Featured Issue
Volume 2, Issue 1—Fall 2025
This Fall Semester 2025 issue contains analyses of endurance running, pharmaceuticals, Zach Bryan, Attack on Titan, Steven Universe, and women in sports.
Articles
Running, Reprsentation, and the Rhetorics of Endurance
Isaiah Bergara
Abstract
ABSTRACT: What happens when a sport based on pure endurance comes face to face alongside technology, economics, and psychology to begin rewriting the limits of what humans can produce? In this essay, I will examine the rising tension between pure endurance and technological enhancements in long-distance running; something that is often overlooked by fans who assume that athletes are only getting faster by becoming stronger. With the use of the key terms of technological unfairness, performance improvement, and blood doping prevalence, I will explain how innovations such as super shoes and the rising use of drug based cheating challenge the authenticity/fairness of long-distance running. To examine if long-distance running is changing from a natural test of endurance to an artificially enhanced competition, I used the combined framework of sports ethics, technology studies, and psychological theory to analyze the sport in- depth. Utilizing the articles provided by Bill Dyer on sports ethics and technological fairness, along with Faiss et al.’s biomedical research on blood doping and the Athlete Biological Passport, I evaluate how performance-enhancing drugs and super shoes reshape both athletic performance and the cultural meaning of "fair play". Furthermore, I use psychoanalytical concepts provided by Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud to understand why athletes try to rationalize/deny their unethical behavior, connecting science-based data with psychological mechanisms. In my interpretations, doping methods, rising shoe technology, and pacing tool methods display the shift of long-distance running, going from an all-natural endurance test to an artificially/ethically unstable landscape, which makes us reconsider what is truly fair and authentic.
Abstract
ABSTRACT: What Kümmerer argues is that there is a massive presence of pharmaceuticals in our environment, and there is very little that has been done to counter and understand what their presence is doing. However, Wilkinson introduces data and facts that proves how the presence of pharmaceuticals in our environment, especially in riverain ecosystems, is in higher concentrations when in areas that are predominantly made up of the lower class and has fewer modern accommodations for its people. My research has led me to the idea that there is a major possibility that the lack of knowledge on the mass presence of pharmaceuticals in our environment falls back onto undertones of racism and classism, as the countries and areas that tend to have the highest presence of pharmaceuticals are often the poorest and most underdeveloped. On the other hand, the areas that have the best of the little research have been the richer countries with more modern amenities and developments. I believe that in order to start solving this issue of pharmaceuticals in our environment we need to take a look at Crenshaw’s critical race theory and apply it to this predicament.
Sergio Perez
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Growing up, I felt as if I never had a transitional object. Especially newly learning about Donald Winnicott’s transitional object idea, where he describes it as a comforting object that helps children manage anxiety, separation, and when their emotions get too high. Growing up was tough, with lots of family issues coming from a broken home. I had an iPod that my dad left behind before he went away. Music kept me going, music was a way I could express myself, and something I could relate to. Now that I’m in a higher academic setting, I’ve come to realize music is a normal transitional object. And it’s my transitional object. Zach Bryan, a well-known country singer, writes music and plays. Listening to his music and interviews, it is easy to come to realize music is more than just a hobby; it’s very important to him, and it is his transitional object. His music brings his raw, unfiltered emotions into sound. Feelings that he has held within get to escape. I started listening to Zach Bryan in a rough stretch of my life, funeral, heartbreak, and what I felt was depression. His music spoke to me; it felt real. I related to his lyrics. The definition of music is: vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion. I would like to focus on that last part, “expression of emotion”. Many people listen to music at parties, clubs, and raves, and do not even think about what is beyond the sounds. Although I’m going to deep dive into a different genre of music, one you wouldn’t hear at those events. When someone such as country artist Zach Bryan sings and writes music more for entertainment, when music is used as a transitional object to cope with anxiety, depression, and just when feelings grow too big, and when it builds a community that deals with it the same way. When an artist shows personality traits such as the ones Sigmund Freud and Donald Winnicott analyzes. We will go into what makes Zach Bryan so authentic and why a Navy Seal has inspired many to play music.
Abstract
ABSTRACT: How often do you read of a story that has a main character in which can fit into several different archetypes? Eren Jaeger is a controversial character who is often debated amongst fans about whether or not he is in the wrong, revolving his choice of triggering the Rumbling. The Rumbling is an event that essentially rids the world in Attack on Titan of any other nations besides Paradis itself. The Hero's and Antihero's journey are archetypes main characters tend to traditionally follow. Slavoj Žižek’s framework is a psychoanalytic approach to the way the story is told. I am approaching the kind of character Eren is by breaking down factors that contribute to why Isayama wrote him as he did. In doing so, I am taking a psycho-analytic approach by exploring the storytelling of AoT that Quilantang et al. delves into, looking at the trajectory Eren's journey follows that Marasigan delves into, and lastly, I'm determining the kind of libidinal type Eren has based of Freud's stance here. I am interpreting Eren Jaeger in Attack on Titan to be a unique protagonist whose character was influenced into being by factors such as his libidinal type, the frameworking of the story's narrative, and lastly, by his hero’s archetype.
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Growing up queer, there was not an abundance of spaces for queer children to feel safe, loved, and accepted in. With the TV as an only friend, Steven Universe guides queer children—all children—through self-acceptance and self-love with humor and hope for the future. I will be explaining the intricacies of Steven Universe's effects and representations as a show focused on representing several aspects of queerness, including queer theories. This representation is a positive influence on the lives and esteems of all children, queer or not queer. This argument will be asserted through the academic sources of Eli Dunn and Mandy Elizabeth. These publications are framed on concepts discussed in social and political sciences, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. I argue that Steven Universe is a transitional object for both those queer and not queer, offering an outlet for both queer joy and queer inter-reflection. It offers most viewers (children) a first view of queer concepts and allows them to form their opinions along with the characters, and hate of the portrayed queerness comes only from prior negative socialization towards said queerness.
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Women’s sports has surged in popularity with recent evidence suggesting a steady increase of viewership and participation growth. I will be dissecting the conversation and controversy of women in sports through examining a comprehensive history of women’s sport participation during the nineteenth century extending to women’s professional soccer in the United States with the introduction of Title IX. Additionally, I cast a focus in assessing the intersecting identities that influence the access to obtaining sport’s physical and mental health benefits. I approach the discussion with my long-serving experiences within the women’s sports and soccer community, and through the academic framework of feminist theory, cultural studies, and the concept within critical race theory known as intersectionality. I contribute complexity to the discourse by introducing possible interpretations to why men resisted women in sport, and the proposal that institutional structures withhold from certain groups the health benefits derived from sports.
Contact Information
Editor: Michael Simmons, Ph.D.
michael.simmons@canyons.edu