Making the Global Turn: The USLPGA, Commissioner Rhetoric of Difference, and “New Imperialism”

Abstract

Focusing on the cultural and structural contours of the global sport of golf, this analysis features the rhetorical power of U.S. Ladies Professional Golf Association (USLPGA) commissioners in narrativizing this “American” global tour. Selected mediated rhetoric of each of these commissioners is read within a post-title 9/11 context, attending to Winant’s notion of “new imperialism” as a process of linking gender and race in a sporting space of globalization. This post-title 9/11 reading illuminates the manner in which USLPGA leadership espouses an elite, global identity and simultaneously acts to contain the very “global” difference it claims to produce. The analysis is also instructive for thinking about the cultural and rhetorical power of commissioners in locating the USLPGA in a set of discourses about globalization, nationalism, and difference.