The Conundrums of Reciprocity and Reflexivity

            While these are but a select few episodes in what has become my near decade-long fixation with the sporting cultures of the American South, each nonetheless speaks to issues of representation, access, and [self-]identification that have arisen in my attempts to, borrowing a crude anthropological idiom, ‘go native’ again. I returned to the South in hopes of finding something different from that which formed my own experiences as a youth, but expected to be confronted by the structures and practices of oppression, racism, and sexism that I had, if only in my mind, left behind. In either case, I did so for political reasons: to write about and celebrate a more humane sporting South, or to excavate the most derisive and antihumane cultural politics that still make the sporting local. In short, I did so in hopes of crafting what Laurel Richardson (2000) refers to as ‘evocative representations’ a better sporting South (see also Ellis, 1997). For mine was a transgressive endeavor with transformative aspirations, and through these “narrative performances,” following Linda Park-Fuller (2000), I sought to reveal “what has been kept hidden, a speaking of what has been silenced—an act of reverse discourse that struggles with the preconceptions borne in the air of dominant politics” (p. 26).

However, the more time I spent in the ‘New Sporting South’—relocated in the sport cultures of my youth—the better I was able to trace a series of ostensibly inescapable patterns of oppression: 1) the cultures of racism, sexism, patriarchy, and ableism are still highly active within these local sporting spectacles; 2) my white skin, Southern drawl, ‘hillbilly’ vernacular, and masculine deportment allowed access to the most exclusive/divisive of these social spaces (whereas others might have been denied); 3) to prolong engagement with various groups, ‘I’ often ‘performed’ my ‘old’ Southern self (laughing at racist jokes, admiring Confederate flag-emblazoned garb, etc.) (see Buber, 1937/2000 notion of 'I-thou'); and 4) in an effort to create change (through critical interrogation of the sporting empirical), I was most often ‘read’ as a [re]productive agent of these residual, regressive cultural politics (see Williams, 1981).

The Problem of Hillbilly Double Consciousness

Borrowing from W. E. B. Du Bois (1903/1996), it might be argued that I have since been wrestling with my own strange hillbilly double consciousness. In other words, as I have reflected upon my new [intellectual, Left, progressive, pedagogical, transgressive] ‘self’ as well as an sharpened my awareness of how others perceive an alternative [Southern, white, masculine, hillbilly, sport-loving] ‘self’ within empirical space, I have synthesized identity and performativity into both a perceivable cultural politic and a seemingly perceptive, if not introspective, performative intellectualism. Indeed, following Hargreaves and Vertinsky (2007), such dimensions of embodiment are never neutral (p. 10)—not only those forms of embodiment we within the fields of qualitative inquiry and cultural studies labor to problematize, but also our own bodies as social organisms. Both within the fields of cultural inquiry and within the amalgamated performances of the everyday—as pedagogues, mentors, field workers, advocates, activists, and ‘researchers’—engaged [auto]ethnographers situate their embodied ‘selves’ into those realms which has heretofore been described as the amorphous ‘field’ (Madison, 1999). As Ronai (1992) suggests, ours are bodies amongst bodies, of embodiment, and within the discourses, rhetoric, and praxis of cultural physicality. And as Paula Saukko (2005) makes clear, such a research dynamic negotiates “the dialogic space between the Self of the researcher and the Other world of the person being researched” (p. 348).

As for me, that type of engaged, empirical, qualitatively-dialogic research was not always an encounter of the Self and the Other, but often the strange reunion of my new ‘performative’ (Judith Butler, 1997) researcher self with my old Southern self. Tami Spry (2001) distinguishes these two researcher ‘selves’ through her textual binary of ‘being here’ and ‘being there,’ and in so doing agues that we must “reflect critically upon their own life experience, their constructions of self, and their interactions with others within sociohistorical contexts” (p. 711). In the fields of the sporting everyday, however, I was constantly reminded of the ‘dialectics of everyday’ (Neuman, 1996), whereby the routines of my new self were continually made subjective (in both forms of the word): at once 1) an empowering act (or so it would seem) where I went back to my proverbial ‘roots’ to develop strategies for a re-politicized Southern kinesis and 2) having failed to escape the specters of neoliberalism and now existing in the realm of the corporatized university, these encounters proved to be productive in enhancing my knowledge-based market value. Regarding the latter, I was able to publish various research articles and in doing so grow the brand equity of the institutions from which I draw employ. Furthermore, as John Beverley (2005) points out, the transition from storyteller in situ to author allowed for a “parallel transition from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, from a culture of primary and secondary orality to writing, from a traditional group identity to the privatized, modern identity that forms the subject of liberal political and economic theory” (p. 548).

But here is where things get complicated. While in the ‘field,’ I was most often ‘read’ as ‘one of the crowd’ or a member of the imagined communities in which I was engaging. Not accidentally, I labored—if by slipping into habitus—to “render my account credible” through, as Clifford Geertz (1988) argues, “rendering [my] person so.” In other words, I was what Geertz refers to as an ‘I-witness’ (pp. 78-79); a researcher-observer for whom the ‘I’ was perceived to be in place. And while in most cases that would only mean that I found myself interacting with NASCAR spectators or Ole Miss students engaged in the banality of their existence within those spaces (drinking a beer, talking sports or politics, playing cards, eating a bratwurst, etc.), there were more than a few times I found myself in situations such as those described earlier; where individuals and groups mobilized bodily practice or spoken language as a form of what Pierre Bourdieu (1993; , 1998) calls ‘symbolic violence’ against a demonized or marginalized ‘Other.’ In these circles, much like the cultural circles of my youth, spoken and unspoken [patriarchal and racist] ‘biosocial’ (Rabinow, 1992) praxis undergirded a more sinister, divisive, and violent territorialism. Unlike traditional forms of race-, class-, and gender-based violence (e.g., lynching, ‘bum bashing,’ or sexual abuse), the shared physical, phenotypcial, and cultural characteristics of the Southern biosociality operating within these sporting spaces projected oppressive forms of inclusivity and thus exclusivity. To borrow from the later phenomenological parlance of Edmund Husserl (1970), I was re-inhabiting an intersubjectivity (Intersubjektivität) of corporeal sameness and ideological difference; thus further splitting the dichotomies of I-thou, us-them, and insider-outsider into, and between, discursive, material, practiced, and ideological realms.

As my work on the ‘New Sporting South’ progressed, I became increasingly concerned about how my own Southern, white body—against my best intentions—was becoming a site of identity-based power within these spaces. In the first instance, that power was productive in the sense that I was able to use it through research outcomes to create new pedagogies of sporting whiteness. But to do this, I had to make myself visibly invisible—using my body to gain access to research sites and moments but not forcing my new ‘self’ onto the lived experiences I encountered. I came to deduce that there was a ‘visible center’ of identity politics at work within these empirical spaces, one that celebrated hetero-patriarchal Southern whiteness as the dominant cultural corporeality. And despite diachronically-disposed ideological and physical disjunctures, I was becoming part of that visible center. In short, I was blending my white, Southern, masculine self in with the crowd.

In large part due to my choice of research sites—those two sporting spheres most deeply-saturated by neo-Confederate forms of unchallenged whiteness, and dialoging with the ‘white reign’ that exists within those spaces (Kincheloe, Steinberg, Rodriguez, & Chennault, 1998)—my body became a symbol of conformity amongst thousands of other similarly white bodies. Like most spectators at these events, I did not wear a Confederate flag t-shirt or less subtle race-based signifiers, and yet my white skin was cloaked by the ‘ideological blanket’ (Baudrillard, 1983) that covers these Southern sporting spaces. As Michael Giardina and I have argued elsewhere (Newman & Giardina, 2008), because the discursive practices of a racist few still hold sway over these spectacles, the racially-exclusive symbolic both colonizes those bodies operating within these spaces and territorializes the sports themselves as exclusively white domains.[i] And like the conscientious majority, mine became one such colonized body.

Thus in the second instance, by standing idle or only offering a begrudging smirk while various forms of symbolic violence were being enacted—indeed by becoming part of ‘us’ instead of part of ‘they’—I was reproducing local power iniquities along the lines of class, gender, sexuality, and race. Mine was read as a body acting of, and in, solidarity—and thus complicity; a body that in turn collaborated in the production of violence and oppression over the race-, gender-, or class-based ‘they.’ Indeed, I was at once ‘homeless’ in the South and at home; forced to reconcile what Edward Said (1996) refers to as the ‘dream-nightmare’ of the discursive, imaginary, and real cultural fabrics of my own Southern identity, Southern dialect, and perceivably (and perceived) Southern body.