Glitter, Bronzer and Power

The New York Times Magazine recently posted a stunning visual piece on women’s tennis that features a video gallery of the world’s top players hitting a ball in slow motion. In some ways, the piece takes us a step forward in depictions of female athletes. Rather than simply showing them smiling while holding a racket, we see these women hitting the ball with incredible force --muscles rippling and all, an image only enhanced by the extreme slow motion video.

However, with the exception of seeing these athletes in actual “action,” the piece is more a re-tread on the old theme of emphasizing beauty over athleticism when depicting female athletes. Taken in its full context, the piece unfortunately minimizes the displays of exertion and maximizes sexuality and beauty.

For instance, Serena Williams, arguably the most powerful woman in tennis today, is seen smacking an unseen ball with ferocious intensity. However, that ball explodes in an avalanche of glitter in front of Williams, who is wearing a sequined dress, body glitter and flowing hair. Like Williams, many of the players are wearing body glitter or bronzer while wearing nightclub-style dresses, several not-so-subtle markers of femininity.

Perhaps most troubling is the way several of the athletes’ bodies are literally chopped up, with the camera focusing only on their legs, abs or breasts. For example, viewers see Samantha Stosur’s face for only a split second as the camera zooms into her breasts as she hits the ball, her head literally cut out of the frame. The video of Victoria Azarenka starts at her shoes and slowly pans up her legs, bare stomach and breasts, mimicking the way a film director might shoot a scene to indicate a man “checking out” a woman. The image of her hitting the ball happens only at the very end, and even then her long, loose and untied hair flows around her face in an image closer to what we might see in Sports Illustrated swimsuit than at Wimbledon. In fact, nearly all the women have loose, untied and flowing hair, another common feminine marker.

Even the title of the piece – “The Beauty of Power” – hints at the discomfort we have at a cultural level of associating women with raw physical power. By labeling these images as not just “power” images, but “beautiful images of power,” viewers are reminded that the players are beautiful [read: feminine] and thus “normal women” despite the displays of muscles and exertion.

In these ways, the players are offered as objects of sexual desire, and presented to the viewer from the perspective of the heterosexual male gaze. By doing so, the focus is put on the women’s sexuality rather than on the displays of strength that the camera also captures. Ultimately, despite the video of female athletes in action, the piece is an overall disappointment, especially given the potential it had to present the physical power and athleticism of the women’s tennis elite.

--Erin Whiteside

Study finds troubling coverage of Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius

A new study by researchers associated with Penn State's John Curley Center for Sports Journalism examines print coverage of Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius' quest to compete in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The study, recently published in the International Journal of Sport Communication, provides a textual analysis of New York Times and Time magazine coverage of the sprinter’s case. In January 2007, the IAAF (track’s governing body) barred Pistorius from competition, arguing that his “Cheetah” prosthetics provided a “clear mechanical advantage.” Four months later, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned the IAAF decision, citing a lack of conclusive evidence as well as new findings that refuted the governing body’s ruling; however, Pistorius ultimately failed to qualify for the Beijing games.

Drawing on Foucault's ideas about the body, this study finds that media discourses surrounding Pistorius reinforced “an unjust but seemingly natural body hierarchy” (p. 303), perpetuating a view of the able body as the cultural sporting ideal. Deviant bodies, like Pistorius’ and those of other athletes with disabilities, are constrained through discursive mechanisms and institutional structures of biopower that function through the knowledge and regulation of sporting bodies.

While some media coverage offered progressive perspectives on disability and sport, this study finds that media discourses concerning Pistorius generally revolved around issues of fairness in competition. The New York Times, for instance, suggested that Pistorius’ performance begs the question of whether he’s “too abled.” As the authors of this study argue, though, “[T]he too abled label reinforces body hierarchies rather than challenging them. It is not that Pistorius was too fast or too talented. It is that he, like other athletes with disabilities, is too different” (p. 303).

According to the study, the discourses of fairness in competition (a powerful normative value of sport) positioned Pistorius as deviant—a threat to the values, integrity, even very nature of sport. Other themes identified by the researchers reflect this apparent threat: a privileging of a medical view of disability (rather than the more progressive social view); descriptions of prosthetics that reflect cultural assumptions about “normal” bodies; and particularly troubling use of dangerous “cyborg” imagery.

This analysis provides a lens on the role of discursive mechanisms in the classification and categorization of bodies that don’t conform to a seemingly natural, but ultimately unjust body hierarchy. Media discourses concerning Oscar Pistorius, as “contested sites for meanings inscribed on the body,” reflect this tension (p. 288).

--T.C. Corrigan