Page 176 - Sport Culture and the Media

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invited by texts, all texts contain the possibility of their own subversion,
and some readers may find pleasure in resisting those preferred readings.
Thus there may be some Shape readers who resist the panoptic gaze, or
who focus on the strength and power of the body ideal presented therein
rather than on the beauty/slenderness motive. My goal, then, is not to
argue that every reader uncritically accepts the body beautiful ideology,
nor is it to argue that every Shape article is potentially disempowering, but
I do wish to demonstrate that there are compelling discursive mechanisms
that encourage the panoptic gaze and yet conceal its source and motives
from ‘view’.
(Duncan 1994: 52–3)

Duncan is arguing that it is possible to see the media texts that forge a linkage
between women’s health, beauty and slenderness and emphasize personal
responsibility for achieving it (and culpability for not) as empowering, and it is
also possible to reject these demands for women constantly to assess their self-
worth in this way. But the merest acquaintance with how many women are
on diets, have had eating disorders and carry around a negative body image
(Heaven and Rowe 1990; Markula 2001) reveals just how compelling such
gender discourses can be and, even for the most critically self-reflexive woman,
to escape. Critcher (1993: 234), in arguing that ‘textual analysis alone can never
deliver anything adequate about audience response’, has highlighted the
dangers of establishing a theoretical agenda concerning the gendered sports
image and then reading all media texts off it as inevitably consistent and
straightforwardly understood by all readers irrespective of their social identity.
Yet there is equivalent peril in celebrating a ‘semiotic democracy’ in which
cultural power is equally distributed among everyone, so that the political
catchcry of ‘one person, one vote’ is translated into ‘one person, as many
meanings as they like’. The mutual constraints of the power of the text, the
autonomy of the reader and the influence of the social have to be carefully
weighed, often with disappointingly inconclusive findings if the aim is to
explain all meaning generation according to a single axial principle. These
issues have been much debated in media reception and audience analysis, with a
resultant greater attention given to the ways in which audiences are mobilized
by the media rather than simply found, the empirical substantiation of assumed
audience responses, and the socio-cultural influences on how texts are read,
interpreted and used (Philo 1999; Ruddock 2001; Balnaves et al. 2002).
Before this discussion becomes overly abstract, we should return to the image
of the sexualized male sports body and of the male body in general. As Jennifer
Smith Maguire (2002: 449) has noted in an analysis of ‘fitness publishing’, the
shaping of the fit body now involves both ‘middle and new middle class men