Burn It All Down

“Burn It All Down” treats sport not as an escape from politics but as one of the places where politics becomes unusually visible. Co-hosts Shireen Ahmed, Lindsay Gibbs, Brenda Elsey, Amira Rose Davis, and Jessica Luther brought journalism, history, and feminist cultural criticism into a roundtable format. Across its archive, the show follows athlete activism, sexual abuse and institutional cover-up, race and gender in sports media, LGBTQ+ participation, college athletics, labor, pay, coaching, and the unequal distribution of authority inside leagues and governing bodies.

The podcast’s strength is the scale at which it reads an event. A tournament, hiring decision, uniform rule, or disciplinary controversy can reveal who owns a sport, whose body is regulated, whose testimony is believed, and whose labor creates value. The hosts also resist a purely scandal-driven feminism by celebrating athletes, organizers, researchers, and journalists pushing institutions to change. Their different locations and specialties complicate the assumption that “women in sports” is a single constituency; nationalism, colonial history, race, sexuality, disability, and class shape both participation and visibility.

Because the episodes respond closely to news cycles, some references and predictions inevitably date faster than a book or research article. The archive is most useful when listeners pair a topical episode with later reporting and treat the hosts’ disagreements as part of the method rather than a defect. For FemRes, the show opens a field often treated as culturally secondary: sport is work, public ritual, media industry, and contested civic space. It demonstrates how feminist analysis can be rigorous without losing speed, humor, fandom, or pleasure—and why loving a game need not mean protecting its institutions from criticism.