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Analysing Media Sport • 25

There is a correspondence between the representations Cook described and
the invasive, medical imaging of the bodies of Best, Beckham and Keane. Cook
pointed to a clash of competing forms of powerful masculinity within the represen-
tations in her analysis. Similarly, the powerful, active bodies of professional
sportsmen—representing what may be, to many, the ultimate in masculinity—were
subjected to the lens of another, contrasting version of masculine authority. Yet,
while the seemingly vulnerable bodies of these sport stars are laid bare for the X-ray
eyes of the media, there is no exteriorizing strategy to compensate: the injuries and
illnesses of the players remain irresistibly interior, hidden. Accusations that players
are faking injuries or conversely hiding their seriousness remain testimony to the in-
visibility of the complaints that mysteriously take the convalescing player away from
the action. The media’s almost obsessive focus on injury and ‘unhealthy’ lifestyle
(e.g. http://www.physioroom.com produces a table of English Premier League inju-
ries) testifies to an unrelenting desire to penetrate beneath the visible surface of the

players’ bodies. This resulting media framing of the sporting body might provoke a
range of feelings in viewers. In the next section, we turn to the capacity of the media
to produce visceral effects in the sports spectator.

Affect and Media Sport

The focus so far on the signs and discourses surrounding sport celebrities draws
attention to the importance of sporting bodies in the sport media. Sport is a highly
physical experience: playing sport is an embodied activity, and it arouses embod-
ied responses in its spectators. To consider media sport to consist only of signs or
discourses which are cognitively decoded by knowing subjects risks missing some
of its power. Watching sport can entail total absorption in the competition, with the
events on the screen having the capacity to move one physically—from the edge of
one’s seat, hands tensely clamped to one’s mouth, to leaping in the air, shouting,
punching the air and even crying. This is more than simply understanding the mean-
ing of what is happening. This is a bodily response beyond meaning.
Clough (2007) suggested that there has been an ‘affective turn’ in a range of aca-
demic disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Thinkers have begun to
focus on the power of affect to move us in ways that combine body and mind. For
example, Grossberg (1992) used the term affect to explain the success of the con-
nections forged between popular conservative politics and postmodern culture in the
United States post-1970. He understood affect as an embodied response to some-
thing. For Grossberg, affect was not simply an emotional response, but embraced
the kind of relationship to the world conveyed by terms like commitment, will and
passion. Affect describes our investment in something, a particular experience or
practice, like a sport spectacle. According to Grossberg (1992), affect could be ‘the
missing term in an adequate account of ideology’ because it captures a sense of an