Analysis Of Sport And The Nation

In the chapter “ Sport and the Nation: Out of the Left Field ”, Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Nathan Kalman-Lamb discuss the idea of the nation, in particular, the history of how it came to existence and the application of such notion to the world of sport. The authors point out that, “ if people speak the same language, cook the same type of food, wear the same types of clothes, listen to the same types of music, have ancestors who did the same sorts of things and who lived in the same place, they are, it appears, part of the same nation” ( Abdel-Shehid,& Kalman-Lamb, 2011). However, a social theorist called Benedict Anderson analyzed nationalism through the concept of “imagined community” (Abdel-Shehid,& Kalman-Lamb, 2011). This term basically means that people tend to feel the sense of belongingness to a certain nation without actually knowing anybody (personally) from that nation. An example could be when these nations participate in events such as the Olympic Games (RIO).

The idea of the nation was a result of industrialization. Historian Eric Hobsbawm notes, “the nineteenth century liberal ideology of social change systematically failed to provide for the social and authority ties taken for granted in earlier societies, and created voids which

He states, “nations and sporting cultures by and large act as repressive or normalizing structures that, by virtue of an inability in tolerance discord, constantly attempt to produce conformity and sameness and disavow difference and inequality” (Abdel-Shehid,& Kalman-Lamb, 2011). This notion of sameness is highly seen in sports when I come to sexuality. Heterosexuality is seen as the normal in sports (heteronormativity) and homosexuality as “other” or the abnormal. Nationalism does not account for the fluidity of humanity and hence the policing of sexuality is sport cultures parallels the idea of