Page 16 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Introduction: Interacting with Media Sport • 5

masculine and the feminine, ‘between femininity and sport, between Britishness and
Asianness, between parent and child’. National identity is also encoded into the sport
media. Research, such as Blain and O’Donnell’s (1998) interrogation of the repre-
sentation of football in the European media, has suggested that the way a nation me-

diates sport can be understood as a signifier of that nation’s identity. Certain sports
become more associated with national identity than others. In the United Kingdom,
the dominance of football in the media is connected with that sport’s particular ca-
pacity to inspire the nation—one of the reasons why many of our examples in this
book reference football.
Tolvhed (2007: 1) argued that while ‘sport, and especially the Olympic arena,
is very much focused upon the nation and competition between nations’, the sport
media also ‘puts the body in focus—how bodily capabilities and limitations are con-
structed in different ways’. As a result, scholars have increasingly sought to highlight
the intersecting dimensions of social identity in the sport media. Wensing and Bruce
(2003), for example, analysed the representation of Cathy Freeman during the Syd-
ney 2000 Olympics and argued that Freeman’s importance as a symbol of national
conciliation resulted in a disruption to the media’s usual emphasis on the gender of
female athletes. The case of Cathy Freeman was shown to highlight the way that
national identity intersects with gender, class, race and sexuality in the sport media,
constructing a complex and shifting set of identity codes. The analysis of mediated
sport is a way of exploring the changing formations of power and social identity.

Sport, Media and Embodiment

The sporting body has become an object of ‘contemplation and improvement, in
the spectacular discourses of the mass media’ (Horne 2006: 2). Much of the work
on sporting embodiment has drawn on the work Bourdieu and Foucault. Bourdieu
(1979) theorised the interrelationships between the social order, particularly class,
and embodiment. Bodies develop, acquire meaning and attain value with respect to
socially constructed ‘tastes’ and individuals’ desire for social distinction. For Bour-
dieu (1979), the slender, healthy body valued by the dominant classes was a refl ec-
tion of their investment of time and money, while the more instrumental relationship
to the body preferred by members of the working class was linked to their limited

leisure time and financial resources. The mediation of bodies may link particular
sports with lifestyle and the impetus towards defining and maintaining class-based

distinctions. An important objective for analysts of the sport media is to unpack the
ways that meanings are constituted through the address to an imagined audience with
an assumption of particular tastes, interests and embodied subjectivities.
Foucault’s work has been widely used within the sociology of sport to explore
‘knowledge formations and systems of power that regulate corporeal practices’ (Rail
and Harvey 1995: 165). Power and the disciplining of bodies operate through the
normalisation of particular forms of embodiment and practices of self-regulation.