LAUSR

ABSTRACT This article examines and critiques the National Football League’s (NFL) ‘A Crucial Catch’ corporate social responsibility campaign and interrogates its use by the NFL to diffuse broader concerns over the social value and health risks of football. The campaign, which until 2017 exclusively raised awareness for breast cancer and emphasized the importance of receiving annual screenings, has often been criticized as a thinly-veiled marketing ploy for the league to appeal to women. Through a deeper examination of the campaign, particularly through a textual analysis of its marketing and promotional materials and its game-day experiences, I argue that the rhetorical and symbolic messages of the campaign, steeped in medical and cultural discourses of family, individual responsibility, heteronormativity, and corporate-science alliances, position the medical dangers of playing football as an obstacle that can be ‘overcome’ through individual determination, much like breast cancer. Furthermore, these messages closely align with discourses that promote football as a necessary and productive institution for the production of socially dominant masculinities, yet do so in a way that responds to both the criticism of unchecked aggression in the sport as well as the threat of uncontrollable black bodies.