Abstract
In the past two decades, “reading sport critically” has become a prominent critical project, an approach that interrogates sporting practices as sites where power and identity are negotiated. Borrowing the concept of “paratextuality” from Genette and emphasizing “pleasure of the text” from Barthes, this chapter “reads” NBA basketball as a text in specifically literary terms, ultimately demonstrating how basketball paratexts participate in and reinforce hegemonic norms. Given that the league is predominantly composed of Black men, the chapter focuses on the production, performance, and policing of African American masculinity in particular. The first section considers NBA “epitexts” (paratexts composed at a spatial and/or temporal remove from “the game itself”) while the second examines NBA “peritexts” (composed directly within the bounds of the court, though not typically considered part of the “proper” game) to show how NBA players’ bodies are commodified, spectacularized, and managed in problematic and ever-evolving ways.
...it is each moment which is intelligible
(Barthes, Mythologies. Hill and Wang 1972, p. 16)
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Notes
- 1.
“Being a basketball player is undoubtedly attached to a black masculinity: a masculinity inherently defined in relation to and in contrast with ideas about white masculinity and black and white femininities” (Brooks, 2009, p. 182).
- 2.
Boyd draws a distinction between “the league,” which is the community of players, coaches, and fans, and “the NBA, the corporation that allows for the league to exist” (Boyd & Shropshire, 2000, p. x). However, as part of my argument is that this line between the sport and its spectacle is increasingly blurry, I use these terms interchangeably.
- 3.
My chapter takes its title from a phenomenon known as “slapping the hardwood,” a practice in which players pound on the floor of the court as motivation to “lock in,” “man up,” and focus on defense. A player who slaps the hardwood implies his own hardness and solidity by insisting that he will not allow his defensive perimeter, his team’s basket, or, by extension, himself to be penetrated (Costa, 2015).
- 4.
“Sex doesn’t even have to have innuendoes. There are risks to ‘going all the way,’ grinding, getting sacked, using bump-and-run stratagem, dinking [sic], balling, clutching, heading, hitting the ‘sweet spot,’ penetrations, naked reverses, exploitations, butt-blockers, squeezes, and of course, there is always the possibility of a hurry-up, firing a blank, or faking it. Protection for ‘scoring’, however, is tough to come by, and only tennis includes love, snooker and a kiss. One wouldn’t want to be categorized as bush league” (Fuller, 2006, pp. 7–8, emphasis in original).
- 5.
It should be acknowledged early and often that applying Geertz’s image of Balinese fighting cocks as “ambulant genitals with a life of their own” (Geertz, 1972, p. 5) to a sport dominated by Black men runs into critical issues of the fetishization of the Black male body under white supremacy (see Wiegman, 1985).
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Joseph, N. (2024). Slapping the Hardwood: Sexuality and Textuality in the NBA. In: Neuhaus, T., Thomas, N. (eds) Interdisciplinary Analyses of Professional Basketball. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41656-9_5
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