CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is caused by repetitive head trauma and detected by a distinctive stain for a protein called ‘tau’ in autopsied brain tissue. While the number of diagnosed patients is only in the hundreds, the cultural footprint of the disease in North America is huge, both because those diagnosed are often celebrity-athletes and because millions of children, adolescents and young men and women play collision sports like football and hockey. We argue that the widespread attention to CTE provides a useful wedge to crack open another, heretofore neglected public health concern: repetitive acts of violence in and around hypermasculine sports create subjects whose brains—and characters—are materially shaped by that violence. Brains change materially when delivering blows as well as receiving them, when participating in degrading hazing rituals as victim or assailant, when belittled or assaulted by a coach, when approaching an upcoming game riddled with fear. We adopt a biosocial model of the brain’s becoming to intervene in a linear discourse around CTE that medicalizes and oversimplifies violence, a story that prematurely dissects one slice of the problem from a noxious whole.

CTE（或慢性外伤性脑病）是由重复性头部外伤引起的，并通过尸体解剖的脑组织中称为“ tau”的蛋白质的独特染色来检测。虽然被诊断出的病人只有数百人，但该疾病在北美的文化足迹却很大，这是因为被诊断出的人通常是名人运动员，以及成千上万的儿童，青少年和青年男女都像足球一样参加碰撞运动和曲棍球。我们认为，对CTE的广泛关注提供了一个有用的楔子，可用来消除另一个迄今被忽视的公共卫生问题：在超男性运动中及其周围的重复性暴力行为造就了受其暴力影响的大脑和人物。传递和接收打击时，大脑会发生重大变化，当作为受害者或攻击者参加侮辱性仪式时，当教练贬低或殴打他们时，在接近即将到来的比赛时充满恐惧。我们采用了一种大脑的生物社会模型，以干预围绕CTE的线性话语，这种话语使医学化和过度简化了暴力，这个故事过早地从有害整体中分解出了一部分问题。