Policing the Political Boundary: How the r/BarstoolSports Audience Confronts Politicization

Recent scholarship attends to politicized popular cultural spaces. Scarcely understood is how audiences of these spaces contend with this scrutiny. In response, I introduce the concept of anti-political space to describe how fans of politicized media spatially distinguish popular cultural spaces from institutional politics. This is conceptualized through a critical discourse analysis of the official Barstool Sports (Barstool) subreddit from 2019 to 2025, where fans share critical news coverage of Barstool. Across 16 analyzed threads, criticism is rendered unfounded or demonstrative of politically obsessed liberal culture. I argue fans’ varied expressions of victimhood and estrangement, while nominally defending against politicization, showcase how reactionary political discourse appears beyond institutional political spaces. Theoretically, this analysis recognizes how symbolic contests over what constitutes politics occur through boundary work. As the political relevance of popular cultural spaces increases in the contemporary media landscape, this analysis underscores how boundary work defends against the felt intrusion of politics into popular culture. Amid broader sociotechnical changes, I suggest anti-political spaces are poised to be a continued feature of the contemporary media environment.