The predominance of the male ‘Other’ on the pages of contemporary sport and leisure print media has become increasingly ordinary over the last decade or so. Many subjugated ethnic groups have utilised sport and leisure stages to challenge the fallacies of psychological and biological inferiority and other ill-founded vestiges of nineteenth-century bio-racist discourses (Carrington, 2002; Hylton, 2009; Messner, 1993). Evidently, whilst ‘black’ females remain underrepresented in media spaces (Knoppers and Elling, 2004), their male counterparts, particularly those of African-Caribbean heritage, have accessed the realm of the popular en masse (Carrington, 2002). The mere presence of these men no longer seems to threaten the status quo of modern Western social democracies; in fact, images of African-Caribbean males are often held as exemplars of neo-liberalism and its fetish for championing quasi-multiculturalism. Indeed, according to some, media consumers only have to open a magazine (Hylton, 2009), switch on the television (Carrington, 2002) or visit the cinema (Giardina, 2003) to experience “a bit of the Other”. Before one is falsely charmed by some gloriously liberating homily of absolute social improvement, it is important to consider the instrumentalism of these developments more critically. This paper therefore aims to address the implications of racialisation in the context of the sport and leisure media and its role in representing athletic bodies in highly stylised and particularised ways. It will be argued that the racialisation of ethnically differing athletic bodies, through modes of photographic and digital manipulation, delivers messages that disadvantage particular ethnic groups, whilst advantaging others. Throughout, racialisation is conceptualised as a process of “categorisation, a representational process of defining an Other, usually, but not exclusively, somatically” (Miles and Brown, 2003: p. 101). For the purpose of this paper, I employ this conception to foreground the negative implications of racialisation.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)