Do Muslim Female Teenagers in Quebec Negotiate the Social Meanings Embedded in the Hijab?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 11 (2014): 1902–17. FIBA.basketball. “Facts and Figures.” Accessed August 15, 2018. http://www.fiba.basketball/presentation. Fagan, Kate. “Diana Taurasi’s Decision to Sit out Should Affect WNBA Salaries.” ESPN.com, February 3, 2015. http://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/12272036. Faludi, Susan. “Facebook Feminism, Like It or Not.” The Baffler, May 12, 2014. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/facebook-feminism-like-it-or-not. Feder, Barnaby J. “They Weren’t Careful What They Hoped For.” The New York Times, May 29, 2002, Online edition, sec. N.Y. / Region. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/nyregion/they- weren-t-careful-what-they-hoped-for.html. Ferber, Abby. “The Construction of Black Masculinity: White Supremacy Now and Then.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31, no. 1 (2007): 11–24. FIBA. “FIBA Signs 11-Year Strategic Partnership with Iconic Basketball Brand Nike,” February 27, 2017. http://www.fiba.basketball/news/fiba-signs-11-year-strategic-partnership-with-iconic- basketball-brand-nike. Gay, Roxane. “Why Would ‘Empowerment’ Be the Goal? It’s Entertaining Entertainment. Stop Tossing around Empowerment like It’s Anything More than a Tool of Capitalism.Https://Twitter.Com/Hareega_Blog/Status/1027351988160409600 ….” Tweet. @rgay (blog), August 8, 2018. https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1027416501110767616. 161 Giampetro-Meyer, Andrea M. “Recognizing and Remedying Individual and Institutional Gender- Based Wage Discrimination in Sport.” American Business Law Journal 37, no. 2 (2000): 343– 86. Golden, Jessica. “NBA Has Baller Season Attendance, Ratings, Merchandise See Huge Uptick.” CNBC, April 12, 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/nba-has-baller-season-attendance- ratings-merchandise-see-huge-uptick.html. Griner, Brittney, and Sue Hovey. In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court. Kindle edition. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014. Grundy, Pamela, and Susan Shackelford. Shattering the Glass: The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball. New York: The New Press, 2005. Guedes, Claudia. “‘Changing the Cultural Landscape’: English Engineers, American Missionaries, and the YMCA Bring Sports to Brazil - the 1870s to the 1930s.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 17 (December 2011): 2594–2608. Hall, Stuart. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent. Discussions in Contemporary Culture. New York: The New Press, 1998. Hall, Stuart, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. Hanis-Martin, Jennifer L. “Embodying Contradictions: The Case of Professional Women’s Basketball.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 30, no. 3 (2006): 265–88. Harris, Fran. Summer Madness: Inside the Wild, Wacky World of the WNBA. Kindle edition. BadAss Media, 2013. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Hoboken: Wiley, 1992. Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978. Helstein, Michelle T. “That’s Who I Want To Be: The Politics and Production of Desire Within Nike Advertising to Women.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 27, no. 3 (August 2003): 276–92. “Her Time To Play - NBA.Com: Jr. NBA.” Accessed March 26, 2019. https://jr.nba.com/hertimetoplay/. Hine, Christine. Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied, and Everyday. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 162 Hoffman, Shirl James. Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010. Holdsclaw, Chamique. Breaking Through: Beating the Odds Shot after Shot. Chamique Holdsclaw LLC, 2012. hooks, bell. “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In.” The Feminist Wire (blog), October 28, 2013. https://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/. ———. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Houck, Davis W. “Attacking the Rim: The Cultural Politics of Dunking.” In Basketball Jones: America Above the Rim, 151–69. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Hult, Joan S. A Century of Women’s Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four. Washington D.C.: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1991. Humphreys, B.R. “Equal Pay on the Hardwood: The Earnings Gap between Male and Female NCAA Division I Basketball Coaches.” Journal of Sports Economics 1, no. 3 (2000): 299–307. Hylton, Kevin. Contesting “Race” and Sport: Shaming the Colour Line. New York: Routledge, 2018. ———. “‘Race,’ Sport, and Leisure: Lessons from Critical Race Theory.” Leisure Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 81–98. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Jedlicka, Scott R. “Sport Governance as Global Governance: Theoretical Perspectives on Sport in the International System.” International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics 10, no. 2 (2018): 287– 304. Jones, Steven, ed. Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998. Joseph, Janelle. Sport in the Black Atlantic: Crossing and Making Boundaries. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Kaba, Amadu Jacky. “African Americans in the US Women’s National Basketball Association, 2006: From the NCAA to the WNBA.” Sociology Mind 2, no. 1 (2012): 95–108. Kelley, Robin D.G. “Playing for Keeps: Pleasure and Profit on the Postindustrial Playground.” In The House That Race Built, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, Kindle edition., 195–231. New York: Random House, 1998. 163 Kevin. “Fam, She Did This in Flats. with Her Left Hand, Look How She Avoided the Nigga Trying to Block Her. Bruh This Is Black Hijabi Excellence.Https://Twitter.Com/Saidjama5/Status/834846227623792641 ….” Microblog. @selfcritics (blog), February 25, 2017. https://twitter.com/selfcritics/status/835331445224767488. Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Kindle edition. New York: Picador, 2000. Ladd, Tony, and James A. Mathisen. Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport. Grand Rapids: BridgePoint Books, 1999. LaFeber, Walter. Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Lannin, Joanne. Finding a Way to Play: The Pioneering Spirit of Women in Basketball. Portland: Portlandia Press, 2015. Lapchick, Richard, Brett Estrella, and Zachary Gerhart. “The 2018 Racial and Gender Report Card: Women’s National Basketball Association.” The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. Orlando: University of Central Florida, October 25, 2018. https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71e0e0_40c980bc9dcd4a7e97d04fdb1e218c7c.pdf. Lapchick, Richard, Brett Estrella, Chelsea Stewart, and Zachary Gerhart. “The 2018 Racial and Gender Report Card: National Basketball Association.” The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. Orlando: University of Central Florida, June 26, 2018. http://nebula.wsimg.com/b10c21a67a6d1035091c4e5784c012f4?AccessKeyId=DAC3A56D8FB 782449D2A&disposition=0&alloworigin=1. “Laws of the Game.” Zurich, Switzerland: FIFA, July 2007. https://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/federation/laws_of_the_game_0708_10565.pdf . Leonard, David J. After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness. SUNY Series on Sport, Culture, and Social Relations. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012. ———. “Dilemmas and Contradictions: Black Female Athletes.” In Out of Bounds: Racism and the Black Athlete, edited by Lor Latrice Martin, 209–30. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014. ———. “It’s Gotta Be the Body: Race, Commodity, and Surveillance of Contemporary Black Athletes.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 33 (2009): 165–90. ———. “Never Just a Game: The Language of Sport on and off the Court.” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7, no. 2 (2012): 137–43. Leonard, David J., and C. Richard King, eds. Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. 164 Leslie, Lisa, and Larry Burnett. Don’t Let the Lipstick Fool You. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 2009. Levine, Marianne. “Supreme Court Rules against Abercrombie in Hijab Case.” Politico, June 1, 2015. https://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/ambercrombie-fitch-hijab-case-supreme-court-ruling- 118492. Lewis, Reina. Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures. Kindle. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Lil Flip. Way We Ball. Houston: Suckafree Records, 2002. Lisec, John, and Mary G. McDonald. “Gender Inequality in the New Millennium: An Analysis of WNBA Representations in Sport Blogs.” Journal of Sports Media 7, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 153–78. Lynch, Kara. Black Russians. Third World Newsreel, 2001. Malveaux, Julianne. “Gladiators, Gazelles, and Groupies: Basketball Love and Loathing.” In Basketball Jones: America above the Rim, 51–58. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002): 766–75. Marcus, George E. “Multi-Sited Ethnography: Five or Six Things I Know About It Now.” In Multi- Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods, edited by Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann, 16–32. New York: Routledge, 2011. Markham, Annette N., and Nancy K. Baym, eds. Internet Inquiry: Conversation About Method. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2008. Mayer, Jane. “How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump,” September 24, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for- trump. McDonald, Mary G. “Queering Whiteness: The Peculiar Case of the Women’s National Basketball Association.” Sociological Perspectives 45, no. 4 (2002): 379–96. ———. “Rethinking Resistance: The Queer Play of the Women’s National Basketball Association, Visibility Politics and Late Capitalism.” Leisure Studies 27, no. 1 (January 2008): 77–93. Megdal, Howard. “Breanna Stewart Shows the Toll of Pro Women’s Basketball’s Never-Ending Grind.” The New York Times. April 21, 2019, sec. Sports. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/sports/breanna-stewart-achilles-wnba.html. Merlino, Doug. The Crossover: A Brief History of Basketball and Race. Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2011. 165 Merriam, Sharan. “Case Study as Qualitative Research.” In Qualitative Research and Case Study APplications in Education, Second., 26–43. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. Messner, Michael A. Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Miles, Matthew B., and Michael A. Huberman. Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994. Miller, Toby, Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim McKay, and David Rowe. Globalization and Sport: Playing the World. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2991. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Muller, Tiffany. “‘Lesbian Community’ in Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) Spaces.” Social & Cultural Geography 8, no. 1 (2007): 9–28. Muller, Tiffany K. “Liberty For All? Contested Spaces of Women’s Basketball.” Gender, Place & Culture 14, no. 2 (2007): 197–213. Mwaniki, Munene. The Black Migrant Athlete: Media, Race, and the Diaspora in Sports. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Nike News. “Nike and FIBA Partner to Grow Basketball Around the World,” February 27, 2017. https://news.nike.com/news/nike-fiba-partnership. O’Donnell, Tim, and Jon Mercer. FIBA Allow Hijab. Uninterrupted, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E-SKXBnlJg. Ortagus, Morgan. “Women’s Economic Empowerment Is a National Security Issue.” Text. The Hill, March 28, 2019. https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/435926-womens-economic- empowerment-is-a-national-security-issue. Peters, Devereaux. “Down & Dirty with Devereaux.” YouTube, n.d. Pluto, Terry. Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Prince-Bythewood, Gina. Love and Basketball. YouTube. New Line Cinema, 2000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exv0KmpCwXE. Prouse, Carolyn. “Harnessing the Hijab: The Emergence of the Muslim Female Footballer through International Sport Governance.” Gender, Place & Culture 22, no. 1 (2015): 20–36. 166 Rada, James A., and K. Tim Wulfemeyer. “Color Coded: Racial Descriptors in Television Coverage of Intercollegiate Sports.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 49, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 65–85. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4901_5. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Ratna, Aarti. “Not Just Merely Different: Travelling Theories, Post-Feministm and the Racialized Politics of Women of Color.” Sociology of Sport Journal 35 (2018): 197–206. Rhoden, William C. “Amid Successes, W.N.B.A. Is Still Facing Challenges.” The New York Times. October 7, 2012, Online edition. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/sports/basketball/amid- successes-wnba-is-still-facing-challenges.html. Rogers, Rikki. “2017: The Year in ‘Empowerment Marketing.’” Women’s Media Center, December 21, 2017. http://www.womensmediacenter.com/news-features/2017-the-year-in-empowerment- marketing. Ryan, Curtis R. “The Politics of FIFA and the Hijab.” Foreign Policy, February 28, 2012. https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/28/the-politics-of-fifa-and-the-hijab/. Savin-Baden, Maggi, and Lana Van Niekerk. “Narrative Inquiry: Theory and Practice.” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 31, no. 3 (September 2007): 459–72. Sekot, Aleš. “Sport Mobility in a Changing Europe: A Global Aspect.” European Journal for Sport and Society 1, no. 2 (2004): 103–14. Sinelschikova, Yekaterina. “‘Sport’s Cold War’: 3 Seconds That Shook the World - Russia Beyond.” Russia Beyond, January 11, 2018. https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/327234-sports-cold-war- basketball. Stacey, Judith. “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” Women’s Studies International Forum 11, no. 1 (1988): 21–27. Staffo, Donald F. “The History of Women’s Professional Basketball in the United States with an Emphasis on the Old WBL and the New ABL and WNBA.” Physical Educator 55, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 187–98. “Take a Seat, Take a Stand - WNBA.Com - Official Site of the WNBA.” Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.wnba.com/takeastand/. Taylor, Diana. Performance. Kindle. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. The Art of the Crossfade. TEDxPCC. Pasadena, n.d. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbewmgKUuKM. 167 The Official Page of the Los Angeles Sparks. #WeAreWomen: Kristi Toliver. YouTube, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDdiCrTVfFo&feature=youtu.be. The Second Jobs of WNBA All-Stars: Seimone Augustus in Russia. Vice Sports, 2017. Thomas, Damion L. Globetrotting: African American Athletes and Cold War Politics. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Weaver, Matthew. “Burqa Bans, Headscarves and Veils: A Timeline of Legislation in the West.” The Guardian, May 31, 2018, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/14/headscarves-and-muslim-veil-ban-debate- timeline. Wenner, Lawrence A. “Media, Sports, and Society: The Research Agenda.” In Media, Sports, and Society, 13–48. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989. Williams, Zoe. “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg – Review.” The Guardian, March 13, 2013, sec. Books. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/13/lean- in-sheryl-sandberg-review. WNBA Star Brittney Griner’s Evolution. E:60. ESPN, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJhnghKpgd8. “Women’s National Basketball Association Collective Bargaining Agreement.” WNBPA, 2014. Yglesias, Matthew. “FD Guest Lecture: Love, Basketball and Imperialism.” Free Darko (blog), November 7, 2007. http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2007/11/fd-guest-lecture-love-basketball- and.html. Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003. Zeisler, Andi. We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. 168 APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS – ATHLETES <Thank you so much for taking part in this interview. Your participation will help generate new research on the lived experiences of professional athletes. I’d like to know your thoughts as a basketball player who competes globally. This interview will take around 30 minutes. Your participation is greatly appreciated.> <I would like to start with a little information about your relationship to basketball…> - What is your earliest basketball memory? - Did you grow up watching the W? - What is the best and worst part of being a professional athlete? - What is like for you mentally, physically, and emotionally to play year round? <I want to get a sense of what it’s like for you as you gear up to go overseas…> - Describe what the last month has looked like for you…how do you prepare to head overseas? - What’s the hardest part about leaving to go abroad? And how do you cope? - What’s it like right now with your team? How are you feeling about this upcoming season? - How do the various countries you’ve played in compare to one another? Describe each team you’ve played on and how they are similar or different. <Playing overseas seems like would be both exciting and also a big shift each season as you adjust to living in a new place or maybe with a new team…> - What do you do overseas when you’re not playing or practicing? - How do you stay connected to loved ones while you’re away? - What’s it like to play on the same team as some of your college or WNBA opponents? Or to face off against your teammates in the W? - What is it like to live and hoop in ________ (country), as a tall, black woman? Can you share any memorable moments you’ve had so far? 169 - How do you deal with language barriers – both in game or practice situations and just everyday life? - How do your teammates perceive you overseas? What is your interaction like on a day-to- day basis? - Have you considered dual citizenship (or do you have dual citizenship) in a country where you’ve played/currently play? If so, why? - We live in a particularly unique historical moment right now. Do you ever think about how the political sphere affects your travel as an international athlete? Are you asked a ton of questions about the U.S.? How do you gauge your safety both here and abroad? <Basketball is something that is fun for me – it’s one of my favorite sports. But I also know that it’s a job for you so money is definitely a huge factor…> - How did you find your agent? And do you have the same one for the WNBA and overseas? What’s your relationship like? - Have you ever had any issues receiving payment from a team? Or heard of this happening to someone you know? - There is obviously a significant discrepancy in the average salary of a WNBA player here and when you travel overseas? How did you first make the decision to play overseas? - Why do you think there is such a difference in pay between the WNBA and overseas leagues? What are they doing differently? - If you could make the same amount of money you do now to stay in the states, would you? What do you think would have to happen with the W for that to occur? <As in any sport, the media plays a huge role in how we perceive athletes and the game itself…> - How would you describe the difference in media coverage in the W versus playing overseas? - How would you describe the relationship between the WNBA as a league and the media? - How would you describe the relationship between your team and the media? - Who do you think is doing the best work in terms of covering the W? - We live in a media environment today that looks very different than the one in ’97 when this league launched…what do you think about the latest shifts in the W, whether it’s Twitter streaming games, or NBA2K finally featuring WNBA players, or being involved in daily fantasy with FanDuel? 170 - Is this good for the league? Do you think it will affect how people perceive the W? - A lot of athletes today use social media to their advantage, whether it’s connecting with their fans, upping their likelihood of securing endorsements, or sharing their thoughts on current events? What is your philosophy when it comes to social media? - How do you think social media has changed sports and more specifically, sports media? - Do you ever feel pressure to create a certain kind of online persona? <Coming back to the US after playing overseas is also a process…> - What are the biggest challenges and adjustments you face as you come back to the U.S. to prepare for the upcoming WNBA season? - Let’s talk about the fans. They’re a really passionate group – what is your interaction like with fans and what is your approach to connect with both the fans of your team and fans of other teams that sometimes end up in the comments section of social media? - What are the biggest misconceptions about women’s basketball, both here and abroad? - If you could change one thing about the WNBA, what would it be? - My first two guesses are always about the refs and the pay so I’ll ask, why is officiating such a problem in this league? - How long do you think you’ll play both overseas and in the W? - Do you ever think about just playing overseas? Or just playing in the W? How difficult is it physically, mentally, emotionally to play year round? 171 APPENDIX B: SPARKS EMPLOYEES INTERVIEW QUESTIONS <Thank you so much for taking part in these interviews. Your participation will help generate new research on the planning and execution of promoting the WNBA and more generally, women’s sports. I’d like to know your thoughts on the league and the Sparks as it applies to your daily life and work. This interview will take about 20 minutes. Your participation is greatly appreciated, and your privacy is very important. Your answers will be combined with others, and will never be linked with you personally. I would like to start with a little information about your personal experience as a Sparks employee.> How long have you worked with the LA Sparks? With the WNBA? - What other teams have you worked for? - What differences have you seen between those teams and the Sparks? What is your current role with the Sparks? Coming into the W, what was your impression of the league as a whole? Describe a few of the challenges and opportunities when it comes to selling the W and more specifically, the LA Sparks. What kind of reactions do you get when you tell people that you work for the WNBA and specifically, the Sparks? <This year, the Sparks launched the #WeAreWomen campaign, a season-long initiative leading up to the August 30 th game…> What was your first reaction to the #WeAreWomen campaign? What was your role for this campaign? What was the most important part of 8.30 to you? What was your reaction to selling out STAPLES for 8.30 in terms of ticket sales? What was your reaction to the attendance on 8.30? Why do you think that less than half of the sales were reflected in the attendance? How well do you think this campaign was implemented? 172 What would you have done differently in terms of strategy for 8.30? <Now that the Sparks are in the offseason, I’m sure you’re in planning mode for next season…> As the Sparks gear up for their 20 th season, what do you see for the future of this team next year on and off the court? What would you like to see happen next season that didn’t happen this year? Give me one strength and one weakness of the Sparks as an organization. Give me one strength and one weakness of the WNBA as a league. If you could change one thing about the WNBA to make it better, what would it be? Where do you see the league in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years? <Thank you so much for your time. Your responses will help shed light on new ways to think about the branding, selling and practices of this WNBA team and the league in general. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or call me with the contact information provided.> 173 APPENDIX C: ORAL CONSENT SCRIPT (SPARKS EMPLOYEES) My name is Courtney M. Cox and I’m a doctoral student at USC Annenberg. You are invited to participate in a set of interviews I’m conducting focused on the WNBA and more specifically, the Los Angeles Sparks. Your participation is very important; as a result of your participation, I will be able to identify the various ways that the WNBA and the Sparks market, sell and promote professional women’s basketball. My contact information is coxcm@usc.edu; 214-235-6161. This study will survey Sparks employees that worked with the team during the 2015 season. You and other participants were specifically selected so that the results will represent a range of backgrounds, views and experiences. I estimate that it will take 15-20 minutes of your time to complete the interview. You are free to contact me at the above email address and phone number to discuss the interview. Risks to interviewees are considered minimal. There will be no costs for participating, nor will you benefit from participating. Responses will be analyzed and reported using generic attributes so your individual identity will remain confidential. A limited number of research team members will have access to the data during data collection. This information will be stripped from the final report. Your participation in this project is voluntary. You may decline to answer any question and you have the right to withdraw from participation at any time without penalty. If you wish to withdraw from the study or have any questions, contact the investigator listed above. Thank you for your time and your participation in this study!

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Reproducing fear amid fears of reproduction: the Black maternal body in U.S. law, media, and policy

PDF

Networked misogynoir: a critical technocultural discourse analysis of gendered anti-Blackness in the Black digital public sphere

PDF

The pop show: racial performance and transformation in global arts industries

PDF

Leading from the margins: an intersectional qualitative analysis of the leadership experiences of Black mothers

PDF

Celestial bodies: Black women, Hollywood, and the fallacy of stardom

Asset Metadata

Creator Cox, Courtney Michelle (author)

Core Title The way we ball: global crossovers within the hoops habitus

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 12/03/2019

Defense Date 05/09/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag feminist theory,global basketball,labor and sport,OAI-PMH Harvest,sport communication

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee chair), Carrington, Ben (committee member), Kun, Josh (committee member), Noble, Safiya U. (committee member)

Creator Email courtneymichellecox@gmail.com,coxcm@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-244009

Unique identifier UC11675167

Identifier etd-CoxCourtne-7974.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-244009 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CoxCourtne-7974.pdf

Dmrecord 244009

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cox, Courtney Michelle

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA