Page 35 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

24 • Sport, Media and Society

he was posed holding a dead bird’s head in front of his face, its beak framing his right
eye. The skull of the bird had caved in to reveal decaying brain matter, making an
evocative connection with the title of the magazine’s feature story, ‘Inside the Mind
of Roy Keane’ (2002). The text below the image suggested that Keane was ‘A Man
Possessed’ and promised ‘his most candid interview ever’.
The regularities which emerge in the style in which the sport celebrities are rep-
resented can be considered as a discursive formation. Analysis of this discursive
formation raises questions about the position of these sport celebrities within
discourses of gender, race and class—a position which, on the surface, appears
to confound received notions of the hypermasculinity accorded to sport stars within
contemporary culture. There is a link here with the observations made by Cook
(2000) in an article exploring discourses of masculinity in new Australian men’s
magazines. Cook (2000: 171) pointed to the ambiguities within the press coverage

of men’s health issues, finding ‘representation of even the archetypically tough and
resistant body (manual workers, sportsmen) overshadowed by penetrative, diagnos-
tic technologies (X-rays, cancer screening)’. For Cook (2000) there was a confl ict
in discourses of masculinity within ‘reports of regimes such as diet control, regular
prostate screening, or various invasive surgical techniques used for high-masculin-
ity sports-related injuries such as knee reconstruction or tendon repair’ (Cook 2000:

172). The conflict pertained to the cultural association of authoritative scientifi c
discourse with masculinity and their seemingly ‘unquestionable right to scope and
scalpel penetration of the body’s surface’ (Cook 2000: 172). This invasive, regula-

tory gaze identified by Foucault has further intensified with the development of

new visualising technologies. Yet, if the medical gaze has been associated with a
‘power ful masculinity’, then it has traditionally been the female body upon which
it has exercised its rights ‘to examine, define and surgically penetrate’ (Cook 2000:

172). However, in the representations Cook analysed, it was the unwilling fl esh
of male bodies which was subject to inspection by this invasive, masculine, medi-
cal gaze.
Cook examined three sites of representation of the male body: bodybuilding
magazines, men’s skin-care commodity marketing, and the surfi ng magazine Waves.
In each site, Cook found a range of compensatory textual strategies to deal with

the conflicting gender codings of the representations. For example, the body was
represented as a mechanistic cyborg in the bodybuilding press, partitioned into its
constitutive muscle groups. As a strategy to resist the ‘scopic medical penetration of
the body’s interior’, the bodybuilding press exteriorized anatomical detail, inscrib-
ing ‘ “soft” tissues onto the body’s “hard” surface’ (Cook 2000: 174). In another
example, the photographs in the ‘Slash of the Month’ feature in Waves magazine
(where readers send in pictures of gruesome wounds sustained while surfi ng) were
described as ‘trophy images: accounts of pain as its own inverse’, refocusing atten-
tion onto ‘the ultimate invulnerability of those very individuals who have reported
the wound’ (Cook 2000: 182).