Necropolitical institutions and state-sanctioned violence: Critical discourse analysis of institutional response to a professional boxer's death in Quebec

This study examines how necropolitical institutions legitimize state-sanctioned violence in Quebec's professional boxing. Through the case of Jeanette Zacarías Zapata's death, we analyze how state institutions simultaneously regulate and promote boxing, normalizing structural violence within the sport spectacle. Using Fairclough's model of critical discourse analysis, we examine the coroner's report and regulatory documents to demonstrate how official institutional frameworks construct discourses of “safe violence” while facilitating unequal risk distribution toward precarious athletes and creating institutional conditions privileging spectacle over welfare. This study extends sociocultural analysis of injury and death in sports via a necropolitical lens, examining how the state normalizes violence through institutional power. In doing so, this study aims to contribute to the discussion in three primary ways. First, it seeks to apply Mbembe's necropolitics to the material practices of sports regulation, through its institutions. Second, it approaches the coroner's report not as a neutral medical–legal document, but as a discursive artifact that actively constructs a reality to displace blame. Third, it examines the report's reliance on the contested “second impact syndrome” (SIS) diagnosis, suggesting it functions as a culturally loaded etiology that helps exonerate local institutions from responsibility. Ultimately, this study illuminates how state-sanctioned violence is rationalized and managed within the supposedly protective frameworks of regulated sport. By creating a “spectacle of safety” that masks systemic failures, these institutions perpetuate a system where certain lives—particularly those of marginalized athletes—are rendered disposable for entertainment and profit.