CREATIVE THOUGHT AT WORK When blitzing goes beyond the gridiron
The video of football superstar Ray Rice punching his girlfriend uncon- scious in an elevator elicited a national gasp of horror, including from Linda Keating Fuller ’64. But Fuller has been studying violence in athletes for more than a decade. While the Rice incident appalled her, it also underlined how ath- letics and violence can create a danger- ous and self-perpetuating vocabulary of both words and actions.
An internationally recognized author, speaker, and communications professor, she is an expert on how the rhetoric of sport reflects and reinforces a culture of violence. Given the long his tory of ath- letes’ cruelty—often toward family mem- bers and especially toward women— Fuller is “surprised there have been so few studies examining the language of sport and its association with violence.” She took up the topic in 1999 with the Super Bowl, when she learned that domestic vi- olence in the US typically escalates during that most-watched American TV event.
SPORTS AND MEDIA ANALYST LINDA KEATING FULLER ’64 LINKS VIOLENT LANGUAGE TO VIOLENT BEHAVIOR.
She noticed “the mix of militaristic and sexist terms implicit in football commentary.” Among terms of “wartalk,” she lists “blitz, bomb and bomb squads, blockading, ground and air attacks, weaving through minefields, squeezing the trigger, and dominating.” Foot- ball’s “sextalk” includes “pumping, squeezing, deep penetration, grinding, gang tackling, quick hits, huddles, and releases.” In America’s soundtrack, these terms merge on a playing field that ide- alizes violence, greed, assault, and ha- rassment. Small wonder, she remarks, that they have served as a springboard for brutality off the field as well. It’s clear to Fuller that “rhetoric influences behavior. It starts with worldview, and it mirrors and fosters norms and values of competitiveness, male authority, and abuse.” She points to numerous other episodes with pro football players, such as Rod Smith beating and choking his girlfriend, Robert Reynolds’s arrest for abuse of his ex-wife and son, Dez Bryant’s assault on his mother, the charge against Ray Mc- Donald for felony domes- tic violence, Greg Hardy’s arrest for throwing his former girlfriend on a pile of shotguns, and Adrian Peterson’s whip- ping his 4-year-old son with a tree branch. A two-time Fulbright re- cipient who has traveled as far as Singapore and sub-Saharan Africa to do her work, Fuller has three sons who have been ac- tive in sport (the oldest, Will, is an ’89 Skidmore grad). She herself is a ten- nis fanatic and usually hosts a Super Bowl party. But “what I am fighting
36 SCOPE SPRING 2015
for,” she says, is “to elucidate how the language of sport can oppress women, and to help create a platform for gender equity.”
“IN LIFE AND IN FOOTBALL, UNNECESSARY ROUGHNESS SHOULD BE PENALIZED.”
If anyone can achieve that ambitious goal, it will be Fuller, whose books include Sport, Rhetoric and Gen- der: Historical Perspec-
tives and Media Representations, Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical and Media Con- texts of Violence, and Sexual Sports Rheto- ric: Global and Universal Contexts, as well as articles such as “Sexist commentary at the Olympic games,” “Foul language: A feminist perspective of football film rhetoric,” and “(Double+) victimization at play for women athletes.” “In life and in football,” she says, “un- necessary roughness should be penal- ized.” And community members should not be passive consumers who accept vio- lence-tinged commentary as colorful or fun, but should be critical thinkers. “Just as helmets and padding cannot complete- ly prevent injuries, neither can we expect to be immune to sport violence,” but she says we can protect ourselves better, by “making our opinions known.” She ob- serves, “Once you start understanding it, you listen differently. It opens up your awareness. I hear it whether I’m playing tennis or at Fenway Park.”
Fuller is not one to complain without also offering constructive solutions. And many can play a role, she says. “If we are teachers, we can introduce media lit- eracy about the role of entertainment in our lives. If we are policymakers, we can help influence decision-making toward inclusion of diverse, alternative ways of conceptualizing, producing, and distrib- uting sport media. If we are concerned citizens, we can form coalitions interest- ed in broadening media choices.” Encouraging others to join her in speaking out against the violence to- ward women and girls that is implicit in popular sport language, she says there is room “for many folks within this femi- nist conversation.” —Helen Edelman ’74
OLIVIA DRAKE
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