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Black Men in the Mix: Badboys, Heroes, Sequins, and Dennis Rodman

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.1997.0002

1080-6512

Lindon Barrett,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

Black Men in the MixBadboys, Heroes, Sequins, and Dennis Rodman Lindon Barrett (bio) It is an understatement to claim that the anomaly in sports and popular culture that is Dennis Rodman has grown into an equally peculiar national phenomenon, and Rodman’s perhaps most notable form of sedition—his brands of crossdressing both on and off the NBA basketball court—places him in a controversial spotlight he shares with no other sports celebrity and, arguably, no other African-American man in 20th-century post-civil rights culture. RuPaul may come to mind, but RuPaul does not occupy a national spotlight as a “man” as that designation is commonly taken. Rodman, on the contrary, by virtue of being a highly competitive and successful professional athlete, does present himself and is perceived as a “man.” Thus, one of the most startling aspects of the phenomenon of Dennis Rodman is the attention he draws to himself unashamedly wearing sequined halter tops, women’s leggings, or leather shorts, or marking his body by conspicuously tattooing himself, dying his hair, as well as painting his fingernails even as he pursues and collects NBA championship rings. He remains in the popular mind neither a drag queen nor one of the innumerable and easily assimilated comedians or actors who make their living by drawing on long and various traditions of male drag in the West. Dennis Rodman—to employ a cliché—is “something else.” The primary sense of this cliché connotes, of course, that Rodman is clearly and highly individual. But, on closer examination, an argument can be made that one of the upshots of his unusual public position is a demonstration of ways in which the notion of the individual proves inadequate to fully understanding the peculiarities of post-civil rights U.S. culture. This analysis proposes the obsolescence of the notion of the individual for assessing Rodman’s phenomenal position, and for assessing the potent conjunction of racial, commercial, gendered, and moral economies in the peculiar figure of Rodman. The proposal is that important facets of post-civil rights U.S. culture suggests a fracturing of the “individual” not entirely calculable by recourse to that concept. And this fracturing, as one must suspect of market cultures, occurs through mechanisms aimed at channeling desire and pleasure. In Rodman’s self-reflections such fracturing is evident in key rhetorical ploys as well as inconsistencies between his sexual imaginary and exploits. The claim here is that these “individual” instabilities reflect always incomplete attempts on the part of hegemonic cultural orders to contain desire and pleasure. What amounts to the characteristically and strictly rationalized libidinal dynamics of post-civil rights U.S. culture do [End Page 106] not always remain so strict or so rational. The resulting eccentricity, however, is not unique to Rodman but endemic to post-civil rights U.S. culture itself. Rodman’s state of publicity, in other words, seems to underscore Kobena Mercer’s sense that black struggles over access to the means of representation in the public sphere, in cultural and political institutions alike, require an analysis that is not exclusively centered on individualizing or psychologizing theories of subjectivity, but which acknowledges the contingent social and historical conditions in which new forms of collectivity and community are also brought into being as agents or subjects in the public sphere. (296) The concept of the individual is sometimes most remarkable for the abiding insistence placed on it rather than its utility or relevance, and Rodman’s most extended statements on Rodman, his Delacourte autobiography Bad as I Wanna Be, foregrounds this circumstance. It becomes clear that—despite the awkward configuration of Bad as I Wanna Be as an extended monologue to a reader/confidante, its almost unthinkable repetitiveness, and its structural skirting with incoherence—many of the perplexities of Rodman’s rehearsal of his thirty-some years of blackness, maleness, athleticism, travails, and insecurities are not only the result of what must have been the impatience of a publisher and hasty work with his co-writer Tim Keown. These perplexities also arise from Rodman’s sometimes shrewd critical remove concerning the incidental circumstances as well as the not so incidental corporate, market, and media...