Necropolitics Narratives and Disposition of Lives in Sport Spectacle: Negotiating the Death of Mexican Boxer Jeanette Zacarías Zapata in Quebec’s Sport/Media Landscape

This study critically examines Quebec sports media narratives surrounding the death of Mexican boxer Jeanette Zacarías Zapata to interrogate how mortality is negotiated within the Quebec boxing sport/media landscape. Applying the concepts of necropolitics and necrocapitalism, we analyze how media narratives divide those who can/cannot die, rendering certain lives disposable, particularly precarious boxers within unequal circuits. We contextualize the boxing industry’s organization and analyze media coverage of Zacarías Zapata’s passing, which demonstrates how narratives construct characters and resolution of a story, isolating mortality through a distorted morality in which death would constitute a failure of certain groups of people or even certain individuals rather than a structural problem of the sport spectacle of boxing in Quebec.