Page 171 - Sport Culture and the Media

152 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

Davis’s analysis opens up, then, to embrace wider dimensions of power
than those simply based on sex and gender, arguing that each is intricated in a
complex and sometimes contradictory manner. This is contested theoretical
terrain, and the conceptual reach and efficacy of hegemonic masculinity can be
challenged (International Review for the Sociology of Sport 1998; Miller 2001).
Pursuing the gendered image of sports photography further, though, it is
apparent that the use of scantily clad ‘proto-sporting’ women (that is, models
wearing something skimpy that is vaguely associated with sport or leisure) on
the cover is a standard promotional strategy of sports magazines like the
Australian edition of Inside Sport. A representative example (April 1997) is of a
model in a leather bikini holding a crossbow, while inside she is featured in
various poses and with equipment associated with the pursuits of swimming,
diving, archery, roller hockey, baseball, soccer, cycling, skateboarding, water
skiing and boxing. In none of these sporting activities is a brief black-and-white
two-piece swimsuit the usual apparel. In the same issue there is a ‘16-page
bonus’ of the best Australian sports photography, in which it is claimed that
‘Australia isn’t only producing world-class athletes. We’re turning out the
world’s best sports photographers too. Here’s proof’ (Inside Sport 1997: 40). It
is instructive to look more closely than is usual at this popular imagery, and also
at the photographs published in the previous year in the Carlton and United
Breweries Best Australian Sports Writing and Photography 1996. The analysis is
a little inexact in that only the principal subjects have been counted in those
photographs where there are large numbers of (mostly out of focus) spectators
and some other media personnel. The ‘findings’ of this quick content analysis
(which can be conducted easily by any viewer of sports photography with,
I suggest, similar results in most cases) are presented in Table 5.1.

Table 5.1 Analysis of two examples of ‘best’ Australian sports photography
Photos Action Non- Main subjects Photographers
no. (%) action no. (%) no. (%)
no. (%)
Male Female Male Female

Inside Sport 21 20 (95) 1 (5) 37 (100) 0 (0) 11 (100) 0 (0)
Carlton 1996 17 13 (76) 4 (24) 23 (77) 7 (23) 13 (93) 1 (7)

The data in Table 5.1, the analysis of which makes no claim to sophisticated
statistical representativeness, are instructive in highlighting the gendered nature
of the sports photographic text. In the case of the Inside Sport feature, not a
single sportswoman appears, while almost every shot features action of a mostly