Page 199 - Sport Culture and the Media
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                         socio-cultural order. Ketra Armstrong (1999), for example, analyses how the
                         Nike leisurewear company tries to communicate with Black audiences through
                         television (and also print) advertisements; Grant Farred (2000) appraises a
                         new form of ‘cool sports talk’ on an ESPN programme that combines post-
                         modernism with a productive engagement with questions of race; Eileen
                         Kennedy (2001) examines the BBC’s coverage of women’s tennis at Wimbledon
                         and  finds it largely infantilizing; while Daniel Mason (2002) has tracked
                         Canadian responses to transnational broadcasting innovations in its national
                         game of hockey. The best of such work connects the institutional pressures on,
                         and workings of, television and other media with the transformations of sport,
                         relationships with fans and audiences, and broader socio-cultural processes like
                         globalization as they relate to classed, racialized, ethnicized,  ‘nationalized’,
                         gendered and other significant forms of power (Bernstein and Blain 2003).
                           Television sport, the prime audiovisual domestic genre and medium, is
                         especially well equipped to focus closely on what Turner (1992: 12) regards as
                         the prime object of contemporary anxiety in the ‘somatic society’ – the body.
                         Therefore, as Samuel Weber (1996: 127) proposes, ‘televised sports reconfirms
                         the individual body as focal point of a reality that television itself calls into
                         question. The body that appears in the televised sporting event is one that
                         accepts its limitations only in order to surpass them, in an infinite progress of
                         record-breaking and record-making’. Here again the anxious viewing subject is
                         seen as scrutinizing screen sports images  – especially the extraordinary per-
                         formances of athletic bodies – for signs of social and personal ‘truth’ (Davis
                         1995). In televised sport such linkages are made not only with non-sporting
                         matters (from the state of national morale to the health of the economy to
                         the quality of the national gene pool), but also between the media sports text
                         and other familiar types of text. As the action unfolds on screen, it becomes
                         recognizable as drama both on and off it.
                           It is useful, then, to appraise the media techniques and textual uses that turn
                         televised live sports action into television drama. Rose and Friedman (1997: 3),
                         using Siegfried Kracauer’s theory of distraction developed in the 1920s,
                         have proposed a particularly strong relationship between television sport and ‘a
                         uniquely masculine experience of spectatorship’ that questions the gendered
                         segregation of television viewing patterns. They argue that in television viewing
                         hierarchies, soap opera (especially of the daytime variety) tends to be
                         denigrated as ‘light’ entertainment for bored housewives, so that:

                           in their very structure, soaps habituate women to the ‘interruption, dis-
                           traction, and spasmodic toil’ [Modleski 1983: 71] which is characteristic
                           of housework. At the same time, by focusing the female spectator’s gaze
                           on others, encouraging her to read their needs, desires, and intentions
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