Neoliberalism was one of the most successful attempts to reshape individuals in human history. Its achievements rank alongside such productive and destructive sectarian practices as state socialism, colonialism, nationalism, and religion. Neoliberalism’s lust for market regulation was so powerful that its prelates opined on every topic imaginable, from birth rates to divorce, from suicide to abortion, from performance-enhancing drugs to altruism. Rhetorically, it stood against elitism (for populism), against subvention (for markets), and against public service (for philanthropy) (Hall and Massey 2010; Gorbachev 2009).

Neoliberalism’s “whole way of being and thinking” (Foucault 2008, 218) was promoted by an elect who...

Following a period of sustained economic growth and vitality during which most of us living in developed nations experienced some of the fruits of (virtually) unregulated capitalism and neoliberal free-market thinking, and during which a minority enjoyed very large financial rewards for their work in the banking and financial sectors, we are now facing a rather gloomier set of circumstances: economic downturn, a “credit crunch,” real concerns about homes and negative equity, reduced opportunities for employment, and ultimately exclusion from the “good life” so easily promised by politicians of different persuasions. Since the early 1970s, the broad thrust and predominance...

It is the images that strike you first: the lifeless body of a fellow citizen cast off to the side of a street, a starving dog gnawing at a bloody limb. A mother gripping onto her infant daughter at the New Orleans Convention Center, begging—pleading—for someone, anyone, to whisk them away from their uncertain future. An elderly man in a wheelchair, clinging to his last shards of breath. A news reporter breaking down into frustrated tears on national television. People—fellow human beings—rummaging in garbage cans or blown-out storefronts for food because the Federal Emergency Management Agency...

Over the past three decades, universities in the United States have become key battlegrounds in a broader struggle over how and by whom socioeconomic relations should be managed and regulated. While education has never been independent of the market, this period has witnessed an intensified encroachment of commercial principles into every aspect of higher learning (Giroux 2007; Hanley 2001; Washburn 2005). In the “corporate university,” as this institutional formation is often described (Nelson and Watt 1999), faculty are increasingly imagined as entrepreneurs, students as consumers, and college campuses as hybrid organizations that wed the revenue-producing goals of the business park...

It is becoming commonplace for sport organizations and sport-related corporations to develop and publicize their efforts to operate in more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways. These efforts include creating or upgrading sport venues in ways that reduce environmental impacts, running spectator events while remaining sensitive to concerns about carbon emissions and the recycling of trash, and producing athletic goods and apparel from more sustainable materials.

Views on these emerging “corporate environmentalist” and “sustainabledevelopment” movements vary. On one hand, a wealth of research outlines the potential benefits of more sustainable practices—both for the environment and for businesses aiming to succeed...

The logic is obvious, simple even. In sport, nothing is impossible.

In 2008, much like any other year, that was the signal cry of successful athletes. But, unlike any other year in sports, 2008 was the year of inarticulable triumph—the athlete reduced to the excessively loaded cryptic phrase in one instance and what can be described only as intensity beyond language in another.

First, and memorably (the image is seared into our heads, courtesy of ESPN’s persistent replays), there was the Boston Celtics’ Kevin Garnett, newly recruited during the off-season from the hapless Minnesota Timberwolves, shouting—literally—to the...

The axioms and anxieties associated with the perceived decline of the North American city (particularly that within the U.S. context) became a defining feature of the cultural politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, the once pervasive disavowal of the very idea, let alone the experience, of the contemporary city has been conclusively arrested by a perceptible economic and emotional (re) turn to North America’s urban landscapes. Certainly, today’s vibrant city spaces bear little resemblance to the dystopic urban environments that dominated public perceptions and experiences of the American city less than a generation ago. Wrought by broader shifts from...

What is it “to govern in an advanced liberal way” (N. Rose 1996, 53)? For some time now, I have been interested in questions of space and how bodies are governed, (dis) located, and (dis) placed. In a study of locker rooms (Fusco 2003), I concluded that ideologies of regimes of “healthification” (Fusco 2006) pervade fitness spaces.Healthificationis a term that I have coined to describe how the continuous deployment of a broad range of specialized strategies and technologies, expertise, and techniques (e.g., policy and educational initiatives, architectural arrangements, urban planning, measures of public order, health and safety regulations,...

As Brenner and Theodore (2002b) have stated, cities are “strategically crucial geographic arenas” (2) in which to analyze neoliberal initiatives in all their variations because cities have become “central to the continuation and reproduction of neoliberalism itself during the last two decades” (28). In ideological terms, neoliberalism is a theory of “creative” political-economic practices that assumes that human well-being is best advanced if capitalist market forces are “unleashed” from their regulatory moorings. The role of the state, therefore, is reduced to activities that support the basic institutional requirements of a liberal market order characterized by private property rights, individual liberty,...

Much research in sport studies has taken a uniformly negative view of economic globalization and its undergirding philosophy of neoliberalism, seeing it as the inculcation of a conservative agenda that has had a negative impact on sports, undermined traditional communities and team loyalties, and created a star system that exaggerates the competitive individualism already endemic in many sites (Andrews 2001; Bale and Cronin 2003; Maguire 1999; Miller et al. 1999,2001). In the words of Miller and colleagues, “to many critics, sport’s manifest nationalism has masked dependency, as indigenous sports were displaced by those of the colonizers—the process of competition,...

Brian Pronger’s (2004) call for “post-sport” physical cultures deeply critiqued the logic and practices of mainstream power and performance sports cultures. It equally drew attention to how modern sport is an exogenously determined social terrain, shaped more by educational logics, market capitalist discourses, military doctrines, scientific philosophies, and state health agendas than organic, moral, erotic, and humanistic uses of sport. In the modern(ist) sport lacunae, cultural ethics of consumption, competition, and rational body perfection indeed reign supreme in physical athletic practice over ideologies of freedom and ecstasy.

A post-sport physical culture is, by contrast, one that subverts modernist ideologies and...

The public persona and marketing prowess of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) offers an instructive site to investigate the articulation of sexuality discourses with neoliberal capitalism. Since the inaugural season in 1997, national advertising campaigns have attempted to build audiences and secure profits via feminist-inspired themes of empowerment and by promoting the league’s players as concerned citizens and/or hardworking mothers (McDonald 2000). The advent of the 2008 WNBA campaign included a league-sponsored orientation program for first-year players, a third of which was devoted to fashion and makeup advice. Among seminars on nutrition, media, and finances, the incoming players were...

The neoliberal reinvention of “welfare” that promotes choice, personal accountability, consumerism, and self-empowerment as ethics of citizenship while at the same time masking social forces (Ouellette and Hay 2008a, 2008b) that position people into the dejected borderlands of consumer capitalism has culminated in the everyday practices of physical fitness and weight loss becoming implicit within technologies of self-governance and the personalization of health. Within this chapter we explicate the powerful role played by the self-help genre of reality television in the making and remaking of citizens (Ouellette and Hay 2008a, 2008b). We interrogateThe Biggest Loser (TBL)as a highly...

For all intents and purposes, Immanuel Wallerstein’s 2008 declaration of an impending turn away from the free market echoes an accord shared by many globalization theorists and political economists (see Geier 2008; Li 2008)—one that suggests that the developed national nodes of the global capitalist “world economy” are on the verge of, or are already in the process of, retracting to what David Harvey (2005a, 2007) refers to as an “embedded” state (e.g., new formations of the Keynesian welfare state) and thereby away from the recent mutations oflaissez-faire globalization. Indeed, the recent election of Democrat Barack Obama in the...

Political pundit Jane Taber’s year-end column in 2007 revealed a host of fascinating tensions within the Canadian political landscape. Beyond highlighting the PM’s well-documented antagonistic relationship with the Canadian media (e.g., Delacourt 2007; L. Martin 2010),¹ Taber identifies Harper’s less-than-subtle rebuke of the public broadcaster, the CBC, in favor of the privately owned CTV network (owned by telecommunications giant Bell Canada Enterprises [BCE]). For many conservatives, including Harper, the CBC is a leftist monolith of the welfare state that holds little relevance in an age of globalization and media deregulation. Ironically, though, Harper’s affection for the national game of hockey,...

Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is the most lucrative professional wrestling organization in North America. Its flagship show, Raw, which airs on Monday nights on the USA network, regularly ranks among the better-rated cable television programs weekly, with men making up more than 70 percent of viewers. Additionally, around half a million children ages two to fourteen watch WWE programming each week (Tamborini et al. 2005). The WWE also airs two other moderately successful programs nationally on cable television:Smackdown!on Friday nights on MyNetworkTV and NXT on Tuesday nights on the SyFy Channel. The company itself, which until...