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Complaints, Complainers and Killjoys: The WNBA and the Intersecting Affective Politics of Labor

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You are invited to the Iowa Colloquium on Sport and Culture’s inaugural Birrell/Parratt lecture on Friday, February 18 at 4:00pm CST / 5:00pm EST.

Mary G. McDonald (Georgia Tech), "Complaints, Complainers and Killjoys: The WNBA and the Intersecting Affective Politics of Labor"

The talk will be delivered on Zoom and is free and open to the public. Please register for the event at the link below: 

https://uiowa.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUofuGgrj4vHtPxY8j537SGb46-emFHC-_o

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

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"Complaints, Complainers and Killjoys: The WNBA and the Intersecting Affective Politics of Labor"

The past several years have witnessed numerous visible forms of anti-racism activism and advocacy on the part of WNBA players. Not only have players participated in direct actions but they have engaged the public via social media platforms like Twitter to raise related issues.

Less discussed by scholars, perhaps, are WNBA players’ efforts to secure better wages and working conditions through the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association (WNBPA) collective bargaining initiatives. During and after the 2018 season, several WNBA players publicly argued on social media that they should be paid more given that the league’s salaries then averaged about $75,000.

While players such as A’ja Wilson, Liz Cambage, and Brittney Griner argued for players to receive a greater percentage of WNBA revenues beyond the 22% allowed under the then existing collective bargaining agreement, numerous social media participants responded with outrage. These respondents found the players undeserving of better pay while also wrongly presuming WNBA players were asking to receive salaries equal to the NBA‘s top players who earn well over $30 million per year.

Rather than looking at this scenario as a simple misunderstanding, in this presentation I draw upon and repurpose the work of feminist critic Sara Ahmad to suggest that WNBA players’ advocacy articulates to the figure of the “feminist killjoy” in bringing their cultural criticisms and “complaints” to larger audiences.

More broadly this presentation uses this WNBA case to explore the affective attachments and intersecting labor relations that help constitute the wider US culture. In doing so this presentation offers a brief history of the present, thus honoring the scholarly legacies of emeriti University of Iowa professors Drs. Susan Birrell and Tina Parratt, to contextualize the ways racialized, gendered, and classed sporting spaces serve as sites of contestation within contemporary backlash politics.

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Mary G. McDonald (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is the Homer C. Rice Chair in Sports and Society in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on American culture and sport including issues of inequality as related to gender, race, class, and sexuality.

A past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS), Professor McDonald has published more than 50 refereed articles and book chapters, and co-edited with Susan Birrell Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation, a foundational work in Sports Studies.

More recently, Dr. McDonald co-edited two additional anthologies, Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production with Jennifer Sterling (Palgrave, 2020) and Sociocultural Examinations of Sports Concussions with Matt Ventresca (Routledge, 2020). She has edited or co-edited several special journal issues including one newly co-edited with Jaime Schultz for the Journal of Sport History, “Reading the Past Critically: Honoring the Legacy of Susan Birrell.”

Professor McDonald is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, “We Got Next”: The Affective Politics of the WNBA. As the Homer C. Rice Chair, she directs the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts’ initiative in Sports, Society, and Technology and she also serves as the College’s ADVANCE professor.

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  • Created By:dminardi3
  • Created:02/10/2022
  • Modified By:dminardi3
  • Modified:02/10/2022

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