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Kobe Bryant, Masculinity, and the American Obsession with Celebrity
By Hettie V. Williams
America’s canonization of basketball star Kobe Bryant is a reflection of a larger obsession with celebrity. Bryant has been recently depicted by artists with a halo over his head, sprouting wings, and walking into heaven with his daughter Gigi. Sometimes remembrance is refracted through deification. Practices such as this have become more common in our inward-looking capitalist-materialist culture fixated on fame, money-making, celebrity and male power.
Religion writer Karen Armstrong has argued, in her book A Short History of Myth, that the old myths (traditional religions) are failing us and thus we must find new ways to gain a measure of transcendence, or escape, from reality either through art, music, drugs or sports to avoid “falling into despair.” In a world in which church attendance and traditional religion is on the decline, many Americans are also on a quest for something to believe in to avoid this despair. Humans are meaning seeking creatures but the gods in modern western societies are always imagined as men. Men who do physical things. Men who do sports.
America as a patriarchal society also celebrates hegemonic masculinity through sports culture. Hegemonic masculinity is a concept in social theory, first advanced by Australian sociologist…