Contesting the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is an annual American rite. Around the country, friends gather together around the television with beer and potato chips and gear up for the game of the season. A multi-million dollar event produced by the NFL, corporate sponsors and broadcast networks, the Super Bowl is a carefully crafted spectacle that seems more about revenue than football. But what happens to your town when the Super Bowl comes to visit? Dona Schwartz seized the opportunity to find out when Super Bowl XXVI came to her home town, Minneapolis. The result is Contesting the Super Bowl, an alternative, non-NFL-sponsored examination of the event and its impact on the host community. Since the Super Bowl is a visual spectacle, Contesting the Super Bowl employs visual means as part of its analytical arsenal. To cover the event, a team of nine photographers fanned out across the city in search of images that might tell a different story than the photographs dispatched by the press or the NFL. Issues probed by the lens include visible manifestations of race, class, and gender divisions, the roles played by local elites in marshaling the spectacle, and the function of the NFL and the media as storytellers. It integrates newspaper clips, quotes from players both on and off the field, NFL rules and regulations, photographers' first-person accounts of their experiences, along with photographs and a series of critical essays heading each chapter. In addition to offering an analysis of power, patriarchy and professional sport, Contesting the Super Bowl critiques its own narrative apparatus and the process of representation. A humorous, and at times disturbing, portrait, Contesting the Super Bowl provides a peek at a different side of this enormously popular event.