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CSCXXX10.1177/1532708617734563Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol">↔</span> Critical MethodologiesMcLeod

Original Article
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

National Bodies: Political Ontology,

1­–10
© 2017 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1532708617734563
https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617734563
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Christopher Michael McLeod1

Abstract
Athletes, their bodies, and their sport performances validate and vivify the nation by lending physical form to an imagined
community. For bodies to express and enact so consistently as to constitute a coherent nation, they must be assembled,
defined, and motivated within a complex arrangement of culture, civil society, and institutions. Aihwa Ong called this
arranging of people with national objectives cultural citizenship. In this article, I write autoethnographic vignettes of
my experiences as a migrant and rugby player from Aotearoa/New Zealand playing in the U.S. South, which I use to
demonstrate and add to Ong’s theories on embodiment, cultural citizenship, and the nation. I argue that a nation is an
unlikely achievement dependent on its members; members, such as athletes, enact their nation in by augmenting its affects,
most notably by making the nation capable of having a physical encounter. I recommend qualitative scholars and sport
sociologists study instances where athletes and other members fail to embody the nation, because this is where scholars
can best observe and study the contingency of nations.

Keywords
cultural citizenship, migration, rugby, embodiment, autoethnography

I feel I belong to my country of citizenship, Aotearoa/New
Zealand, when I play rugby in the U.S. South. In the sum-
mer, fall, and spring of 2012-2013, I played rugby for
South City “Raiders” Rugby Football Club (SCRFC), a
second division men’s rugby club located in South City, a
midsized city in the U.S. South. I arrived in South City in
May 2012 and began playing for the club during the end of
summer. I played for the remainder of the season, but spent
most of the spring recovering from a broken hand. Our
final game was the regional final, which we lost, so we did
not advance to the national tournament. One of five
migrants on the team, I spent the season contemplating and
experiencing how citizenship operates in and on my physi-
cal encounters playing rugby.
While playing rugby on foreign fields, my belonging to
Aotearoa/New Zealand was more salient than it had been
during my 23 years as a resident of Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Reale (2015) observed, “Identity is strange that way, often
strengthened at a distance, becoming stronger when threat-
ened, embattled” (p. 3). And, given sport is one of the prin-
cipal sites for the expression of national identities (Bairner,
2001), rugby is a typical place to express this belonging.
Moreover, Tuck (2011) wrote of migrant rugby players in
the United Kingdom, “Individuals representing their coun-
tries can thus become highly visible embodiments of national
sport dreams. In their world these ‘patriots at play’ are sig-
nificant actors who can define, reflect, protect and fuel the
special charisma of nations” (p. 201). Indeed, if athletes are
important for defining, reflecting, and protecting nations, it
is because “patriots at play” embody the nation in two
senses. They embody the nation because it is easy to imagine
a community when represented by a select few, wearing
meaningful colors and symbols, and competing against
another group who are also selected and dressed to represent
another community. But “patriots at play” also embody the
nation in a more literal sense; in sport, bodies, their anatomy,
physiology, and physics are instrumental (Evans & Stead,
2014). If sport is physical and if migration precipitates
encounters (Falcous & Maguire, 2011), then sport played by
migrants precipitates physical encounters.
In this essay, I interrogate the physical encounters of my
sport migration, using narratives about playing rugby to the-
orize my body as a site of national embodiment and to draw
broader implications about studying the nation in the context
of sport and physical activity. Contributors to Cultural
Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies have recognized that the
body and its movements are important sites whereby culture
is produced, communicated, and negotiated (Giardina &
Newman, 2011). For example, Wainwright, Williams, and
Turner (2007) studied Royal Ballet dancer’s perceptions of
1
Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA
Corresponding Author:
Christopher Michael McLeod, Florida State University, Tully Gym, 139
Chieftan Way, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
Email: christopher.m.mcleod@ttu.edu
2 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)
their bodies in relation to changes initiated by globalization.
Park (2005) and Vannini and Fornssler (2011) studied how
World Anti-Doping Agency and gender verification testing,
respectively, governed athletes’ bodies. Markula (2014)
used poststructuralist theory and her experiences as a fitness
instructor to explore the transformative possibilities of
movement (see also Newman & Shields, 2013). Newman
(2011), Flanagan (2014), Clift (2014), and Koch, Scherer,
and Holt (2015) reflected on their own bodies as sites of cul-
tural politics, exploring tensions of race, gender, and class in
sport and physical activity. To study the body in relation to
the nation, I seek to further this research by describing and
theorizing how bodies are defined, formatted, and motivated
within complex assemblages of culture, civil society, institu-
tions, and technologies thereof. Aihwa Ong (1996) called
such an arranging of people with national objectives cultural
citizenship, which she described as a “dual process of self-
making and being-made within webs of power linked to the
nation-state and civil society” (p. 738). That cultural citizen-
ship is a process is best seen in histories of migration, where
people have, over time, defined themselves and been defined
as, alternatively, belonging and alienated, friend and enemy,
same and other. People have become cultural citizens before
or after they became legal citizens and sometimes they lost
or gained cultural legitimacy even as their rights remained
unchanged.
I use Ong’s theory of cultural citizenship and her associ-
ated work on immigrants and biopolitics to interrogate my
migrant encounters on rugby fields. It is my contention that
Ong’s research shows nations to be achievements of, rather
than the impetus for, cultural citizenship. If this is the case,
then it is important to consider how physical activity is used
to create nations. Moreover, sport offers an important site to
reflect on other embodied nation building practices, such as
work, sex, and war.
This article is organized in three parts. I begin with a con-
textualization of the importance of rugby to Aotearoa/New
Zealand identity and citizenship, as well as a discussion of
men’s rugby in the U.S. South. I then review Ong’s work on
cultural citizenship and how she conceived of the body. My
subsequent readings of cultural citizenship and bodies are the
key heuristics through which I write my rugby experiences.
Next, I describe my fieldwork and introduce three autoethno-
graphic vignettes of rugby, embodiment, and citizenship. I
conclude by returning to Ong in light of my vignettes to offer
implications for qualitative researchers and sport scholars
who study embodiment and nation building.
Situating My Rugby Body and Citizenship in
Aotearoa/New Zealand
Officially a bicultural nation (in terms of the rights given to
indigenous Māori and nonindigenous Pākehā peoples) cul-
tural and legal citizenship in Aotearoa/New Zealand is, to
use Raymond Williams’ term, a contested terrain. One cul-
tural practice through which dominant frames of citizen-
ship are confirmed and resisted is rugby union, what many
consider to be Aotearoa/New Zealand’s national sport and
quasi religious past-time (Phillips, 1996). Rugby is used to
mobilize a particular White-male dominated, colonized,
frontier-based imagination, and racially anxious image of
national identity (Falcous, 2007; Falcous & Newman,
2016; Falcous & West, 2009; Gibbons, 2002; Grainger,
Falcous, & Newman, 2012). However, the reality of rugby
is also contradictory to many of these claims (Hokowhitu
& Scherer, 2008; Ryan, 2001). For instance, Māori and
Pacifica athletes have always played a significant role in
the international success of national rugby teams. As a
result, the men’s national representative team, the All
Blacks, is complexly related to the national imaginary;
often assumed as a symbolic representation of cultural har-
mony in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Hope, 2002), the All
Blacks’ use of Māori culture, such as Haka, sparked debates
around indigenous rights (Jackson & Hokowhitu, 2002).
Furthermore, the Black Ferns (the women’s national team)
were historically more successful than the All Blacks (the
men’s national team), although this is rarely recognized in
public discourse. Consequently, rugby in Aotearoa/New
Zealand is a space for the negotiation of citizenship, both
as desires and anxieties around citizenship play out in pub-
lic, and in terms of how individuals give meaning to their
own citizenship.
Rugby continues to play a significant role in the identity
projects of men and boys in Aotearoa/New Zealand. For
instance, males with hemophilia identified an inability to
play rugby as the “single most pervasive idiom of distress”
because of the masculine abnormality that it entailed (Park,
2000, p. 446). In addition, Pringle and Markula explored the
intersections of rugby, discourse, and masculinity in the
experiences of 14 New Zealand men (Pringle, 2001, 2008,
2009; Pringle & Markula, 2005) and found rugby to be a
pervasive discursive influence in everyday practices of all
their male participants. Their sample included five men
who played rugby through to their twenties, three who par-
ticipated in their teens, and six who only had “ephemeral
experiences of participation during boyhood years” (p. 479).
Although Pringle and Markula (2005) stressed that rugby
discourses do not lead to the simple reproduction of domi-
nant masculine identities, they point out that every partici-
pant (even those who did not play rugby formally, or quit
playing at a young age) negotiated rugby discourses in
some manner growing up. This is the context from which I
draw my meanings of sport and the nation. I played for my
local, rural club for 8 years, beginning when I was 10. I also
captained my High School First XV (equivalent to an “A”
team). For this study, however, I am concerned with how
this citizenship works in places other than Aotearoa/New
Zealand.
McLeod 3
Situating the Field—Rugby and Citizenship in
the United States
In the United States, from 2009 through 2013, rugby
was the fastest growing team sport for ages 6 and above
(Campbell, 2014). This paralleled a growth in specta-
tors, exhibited by sold-out, 61,500-seat game for the
USA Eagles versus the All Blacks, in 2014 (Campbell,
2014). Participation is governed by USA Rugby (formed
in 1975) rather than National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA), meaning it is governed leniently
compared with other U.S. sports. For this reason, post-
game activities such as the drinking, singing, and gen-
eral misogyny observed by Schacht (1996) have
endured. Indeed, some but not all of my teammates
played because rugby was an oppositional on-field and
off-field practice.
South City was formed following a change in the insti-
tutional structure of rugby at the local university. In an
attempt to gain legitimacy, the local college team excluded
nonstudents, graduate students, and the aforementioned
postgame behaviors from official team events. The univer-
sity coach at the time explained this change was tied to
USA Rugby’s efforts to legitimize college competition.
Although some of my teammates celebrated rugby for the
concomitant culture, others favored it—in line with USA
Rugby’s goals—as a legitimate athletic pursuit. In the
United States, options for college-aged and older adults to
compete at a serious level of sport are limited compared
with countries, like Aotearoa/New Zealand, which has a
developed club system. Thus, while some of my teammates
saw rugby as a cultural activity, others saw it as serious
competition. Those favoring the latter took to consuming
as much rugby media as they could access, some of it com-
ing from outside the States. For example, one of my team-
mates routinely asked what I thought of the most recent Six
Nations match.
Although there was a burgeoning sense of pride and iden-
tification with the USA Eagles, many players also supported
nondomestic teams in professional and international compe-
titions. Thus, my citizenship was rarely a cause for conflict;
and instead, was more often viewed as a symbol of quality,
particularly when associated with the All Blacks and the
Aotearoa/New Zealand-based teams that played in the Super
Rugby competition. I was given the nickname “K-One” (in
reference to being “Kiwi number one”). In the remainder of
this article, I refer to my citizenship as “Kiwi” citizenship
because I was labeled as a “Kiwi” by my teammates.1 “Kiwi”
is useful in this article, moreover, in that it attends to the
cultural aspects of citizenship as well as the legal definitions
and rights that are implied by other titles like “New
Zealander.” I now turn to Ong and develop her theory of
cultural citizenship.
Cultural Citizenship
Aihwa Ong is an internationally renowned cultural anthro-
pologist who studies the intersection of nation-state, global
capitalism, gender, class, ethnicity, and race in the contexts
of South East Asia and Asian immigrants in the United
States. Ong (1996, 1999, 2003) developed her definition of
cultural citizenship in her later, two-part study documenting
how poor Cambodian refugees and affluent Hong Kong
transnational cosmopolitans negotiated, and were differ-
ently received by, state, civic, medical, welfare, religious,
and market institutions and groups. As with other defini-
tions of cultural citizenship, such as that developed by
Rosaldo (1994), Ong eschewed the legal, rights-based defi-
nition of citizenship in favor of a focus on “everyday pro-
cesses of being-made and self-making in various domains
of administration, welfare, church, and working life” (Ong,
2003, p. xvii). However, in contrast to Rosaldo’s definition
of cultural citizenship, which hinges on the right to exercise
cultural difference, Ong emphasized the process of subject-
making and the concomitant technologies of government,
designed to categorize citizen-subjects and then instill them
with particular values. The aim of these technologies is to
make individuals, families, and collectivities governable.
Building on Foucault (1982), Ong argued to govern means
to control people by encouraging them to understand and
conduct themselves as individual subjects of science, insti-
tutions, or their own aspirations (Rose, 1999).
If governance relies on individual subjects, then cultural
citizenship refers to, first, a problem: How can the state
achieve universalized citizenship, when citizenship can
only be attained, as Foucault showed, by a process of indi-
viduation? Ong believed this problem to be pragmatic and
consequently studied its manifestation in concrete assem-
blages of practices, institutions, techniques, and converging
rationalities in which new arrivals are located, ordered,
inscribed, and marginalized (Collier & Ong, 2005). Thus,
she studied cultural citizenship not as an outcome or as a set
identity, but as a “dual process of self-making and being-
made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and
civil society” (Ong, 1996, p. 738).
Ong’s work has been taken up widely to address ques-
tions of gender, ethnicity, national identity, and citizenship
in Asian contexts (Chee-Beng, 2000; Choo, 2006). It has
also been used to problematize simplified uses of “culture”
in debates over immigration (Viruell-Fuentes, Miranda, &
Abdulrahim, 2012). Her thesis on ideological whitening
and blackening has also been adopted (Ng, Lee, & Pak,
2007) and extended to Cuban and Mexican immigrants
(Horton, 2004). Siu (2001) developed Ong and Rosaldo’s
concepts of cultural citizenship to account for cultural citi-
zenship that operates beyond nation-states. Finally, Ong’s
work has been used to understand new biopolitical regimes
4 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)
of immigration and citizenship. She showed how bodies are
the main sites where the tensions of cultural citizenship—
caught between immigrants’ identities and state objec-
tives—play out.
The National Body
Ong’s research is replete with bodies: bodies that work,
give birth, fall sick, dress, are tended, symbolize, and are
blackened and whitened. For instance, Ong and Peletz
(1995), writing on gender and body politics, used the later
to refer to “the inherently political nature of symbols and
practices surrounding the body politic and the human body,”
as well as “the diverse ways society is mapped onto the
body and the body is symbolized in society” (p. x). As with
how cultural studies scholars envision, Ong and Peletz used
Hobbes’ image of the body politic to show how the indi-
vidual body is articulated to an encompassing collectivity.
The body is always many, and it is political in its expression
or transgression of this collectivity. Or, as is more often the
case when writing about nations, the body is political in its
expressions or transgression of symbols, texts, and prac-
tices of this collectivity. For example, in Ong’s (1995b)
early work on factory women in Malaysia, she showed how
the demand for cheaper female labor enacted a reordering
of bodies in families, the public, at work, and in religion.
According to Ong (1995b), “the newly ‘reasonable’ resur-
gent Islam and the newly affluent state are both seeking to
regulate not just women’s bodies but ultimately all bodies”
(p. 186, emphasis in original).
In her later work, Ong (1995a, 2003) adopted a more
explicitly Foucauldian approach to bodies as exemplified in
her writings on biopolitics and immigration. For instance,
Ong (1995a) analyzed refugee medicine as a set of social,
economic, and juridical practices that socialize biopolitical
subjects of the modern welfare state. Here, medicine was
used to problematize the refugee body (as Ong cogently
showed in the case of smell), to compare it with a normal-
ized American body, and to cultivate new “bodily regimes or
‘regularized modes of behavior’” (p. 1250). However, Ong
(1995a) also showed how Khmer refugees employed strate-
gies to avoid the control of medical care. She concluded the
locus of Khmer refugees’ resistance is in their bodies. This is
because refugees find in their bodies’ ways to (a) manipulate
the medical system (by faking blindness or madness) and (b)
generate rights for themselves, as in the case of pregnancy.
All this is to say that, for Ong, nations only exist so far as
they are achieved in and enacted by bodies. In other words,
the nation is made only so far as bodies labor in the factory,
follow doctors’ orders, purchase goods, or play sport.
Cultural citizenship is a significant concept because it
describes the many ways in which national goals are made
into personal and embodied projects. Following this read-
ing of Ong, scholars must attend to how bodies can become
national so consistently as to be called, thought of, and
managed as a single body politic.
In sport, bodies achieve the nation uniquely and dramati-
cally. Rather than see this as a quality of the nation—through
which sporting bodies are inscribed in the same or similar
ways—I argue that, with Ong’s help, the sporting nation can
be seen as the last step in a contingent process whose princi-
pal actors are bodies at play, bodies formatted within and
motivated by the self-making and being-made of cultural
citizenship. I develop these insights with three vignettes
recounting my experiences playing rugby at South City.
Method
To understand cultural citizenship and embodiments
thereof, I played rugby on the weekends, practiced twice a
week, and attended fundraisers, holiday parties, post-prac-
tice “stink and drinks,” and after-match functions. During
and after each of these events, I recorded field descriptions
as well as self-reflexive and introspective notes. I focused
on how my cultural citizenship was evoked, negotiated, and
enacted in SCRFC, by myself and in relation to other club
members and opponents. These methodological decisions,
to choose playing rather than watching, and to choose intro-
spection and intersubjectivity as the principal analytical
sites, were deliberate attempts to understand the active body
and its cultural physicalities (Giardina & Newman, 2011).
In the latter half of the season, I interviewed eight of my
teammates as well as the captain, a player coach, and the
coach (eight Americans, one English, one Welsh, and one
Canadian American).
I follow Carrington’s (2008) definition of autoethnogra-
phy as “the attempt to develop a reflexive account of the
Self that opens up to critical interrogation of both the
researcher’s own biography in relation to those studied and
the very act of inscribing or narrating that ethnographic
story” (p. 426). Carrington (2008), as with Newman (2011),
conducted autoethnography in a way that was closely artic-
ulated to ethnography. In both cases, the authors realized
the “auto” in their ethnography enabled them to better trace
the patterns of racial politics than their previous ethno-
graphic writing did. Nevertheless, they maintain autoeth-
nography is necessarily wedded to traditional ethnographic
methods whereby researchers seek out places to encounter
and write about others. The difference between my work
and theirs is I purposefully undertook the ethnography to
critically interrogate the relation of my biography to others
instead of retroactively considering how my body insinu-
ates cultural politics.
Although interviewing is traditionally an ethnographic
technique, autoethnographic researchers have also used
interviews (Adams, 2011; Marvasti, 2005; Miller, 2002).
The difference is how these authors modified interviews to
incorporate or emphasize the various and broadly defined
McLeod 5
values of autoethnography (Anderson & Glass-Coffin,
2013). I used reflexive dyadic interviewing techniques
(Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013) to critically interrogate
my own biography and the act of inscribing and narrating: I
used events, feelings, expectations, and reflections I experi-
enced during the season to invite teammates to talk about
my performances. This reframed traditional boundaries
between the researcher and researched. It meant working
with interviewees to describe and discuss the interviewer-
as-a-subject. Thus, I was able to show an “I” that “not only
looks but is looked back at” (Ellis, 2004, p. xix).
In the following sections, I write in vignettes. These
vignettes are layered with interview transcripts and field
notes in an attempt to turn the analytical gaze onto my
researcher body (see Laurendeau, 2013, for an example of
this technique). I describe events rather than processes or
representations (Scheffer, 2007). More specifically, fol-
lowing Denzin (2013), I selected “critical biographical
experiences” of playing rugby in the U.S. South. These
“epiphanies,” create, rather than indicate, how my biogra-
phy and biology articulate to cultural logics and contexts.
All three epiphanies are physical encounters precipitated
by my sport migration.
Three Rugby Vignettes
Sensations of Failure and Success
The following is an account of my first rugby game in the
United States:
It was a hot day. Made all the hotter by the colony of black
rubber balls which covered the artificial surface of the rugby
pitch. I had never played in such heat or on fake grass. Despite
all of these new sensations—of sunrays and hot springy
surfaces—I felt saturated with something familiar and
unwelcomed: apprehension. This apprehension followed me—
not because of the situation—but because it was in me: my
spinal column, my vision, and my vocal cords.
For me, this apprehension surfaced as an impression of a
past, failed performance. It was a felt memory of me miss-
ing a tackle some time ago. In it, an opponent runs toward
me, and he and I are held timelessly in the moment before
either of us moves to initiate contact. It is felt because, at the
same time as I see the opponent, I feel my lower back mus-
cles straining.
In this felt memory, my opponent and I skip backward
and forward, one step at a time, as though the reel is stuck
either side of the moment. Neither of us can complete the
motion nor back out. It feels bad to me, this skipping,
because in this moment I am overwhelmed and incapaci-
tated by a feeling of hesitation.
In this memory, I struggle to not hesitate, but I inevitably
fail in that remembered or created moment. And so my eyes
close, my head drops down and away, and my back arches.
These are all the checkmarks of (a) poor tackling technique
and (b) shying away from contact. I miss the tackle as per-
fectly and pathetically as possible, over and over again.
None of this is happening in the real sense of things, but
I can feel myself shying away from the imaginary opponent
as I stand there, waiting to be called onto the field.
So I play with the ball to keep my hands occupied. I’ve
picked up some tricks from Christchurch playing grounds
that look impressive. They are actually basketball tricks, but
they look exotic with the oval shape of a rugby ball.
“Look at this flash guy,” an opponent mocks.
I don’t laugh, despite the irony (of playing with a rugby
ball, as though it was a basketball, on an America rugby
field, to look more competent as a Kiwi). I am trying to live
up to an idea of rugby that I had been actively trying to
underperform, an idea that I knew was present in my body,
my accent, my nationality. So far, in training and social
events, I was afforded opportunities because of what I rep-
resent. But this representation comes with responsibilities
that I had yet to fulfill on the field where it matters. For this
first game, it is the tackle that is most important.
Thankfully, I made it.
I was the last defender, facing down a bigger opponent. I
shadowed him to my right side, lined my shoulder up with
his hips and drove through his body, head up, my cheek
touching his butt-cheek. It felt perfect. No hesitation.
But I received no congratulations for that tackle, or any
other that day. My performance was expected. I had done
nothing to challenge what Kiwi rugby meant to my peers. I
had simply performed, as they expected I would.
Despite the lack of praise, despite the sunburn, and
despite the grazes that come from playing on an artificial
pitch, I slept well that night; because, although I could not
escape it using imagery, I was freed of apprehension and
anxiety when I felt my shoulder drive through the softer
part of my opponents’ abdomen.
Privilege, Perceptions, Performance
I interviewed our Captain, Brycey, over lunch in a Cuban
restaurant. We had a table outside. It was busy, loud, hard
to focus—and awkward. We were two men sharing lunch
in low-seated chairs, when we were more used to leaning
on a high top. As a result, I stopped recording when lunch
was served (something I did not do during most of the
interviews). We chatted about things of interest like his
upcoming wedding. When the conversation turned back to
rugby it was easier, a discussion between two invested,
interested people. It reminded me in some ways of his cap-
taincy style. It is hard to buy his pregame “psych-ups,”
they are too forced for me. Instead, I enjoy that he plays
silent because I like to imagine he is too focused on the job
to talk.
6 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)
When I asked him about his expectations of me, he said,
I actually kind of wanted you to be vice captain or something
you know, I would take the forwards and you would take the
backs, which seemed to be where things were going . . . I guess
I had expectations of you guys being better players than the rest
of the team and the rest of the other players and I guess you
could attribute that to you being from New Zealand. I think that
ties directly into your cultural stereotypes, ah, I did expect you
two to be playing on a different level to the rest of the guys.
(Personal communication, February 16, 2013)
These sentiments were shared by my other teammates. For
example, I interviewed Miles during taco night at a local
sports bar. We sat at a high top this time. He propped his
broken foot up on a seat. I looked at it often as we talked,
and self-consciously fidgeted with the soft-cast supporting
my own, recently broken and operated-on hand. He said,
As soon as I heard your voice and like heard the accent I was
just like “great, Kiwis” you know, New Zealand’s sport is
rugby, yea they have other sports but that’s what they are
known for, the All Blacks, so these guys can play you know
like obviously young and in shape, good to go . . . but you
never know what to expect . . . until you see the first training
session with the hands or tackling someone. (Personal
communication, February 18, 2013)
It seemed to me as though my actions reinforced my team-
mates’ and coaches’ expectations. As a result, they gave me
roles and responsibilities. As Brycey continued to point out,
I wanted to learn from you, I remember consulting you a lot
even in practices and in games trying to work stuff out . . . I just
kind of wanted to go with what you thought was like
comfortable, like I felt that in a way I was kind of yielding to
your opinion on the matter because I felt like you knew more
than me. (Personal communication, February 12, 2013)
Finally, Brycey talked about how he felt like he knew peo-
ple better after playing rugby with them. He spoke of rugby
as a survival situation, where your instincts are measured.
Based on that judgment, I asked Brycey, how did he per-
ceive me on the rugby field?
I trust you, I mean I don’t know if you think you’re a shit rugby
player, I don’t think you are, but I like being on the field with
you because I know when the ball’s in your hands you are
going to make a good decision, the majority of the time, I mean
we all have our mess ups . . . (Personal communication,
February 12, 2013)
It was our fifth game of the pre-season. We were away, at the
home ground of our biggest rival, whom the Raiders were yet
to beat in their history as a club. It was a good match. We were
playing well, but just losing. With possession, and in an
attacking position, we were looking to score and take the lead.
The ball came out from the ruck, to me, on the short side. I took
it to the line, eyeing a gap two players out, waiting for someone
to run the angle. I had a lot of success attacking with this simple
option. My speed allowed me to push the shoulder of my
defender, meaning that the outside defender needed to hold or
respond to me instead of the player they were marking. The
idea being: this opens a gap outside of the now static defender’s
shoulder, one of my teammates could exploit it running a hard
line. Ideally, someone will almost be through that hole before,
or as, the pass is given. But that means I have to give a very
good, very flat ball.
I gave it—late. No one had hit the gap as I was hoping. But I
gave it anyway—late. Too late and not quick enough to a target
too far away. The ball floated, tailing in the air as I pushed the
skip pass. An opponent snatched it up, ran half of the field and
scored to put us out of reach.
My mouthguard bounced weakly when I threw it at the ground.
“What was that?”
(Un)necessary Duties: Creating Spaces of
Citizenship
The end of the pre-season was looming. We were cleaning
up our team systems to prepare for the fall competition. I
was with the backline working on a crude system I had
devised for defense. As we set up, Coach introduced two
new players he had been emailing; he was excited they
made it. I assumed each man identified as African American.
I also assumed they had experience playing American
Football. I further assumed they wanted to play a contact
sport and had turned to rugby as a substitute for football.
And finally, I assumed that they had assumptions about
rugby, and particularly about physicality.
Maybe they had watched some highlights on YouTube? No
doubt Kiwi rugby would feature in those.
The drill was to practice marking up on, and tackling, the
correct opponent given particular situations. We were prac-
ticing against an attacking line made of forwards.
I know what amateur rugby looks like. Tackling upright, jersey
pulling. I know that “rugby players” love how tough the sport
appears. I know that the physicality and the toughness is what
they seek to invoke when they mention their participation
while out socializing. It’s why my teammates offer rugby as a
fact about themselves before their occupation. A lot of these
notions in the United States come from rugby players thinking
they hold a moral (and physical) superiority over American
Football. This is the reason why they wear t-shirts sporting
“Football is nice but pads dull the pain.” I also know how it
looks when these “rugby players” turn to tackling—the aspect
of the game where this “toughness” is enacted—only to tackle
upright and pull jerseys. It’s bad. It’s embarrassing. It’s talking
McLeod 7
without walking, as they say. And it makes rugby look pitiful
compared with football.
My opposite in the drill (the first receiver) was a prop, solid,
but slow when handling the ball.
When he caught the ball, I hit him. I made sure he went
to the ground. When he caught the ball a second time I hit
him again. Even when he had given the pass I would tackle
if committed, which—because he was not skilled with the
ball—was most of the time. I tackled hard, harder than the
drill required. And I kept on talking/accenting as I put my
teammate down.
“The first thing, when you say something like that,” said Coach
when I ran the moment past him in our interview, “you know,
that’s not your responsibility, to demonstrate how rugby should
be played to a bystander.” (Personal communication, December
5, 2013)
He is right. Being a member of the team does not make it
my responsibility to show how to tackle or play rugby. We
have coaches, and drills, and tackling bags, technique, vid-
eos, and the maxims “ass to the grass” and “cheek to cheek,”
all of which do a much better job of demonstrating how to
tackle. Yet, I believed it was my responsibility to demon-
strate how rugby should be played to a bystander.
I remember this moment. Not because, as should be the case, it
was a questionable moment of excessive violence. I remember
it because I still feel nervous that I won’t make those tackles; I
dwell here to be sure I performed well. I dwell anxiously; an
anxiousness that accompanies an impression—a felt-memory
of a missed tackle some time ago: my eyes close, my head
drops down and away, my back arches . . .
Cultural Citizenship and Members of
Bodies Politic
I brooded over Coach saying it was not my responsibility
to show others how to tackle. Every year he participates in
local Highland games, I thought he would understand how
sport is even more important when you are far away from
home (his is Canada). After all, he and my teammates
commonly talked about my Kiwiness when discussing
rugby. But, I thought, perhaps my situation is too unique,
my identity and anxieties too private for him to grasp.
What does he know about being a Kiwi rugby player? I
sought, in other words, to use the nation, omnipresent yet
invisible, to explain my actions, my anxieties, and my bro-
ken bones.
Using Ong’s formulation of cultural citizenship, how-
ever, the nation is an outcome of these epiphanies.
Channeling Butler (1990), perhaps there is no national iden-
tity behind the expression of nationalism; perhaps there is
no nation behind performances of citizenship.
In the case of sport, Ong shows that the cultural citizen’s
first obligation is not to carry out any transcendental objec-
tive, or perform in a predefined way, but to create an entity
to which he or she belongs. What stands out about Ong’s
studies is how government actors try to enroll immigrants
and their bodies in projects such as work, pregnancy, or
abstinence. Similarly, what stands out about contact sport is
the anxiety of tackling and the pain that sometimes comes
after; how all sorts of expectations and motivations are dis-
tilled into collisions. At the same time, a coach can dispel
the weight of the national imagination by deciding I have
other responsibilities, showing that Kiwiness is a contin-
gent achievement.
Migrant rugby has important lessons for understanding
national encounters, which have implications for how cul-
tural studies and sport scholars study political ontology.
With collisions, cultural citizens—like myself—make
nations. I use my body to make affects I belong in—I tackle
to be, without apprehension, on this side of the tackle and I
pass to be the giver of a good pass—but these affects decay
and must be maintained with more tackles and more suc-
cessful passes. I extend these affects further if people call it
“Kiwi rugby” or I establish my position in the backline.
Giving it a name extends the nation because names last lon-
ger than collisions. But a coach can recall this permanency,
leaving pain and injury without cause.
For me, successful cultural citizenship meant to enact so
consistently as to make the nation by which I could then be
a member. I was a member—etymologically a “limb”—
making a body politic on which to hang myself.
When we speak about political ontology, then, we can
say that the nation is embodied because that is all there is to
it. Instead of saying that sport proves national identity, we
say that sport enacts it. In this formulation, scholars can
study how people maintain traditions as well as how they
invent them; and they can study how people show commu-
nities as well as how they imagine them. They can study,
along with other sport practices, including spectating
(Newman, 2007), social media (Norman, 2012), and news-
papers (Falcous, 2007; Falcous & West, 2009), all those
techniques that collect bodies to be national, including sur-
veys (Igo, 2007) and border security (Sparke, 2006), and
even mundane technology, such as roads (Schouten, 2013).
In conclusion, Ong demonstrates and helps theorize how
bodies are assembled so as to have the real collective affects
of nations. Moreover, she shows that this is a difficult
achievement that requires people to participate regularly
and consistently least the nation fail to eventuate. The other
side of this arrangement is the single body, the member that
is said to embody the nation. A common definition of
“embody” is to invest something without form—like an
idea, abstraction, or nation—with physical form. But to
invest an idea, abstraction, or nation with physical form is
also to lend it qualities and affects that it does not have
8 Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 00(0)
without being embodied, such shoulders, tackles, and
accents—for this reason, to embody is also to enact or cre-
ate. In migrant sport, to embody the nation is to bring it to
physical encounters. So rather than define embodiment as a
state of representation, I argue (and I believe Ong would
agree) that embodiment is a state of augmented affects. The
implication of this reading is that members of nations give
themselves to something that needs them and that would not
exist in the same way without this gift of physicality. The
members who enact nations are interesting simply because
they create nations, but they are more fascinating in those
moments where the nation dissolves with an intercept pass
or a coach’s comment. The important site of analysis for
qualitative scholars, is this subject who loses their narrative
at the same time as they enact it—and for the sport scholar,
the important site of analysis is the athlete who fails to
embody anything at all, even, and especially, when they feel
the weight of a country in their movements and their
encounters. These sites are important because the nation
can be observed, studied, and perhaps exploited at its most
contingent.
Authors’ Note
Christopher Michael McLeod is currently affiliated with Texas
Tech University, 2500 Broadway, Lubbock TX, 7909, USA.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Note
1. I do not claim any authority on defining what “Kiwi” means
as a cultural label, for it is a highly contested term (Bannister,
2005; Bell, 2004; Pickles, 2002). Rather, I use it to evoke the
seemingly banal operation of my citizenship in this context,
where “quality” rather than “conflict” was the overriding sig-
nified of my textually mediated accent and movements.
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Author Biography
Christopher Michael McLeod is an assistant professor of sport
management at Texas Tech University. He studies the political
ontology, political ecology, and political economy of sport.