Two for two: Olympic jouissance, spectating, and the zero-sum game of gender

In the emerging intersection between psychoanalysis and sport studies, scholars have established sport as a significant site of psychoanalytic inquiry. Victory, the climax of organized athletics, remains underanalyzed. In the present paper, victory celebrations and their circulation through digital media are viewed as sites of affective and ideological production. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theories of performativity, and critical theories of subjectivity, select victory celebrations from the 2026 Olympic Winter Games are examined as gendered performances of jouissance. An analysis of the celebrations of snowboarder Benjamin Karl and speed skater Jutta Leerdam illustrates how comparable experiences of athletic triumph are differently organized through hegemonic masculinity and postfeminist femininity. Next, a look into a presidential call to the U.S. men’s hockey locker room extends the analysis from individual bodies to collective identification, nationalism, and spectatorship. A discussion of implicated subjects in the aggression underlying the act of spectating and the scorekeeping of gender is presented.