Page 184 - Sport Culture and the Media

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In this case, ‘serious’ debates in the magazine over the issue of ‘femininity vs
muscle’ were undercut by the use of ‘images of these [female] bodybuilders
posing seductively in conventional “feminine” poses – and most of them either
wear thong backs or high heels’ (Ndalianis 1995: 20). Thus the traditional
sexualization and patrolling of the ‘socially approved’ appearance of sports-
women is still occurring in sports photography at the same time as some of
the presentational rules are being at least partially rewritten for men. Such
issues are made more complex when other social variables are introduced that
demand greater analytical scope to go beyond the prime concerns of white,
heterosexual men and women. Given that few professional sportspeople have
ever ‘come out’, especially when at the peak of their careers (Rowe and Miller
1999), and that sports photography adheres mainly to an heterosexual/sexist
ethic, gay men and lesbian women have largely been ‘out of the frame’ as
photographic subjects and unacknowledged as textual readers. This state of
affairs has begun to be challenged by new readings of both conventional and
unconventional sports images. For example, the postmodern pseudo-sports
television show Gladiators (a moving image show, of course, but one that,
as with most popular television and film, has produced many still print and
Internet images) is opened up to the kind of reading advanced by Kathryn
Goldie:

Lesbianism and male homosexuality flutter over and around Gladiators,
but are manifested in different ways. Each requires a different containment
strategy as required by a patriarchal and heterosexual social order. How-
ever, the juxtaposition of sport, bodybuilding, wrestling and cartoon
superhero genres creates enough tensions and ambiguities to defy a single
reading of the muscular body, either on display or in action. Despite
Gladiators’ best efforts to construct non-threatening heterosexual hege-
monic power relations, homoeroticism and the possibility of oppositional
reading strategies remain.
(Goldie 2002: 79)
Interrogating the power of sports representation and the politics of reading
media sports texts creates many opportunities to analyse the relationship
between social inequality and cultural power. In these ‘image stakes’, Linda D.
Williams (1994) notes the double disadvantage of black sportswomen. On
the assumption that ‘no feature is so important to a magazine as its cover’
(Williams 1994: 51), she conducted a study of the covers of Sports Illustrated
between 1954 and 1989, finding that, while only 114 (6 per cent) of the 1835
covers in the period involved women, only 5 of these featured black sports-
women (4 per cent of magazine covers with women appearing and 0.3 per cent
of total covers), with 4 appearing in the short period between 1987 and 1989