Concussion killjoys

CTE, violence and the brain’s becoming

Bibliographic Data

ID16842006
AuthorsAryn Martins (0000-0003-1516-3219, York University, corresponding author), Alasdair McMillan (York University)
Year2022
Volume17
Issue2
Pages229-250
Publication date2022-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBioSocieties (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1745-8552 • E-ISSN: 1745-8560
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/s41292-020-00209-1
OpenAlexW3096080880
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited25

CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is caused by repetitive head trauma and detected by a distinctive stain for a protein called ‘tau’ in autopsied brain tissue. While the number of diagnosed patients is only in the hundreds, the cultural footprint of the disease in North America is huge, both because those diagnosed are often celebrity-athletes and because millions of children, adolescents and young men and women play collision sports like football and hockey. We argue that the widespread attention to CTE provides a useful wedge to crack open another, heretofore neglected public health concern: repetitive acts of violence in and around hypermasculine sports create subjects whose brains—and characters—are materially shaped by that violence. Brains change materially when delivering blows as well as receiving them, when participating in degrading hazing rituals as victim or assailant, when belittled or assaulted by a coach, when approaching an upcoming game riddled with fear. We adopt a biosocial model of the brain’s becoming to intervene in a linear discourse around CTE that medicalizes and oversimplifies violence, a story that prematurely dissects one slice of the problem from a noxious whole

Aggression · Athletes · Biosocial theory · Chronic traumatic encephalopathy · Concussion · Diathesis–stress model · Football · Injury prevention · Medical emergency · Medical tourism · Physical therapy · Poison control · Psychiatry · Tourism · History · Medicine · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Psychology · Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments · Social Psychology · Traumatic Brain Injury Research

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