{"id":464,"date":"2015-02-18T19:23:19","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T00:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=464"},"modified":"2015-02-18T19:33:47","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T00:33:47","slug":"boyssports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2015\/02\/18\/boyssports\/","title":{"rendered":"Boys\/Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf a boy didn\u2019t care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying, \u2018Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds.\u2019 You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn\u2019t like sports\u201d (Sedaris 5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this passage, the narrator of Sedaris\u2019 Me Talk Pretty One Day<\/em> ruminates about the strange power of the expectation that all boys will be invested in sports, something that he himself does not enjoy. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick\u2019s discussion of how institutions come together and speak with \u201cone voice\u201d in order to create and reinforce meaning is useful in thinking through the narrator\u2019s frustration with the connection between gender and sports in this part of the text.<\/p>\n

Speaking about the way Christmas has become an institutionally constructed and enforced monolith tightly linked to the family, Sedgwick argues, \u201cThey all\u2014religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy\u2014line up with each other so neatly once a year\u201d (6). Although the narrator does not reflect specifically on the way these institutions enforce the link between sports and masculinity, this passage reveals his frustration with the \u201csports\/manhood\u201d tautology; to borrow Sedgwick\u2019s words, it is a monolith that he views with “unhappy eyes” (5). His recognition of the fact that desire for certain foods is seen merely as \u201cpersonal taste\u201d in a way that the lack <\/em>of desire to participate in sports culture is not demonstrates his understanding that the \u201cboys\/sports\u201d connection extends beyond the realm of the individual and is functioning on the level of institution.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the fact that the narrator can simply say \u201cthere were names for boys who didn\u2019t like sports\u201d without specifically providing those names only reinforces Sedgwick\u2019s claim about institutions lining up and speaking with one voice; as readers, we are already familiar with the sorts of names the narrator is referring to, because we too have experienced the ways institutions discipline gender roles. The narrator asks\u00a0for the sort of unpacking and \u201cdisarticulating\u201d that Sedgwick calls for. He wants to live in a world where, \u201cOh well, I guess it takes all kinds\u201d is the response he would receive if he opened up about his lack of interest in football. But this would require disengaging masculinity from the realm of sports, and an unpacking of the terms \u201cboyhood\u201d and \u201csports\u201d in order to see why all their parts actually have multiple \u201cpossibilities\u201d and \u201cgaps\u201d and \u201coverlaps\u201d (Sedgwick 8). Disarticulating monoliths in this way would open up the potential for the narrator\u2019s (and everyone\u2019s) relationship to sports to be seen merely as personal preference, no more linked to gender\/sexuality than his relationship to \u201cbarbecued chicken or potato chips.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf a boy didn\u2019t care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying, \u2018Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds.\u2019 You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn\u2019t like sports\u201d (Sedaris … Continue reading Boys\/Sports<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1491,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}