Examining Identity in Sports Media

Heather Hundley, Andrew C. Billings

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781483342740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Including the work of top sports communication researchers, Examining Identity in Sports Media explores identity issues, including gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability, as well as the intersections within these various identity issues. This co-edited, twelve-chapter book investigates how various identity groups are framed, treated, affected, and shaped by a ubiquitous sports media, including television, magazines, film, the Internet, and newspapers. While other books may devote a chapter or section to issues of identity in sports media, this book offers a complete examination of identity from cover to cover, allowing identity variables to be both isolated and intermingled to capture how identity is negotiated within sports media platforms. Far more than a series of case studies, this book surveys the current state of the field while providing insight on future directions for identity scholarship in sports communication.

Examining Identity in Sports Media is ideal for undergraduate or graduate-level courses in Sports Communication, Sports Media, Media Criticism, Sports Sociology, Gender Communication, and Identity Politics.

1

Examining Identity in
Sports Media

Andrew C. Billings

Heather L. Hundley

In his 2006 best seller, The Long Tail, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson argues that niche consumption is en vogue within virtually every form of mass media. Gone are the days of water cooler programming in which shows like Friends and Seinfeld secured substantial swaths of television viewers; in their place we have shows with “buzz” that secure less than half the viewers that the top sitcoms once did, along with hundreds of cable channels that draw viewers by the thousands rather than millions. Music enthusiasts are less likely to listen to Top 40 music radio stations than they are to take advantage of the thousands of options specifically tailored to their tastes, e.g., downloading obscure, non-commercial music a dollar at a time. The cinema still has blockbusters, but it also features independent “art house” options that grow each year. Yet, within all of the niche markets that define 21st century media, sport permeates immense segments of American and international culture. The Super Bowl continues to be the largest single television rating of a given year, and competition between satellite radio and television companies is often largely won and lost based on who can secure the most desirable sports contracts. Certainly, this century has given rise to niche programming—such as the X Games or Ultimate Fighting Championship—yet these new events only supplement the still-uber-popular cornerstone sports within the sports cultural zeitgeist. For instance, even with all of baseball’s troubles, more people are attending the games than at any point in the long history of the game (Selig, 2007).

Dubbing major sports media events as “megasport” (those events that become part of a national fabric, such as the Indianapolis 500 on Memorial Day weekend or March Madness every spring), Eastman, Newton, and Pack (1996) explore the ramifications of an evermorepervasive sporting landscape in which millions (sometimes billions) of people experience a joint “reality” through the lens of an often singular mass media outlet. Such events represent a mosaic of political, social, and cultural import, offering commentary on issues beyond the directly observable athletic performances. For decades, scholars have devoted considerable attention and scrutiny to the exploration of identity, particularly interrogating how mediasport (see Wenner, 2006) enacts and portrays social divides and underprivileged groups. Conclusions, of course, vary—ranging from arguments that sport (and the media surrounding it) contributes to and even exacerbates identity divisions to studies that argue sport can enact social changes that aid the advancement of underprivileged and underrepresented groups within society.

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY IN SPORTS MEDIA

The examination of identity has a difficult and often convoluted history within academe at least partly because of its hybrid localization in scholarship. Scholars in disciplines from sociology to women’s studies to global studies all rightly focus some of their works in this area. Disciplines such as kinesiology and sports management examine identity issues as well, partly because of the underlying belief that sport shapes society as much as society shapes sport, but also because many sporting entities routinely resist more progressive thinking about identity issues, making the organizations (and the individuals involved in them) ripe for examination (see Maguire, 1999, for an overview of identity in sport on a global scale).

However, it is hard to separate the negotiation of identity from how it is conveyed and shaped by media entities, and it is equally as difficult to separate media influence from the core communication messages employed by these same sports media. Thus, communication research can often be referred to as “Ground Zero” for understanding the complex messages that mediasport imparts. This book aims to provide some common understanding of the specific communicative messages embedded in media coverage while also serving as a bridge to the understanding of other disciplines that study identity and sport from sociological and psychological standpoints.

Stuart Hall (1996) claims that “identities are constructed within, not outside discourse” (p. 4); as such, these identities are duplicitous, ubiquitous, and continually in flux. These issues are important sources for learning and reinforcing social beliefs as they are salient contexts for investigating issues of identity, including ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability/disability, and more. Consequently, sport and media inscribe numerous implicit and explicit ideologies that saturate our culture. Using a wide variety of theoretical and methodological constructs (e.g., surveys, content analyses, ethnographic research, field work, or other appropriate quantitative, qualitative, or rhetorical approaches), this edited collection examines various media to expose how the intersection of sport and media construct, reinforce, and/or perpetuate perceptions of human identities. Morris (2006) articulates the societal shaping of identity issues, using anecdotes to explain how people conceive their perception of identity—both in terms of self and otherness. The amount of media scholarship on identity tends to coordinate with the degree in which the identity form is directly observable. For instance, gender is relatively easy to note (and, hence, code, study, and analyze), while the sexuality of a person is obviously not as easily determined unless it is overtly articulated. Additionally, some discussions of identity are more ubiquitous than others. Jon Entine’s (2000) examination of race, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, illustrates how issues of race and ethnicity permeate virtually any participant or consumer of sports media. In contrast, an identity issue such as (dis)ability only percolated in discussion after golfer Casey Martin sued the PGA Tour in his desire to use a golf cart at tournaments (Cherney, 2003). Otherwise this discussion of identity is primarily nonexistent in research making assumptions that sport and ability coalesce as a naturalized construct.

Scholars have a pragmatic tendency for isolating identity variables, particularly those that can be most readily recognized. As Kelby Halone mentions in Chapter 12, merely examining six identity variables (hardly an exhaustive list) amounts to over one thousand cells of potential examination. Thus, some scholars (e.g., Billings & Angelini, 2007; Billings & Eastman, 2002, 2003) have attempted to provide foundational analyses of gender, ethnicity, and nationality as singular variables that later can be amalgamated, while other scholars (e.g. Billings, Angelini, & Eastman, 2008; Boyd, 1997; Hauck, 2006) focus on the complex intermingled roles of identity within singular sports case studies. Both approaches are useful if not foundational to the more complex understanding of identity that must be addressed in the 21st century.

Identity politics (see Mohanty, Alcoff, Hames-Garcia, & Moya, 2005; Nicholson & Seidman, 1996), which first became part of the public consciousness in the 1970s, was largely an attempt to offer increased opportunities for inequities provided for certain underprivileged, underrepresented, or underutilized groups of people, most commonly in terms of racial and gender biases as a response to the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism. Such conceptions have expanded both in terms of scope and goal orientation over the subsequent decades, noting that hegemony entrenches notions of difference depending on cultural, social, and political contexts and understandings. Most notably, identity has been more self-denoted, suggesting a negotiation of who a group self-identifies as belonging. Recently, scholars (Hogg & Reid, 2006) have combined postulations of social identity (Tajfel, 1972; Tajfel & Turner, 1986) and self-categorization (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Riecher, & Wetherell, 1987) to argue that group “norms” are conceived through the negotiation of these issues.

Social norming provides the impetus for examining not only media content and effects as they relate to identity but also the inherent tie to mediasport (Wenner, 2006), as sports are consumed by millions of television viewers, radio audiences, newspaper readers, magazine subscribers, and Internet users. For instance, the two largest world television spectacles (Olympics and World Cup) draw global audiences in the billions (Gordon & Sibson, 1998; IOC Marketing Fact File, 2008), numbers that dwarf the ratings of perceived American mega-programs such as American Idol, which attracts nearly 28 million weekly regular viewers (Robertson, 2008).

Because of the ubiquitous nature of mediasport, the opportunity also exists for billions of people to be exposed to new cultures, ideas, and social perceptions that are inherently linked with beliefs about identity including gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, aging, religion, and many other ways in which a person self-identifies. Sometimes this exposure comes in the form of witnessing a race competition in which people rarely interact within their local communities (take, for instance, a person growing up in a small, monolithically White U.S. town who also is a fan of professional basketball); at other times exposure consists of new conceptions of identity groups in which they already interact (take for instance a Middle Eastern perspective on Olympic beach volleyball “uniforms” and their relation to women’s issues). The direct effects, i.e., the hypodermic needle, approach to media is certainly not being endorsed here; however, it is also not such a logical leap to believe that people who follow national and international sports in the media also are (re)formulating their own beliefs about identity groups: the grand “negotiation” in which we refer that is perpetually in flux and constantly updated based on personal experiences.

SCHOLARSHIP ON IDENTITY

This book explores issues of identity within mediasport—conceptions of gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc.—without the use of dichotomous value-laden notions of good/bad or right/wrong. The chapters within the book utilize a wide variation of theoretical constructs and methodological approaches, examining one or more issues of identity and analyzing how mediasport holds the power to shade our judgments about people. We contend that identity is an extensive negotiation that is always changing, always being interpreted and reinterpreted, and always contested by various entities. Whether the context of the mediated situation is a movie, television program, series of newspaper commentaries, or other mass media formats, the negotiation of identity can be addressed using different epistemological approaches with the underlying theme being that social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) can be influenced by the way mediasport frames or sets an agenda (see Goffman, 1974; McCombs & Shaw, 1972).

Notions of identity are intermingled and interminably complex to the point that many media gatekeepers have indicated they let the visual image do the work (see Billings, 2008). As a result, gender identity is reduced to biological differences (such as breasts or an Adam’s apple) and reinforced with social constructions (wearing makeup, long hair, and gender-based clothing) as evidenced in visual cues; ethnicity is typically reduced to perceived skin pigment; and sexual orientation is left to a viewer’s increasingly flawed conceptions of “gaydar,” based on stereotypes of effeminate men or masculine women. This book delves into many of these issues with fervor and a sense of detail that is necessary to gain even a rudimentary understanding of what constitutes self or otherness. Without question, our examination of identity variables is not exhaustive but only scratches the surface on what should be a dense dialogue about how sport, media, and identity triangulate a unique nexus of investigation that shapes everyday actions and understandings.

Many studies of identity have functioned as “scrutinizations” of social divides, essentially determining ways in which we divide ourselves biologically, culturally, socially, and politically and then uncovering inequities in media treatment by these different partitions. The most objective form of division has also been the most investigated: the gender variable. While differences between sex (largely defined biologically) and gender (largely defined within social constructions of masculine and feminine notions and expectations) have been discussed for decades, research has largely employed biological divisions because sport, in its very nature, enacts men’s and women’s sport as two separate entities. Even in events such as Wimbledon (tennis) championships or the Olympics in which both men and women compete, the events are divided by gender and function primarily as separate events. As such, the preponderance of mediasport studies has examined how entrenched notions of masculinity often result in less prominence and respect for women’s sport. Advancements for women’s sport have occurred in terms of opportunities to compete; O’Reilly and Cahn (2007) describe the post-Title IX era as a “spectacular transformation . . . in which the right to play sports and receive resources commensurate with men’s sports is rarely disputed” (pp. xi–xii). Nonetheless, media coverage of women’s sport has not increased in salience. For instance, people can find television channels highlighting women’s sports, yet they tend to be less prominent than similar outlets for men. Where men’s athletics frequently are aired on the big four broadcasting networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX) along with the cable network ESPN, women’s sports often are relegated to secondary channels; for instance, men’s golf is routinely offered on broadcast networks such as CBS, NBC, and ABC, while women’s golf is usually located on the Golf Channel or ESPN2. Studies have also shown that the discourse used by media gatekeepers is substantially different between men and women, often serving to diminish women’s athletic achievements.

Another prime area of mediasport scholarship on identity has been the examination of race or ethnicity. Again, even agreeing upon common definitions of race and ethnicity is a yeoman’s task in many ways, as people who consume mediasport largely operationally define race as skin color, while other scholars argue for much more complex unpacking of this identity variable (Carrington, 2007). Despite increased comprehensive understanding of ethnicity and the problems inherent with artificial assemblage of identity groupings, sportscasters and other media gatekeepers largely continue to describe the action with stereotypical Black/White categorical distinctions, often resulting in an amalgamation of disparate ethnicities into overarching categories defined solely by one’s skin color. Thus, athletes such as Fijian golfer Vijay Singh, Cablinasian golfer Tiger Woods, and French basketball player Tony Parker are frequently all subjected to biases applied to “Black” athletes even though each has a distinctively different ethnic background.

New York University sociologist Troy Duster argues that race is predominantly a cultural invention, postulating that “if you believe these differences are real, why wouldn’t you slip into the thinking that performance, in the classroom or on the basketball court, is also explainable by genetic or biological differences?” (Dokou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Examining Identity in Sports Media
• 2. The Rene Portland Case: New Homophobia and Heterosexism in Women’s Sports Coverage
• 3. Exploring the Influence of Mediated Beauty: Competitive Female Athletes’ Perceptions of Ideal Beauty in Athletes and Other Women
• 4. Making Masculinity and Framing Femininity: FIFA, Soccer, and World Cup Web Sites
• 5. Gendered Sports Dirt: Interrogating Sex and the Single Beer Commercial
• 6. Hegemonic Masculinity and the Rogue Warrior: Lance Armstrong as (Symbolic) American
• 7. Do You Believe in Nationalism? American Patriotism in Miracle
• 8. The Whiteness of Sport Media/Scholarship
• 9. A Content Analysis of Racial Representations of NBA Athletes on Sports Illustrated Magazine Covers, 1970–2003
• 10. Sporting Images of Disability: Murderball and the Rehabilitation of Masculine Identity
• 11. The Effects of Outcome of Mediated and Live Sporting Events on Sports Fans’ Self- and Social Identities
• 12. The Institutional(ized) Nature of Identity in and Around Sport(s)
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors