The Basketball Feelings Podcast, Episode 60: Jessica Luther

Photo credit Janelle Renee Matous

It’s such an interesting thing working on gendered violence because there’s so much cultural narrative around it that you’re working against all the time. Really basic stuff like: “Women are liars.” Whether or not you acknowledge that in the work that that is a strong cultural belief, you’re still working against it the whole time — I just feel this need to try.

Dr. Jessica Luther has long written about gendered violence, power and its abuses, and questioned fandom’s relationship to sports and the athletes who perform them. She’s written two books, spent literal years reporting on stories she’s broken like Baylor’s rape scandal and the toxic culture inside the Dallas Mavericks (a foundational text for me), and this past spring successfully defended her dissertation about gender and racial discrimination at the University of Texas in the 1970s.

What I love about her work is no matter the subject she’s interrogating, she does it with a depth of care and attention that comes through loud and clear. To my mind she’s absolutely pioneered a critical and compassionate approach to coverage that was otherwise missing in sports writing and reporting, and one that’s deeply informed my own work.

We talked about the cultural biases that work against the kind of reporting she does, how her academic background has served her work, where she had to learn on the fly, and being intentional in the language that stories about gendered violence are written.

We also talked about how you decide when you’re done a story, collaborative reporting, how to fit empathy in “news”, what the process of research and reporting over months and sometimes years looks and feels like, and cold contacting survivors.

Plus: The valourization of coaches, psyching yourself up to ask hard questions, the trope of the “right” victim, hitting walls, why it’s better to initiate and engage in difficult conversations versus avoidance out of the fear of saying the wrong thing, getting scooped, the Burn It All Down podcast, separating the individual from the institution, and the very specific story that led her to writing and defending her thesis!