Suchergebnisse

This study demonstrates how the metaphor of the panopticon, a particular prison structure that renders prisoners self-monitoring, offers a useful way of understanding the mechanisms that inculcate an unrealistic body ideal in women. Foucault's notion of panopticism and a critical approach are used to show how textual mechanisms in two issues of Shape magazine—a women's fitness glossy—invite a continual self-conscious body monitoring in women. An analysis of two panoptic mechanisms, "The Efficacy of Initiative" and "Feeling Good Means Looking Good," is supplemented with a discussion of Foucault's notion of confession/shame, and specific features of Shape' s discourse are analyzed for their panoptic content.

This essay looks beyond the focus on team names and mascots to the larger issues of naming and the use o f language in sports. It is argued that the language of sports backfires on women through "rigged discourse" that perpetuates a structural bias that naturalizes men as superior and women as deficient. This argument is supported by the relative paucity of coverage of women in sports and the reliance on visual stereotyping of women in sports coverage. Gendered and racial hierachies of naming in sports are highlighted as examples of the embedded biases of language that can be changed and affect existing power relations.

Analyzing women's fitness/beauty magazines for advice on diet and exercise reveals a range of contradictions, the focus of this research. Contradictory diet and fitness discourses signify our culture's paradoxical expectations for women's bodies, ensuring that virtually no woman can measure up. In short, the production of feminine bodies is rigged for failure. Starting with Spitzack's (1990) initial insights into the "aesthetics of health" and fat as disease, we explicate, through textual analysis, the underlying principles of eight essential contradictions in diet and fitness discourses (e.g., diets are freeing), principles that both necessitate and enable the discursive net in which contemporary women are ensnared. Comparisons are drawn between the themes that Spitzack elaborated and those uncovered by our examination 20 years later. Connections are made to the obesity "epidemic" and implications are discussed. Future research should investigate the actual interpretation and utilization of these contradictory messages among magazine readers.

As of August 2003, 15.2 million American adults participated in fantasy sports. Fantasy sport allows online participants to assume the roles of owners, managers, and coaches of professional teams, building franchises and experiencing every phase of the process (i.e., drafting athletes, trading players, signing free agents, submitting lineups). Despite its great popularity, there is a paucity of research investigating fantasy sports. Taking a pro-feminist approach, the current study examines the appeals and experiences of participants and the audience to whom fantasy sport leagues are directed. Using personal observations, textual analysis, and focus group responses of three male fantasy leaguers, the current study indicates that fantasy sports reinforce hegemonic ideologies in sport spectatorship, emphasizing authority, sports knowledge, competition, male-bonding, and traditional gender roles.

American women have flooded into sports at all levels in the last several decades—but you would never know it from watching the evening news.

This study of televised sports news on three network affiliates and ESPN's SportsCenter extends and expands on earlier studies in 1990 and 1994 to examine the quality and quantity of televised coverage of women's sports.The dominant finding over the decade spanned by the three studies is the lack of change. Women's sports are still "missing in action" on the nightly news, and are even less visible on SportsCenter. Textual analysis revealed some change over the decade, but mostly showed continued gender asymmetries in televised sports news and highlight shows: (a) the choice to devote a considerable proportion of the already-thin coverage of women's sports to humorous feature stories on nonserious women's sports, and (b) the (often humorous) sexual objectification of athlete women and nonathlete women. The authors conclude with a discussion of how and why television has continued to cautiously follow, rather than lead or promote, the growth in girls' and women's sports.

This research compares and analyzes the verbal commentary of televised coverage of two women's and men's athletic events: the "final four" of the women's and men's 1989 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournaments and the women's and men's singles, women's and men's doubles, and the mixed-doubles matches of the 1989 U.S. Open tennis tournament. Although we found less overtly sexist commentary than has been observed in past research, we did find two categories of difference: (1) gender marking and (2) a "hierarchy of naming" by gender and, to a certain extent, by race. These differences are described and analyzed in light of feminist analyses of gendered language. It is concluded that televised sports commentary contributes to the construction of gender and racial hierarchies by marking women's sports and women athletes as "other," by infantilizing women athletes (and, to a certain extent, male athletes of color), and by framing the accomplishments of women athletes ambivalently.

This article, based upon a comparative analysis of televised coverage of the "Final Four" of the women's and men's 1993 NCAA basketball tournaments, sheds light on some of the mechanisms through which an "audience preference" is socially constructed for men's sports over women's sports. First, we examine the temporal framing of the women's and men's tournaments by the sports/media complex. Next, we present a comparative description of the visual and verbal televised presentation of the women's and men's games. On the basis of these comparisons, we argue that the sports/media complex actively constructs audiences that are likely to see the men's Final Four as a dramatic, historic event that they simply "must" watch, while fans are likely to see the women's Final Four as a nonevent or, at best, as just another game. This, we argue, serves to situate viewers of men's sports at a nexus of power and pleasure, while simultaneously containing the potential challenge that female athleticism poses to hegemonic masculinity. Finally, we discuss, in light of socialist‐feminist theory, the potentially contradictory outcomes of recent hints of increased televised coverage of women's basketball.

Through the methodology of textual analysis, this study discusses how women's fitness magazine texts equate physical health with beauty and how this equation is achieved. Michel Foucault's ideas on power and discipline and Herbert Marcuse's ideas on co-optation are employed to inform the research. The study discusses how texts often use empowerment, or feminist, ideology to convey to readers that exercise and fitness pursuits, when used to achieve physical change that improve a reader's physical attractiveness, are ways to empower themselves in all aspects of life. By co-opting feminist ideals, fitness texts encourage readers to concentrate on their physical selves, specifically physical beauty, not health, at the expense of achieving true physical health and gains in the social arena.

This study used both qualitative and quantitative analyses to discern whether the narratives, metaphors, framing devices, and production practices in televised international athletic events differed by the race, ethnicity, or nationality of athletes. About 340 hours of videotapes of 7 televised international athletic events were used to study key aspects of production: (a) commentator descriptions of 161 athletes in 31 competitions, (b) 30 personal interviews drawn from 3 of the events under study, and (c) 5 opening and closing segments that commonly unify themes and metaphors and that produce the look of an event. Six major findings include the following: (a) efforts were made to provide fair treatment of athletes, (b) the treatment of race and ethnicity varied across productions, (c) little evidence of negative representations of Black athletes, (d) representations of Asian athletes drew on cultural stereotypes, (e) representations of Latino-Hispanic athletes were mixed, and (f) nationalistic bias was evident.