Subverting the Male Gaze in Televised Sports Performances Shannon L

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2005 Unsportsman-like Conduct: Subverting the Male Gaze in Televised Sports Performances Shannon L. Walsh

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF THEATRE

UNSPORTSMAN-LIKE CONDUCT: SUBVERTING THE MALE GAZE IN TELEVISED SPORTS PERFORMANCES

SHANNON L. WALSH

A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2005

The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Shannon L. Walsh defended on April 6, 2005.

______Carrie Sandahl Professor Directing Thesis

______Mary Karen Dahl Committee Member

______Laura Edmondson Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

To my husband and loving family.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would most especially like to acknowledge Carrie Sandahl for her feedback on this project over the last two years. You gave me invaluable guidance and advice as I constructed this thesis. I could not have asked for a better advisor or friend.

I would also like to acknowledge Debby Thompson. I wouldn’t be where I am without you. Thank you for helping me discover my love for theatre studies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... vi INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Description of Project...... 3 Theoretical Underpinnings and Methodology ...... 4 Traditional Representations of Women in Sports Narratives ...... 9 Chapter Breakdown...... 14

1. KICKIN' IT TO THE MAN: TRANSGRESSIVE INTERVENTIONS BY WOMEN 19

Transgressive Athletic Bodies ...... 21 Sporting Reporting ...... 24 Female "Lookers"...... 28

2. SISTER ACT: THE DOUBLE-BIND OF THE MALE IMPRIAL GAZE ... 35

Stereotypical Representations of Black Women...... 36 Resisting Representations...... 41

3. COMING OUT OF THE LOCKER: LESBIAN (IN)VISIBILITY IN SPORT 50

The Lesbian Boogeywoman Stereotype...... 51 Invisibility Politics ...... 54 Visibly Resisting Compulsory Heterosexuality...... 58 Reinforcing Heterosexuality...... 61 Lesbian Spectatorship...... 62

CONCLUSION ...... 66

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 68

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 73

ABSTRACT

This thesis takes as its foundational assumption that televised sporting events are not mere documentations of games as they unfold, but carefully crafted performances whose conventions are geared to its ideal spectator – the white heterosexual man. While this assertion is axiomatic, it does not explain televised sports enormous popularity amongst women. According to a 1999 article in The New York Times on the Web of the 130 million viewers that watched the Super Bowl that year, 43 percent were women (Kane par. 24). Why do women want to watch a performance that is so clearly geared to white, heterosexual men? According to one recent editorial in the Elizabethtown College paper, “we watch for the “tight ends,” and I do not mean the field position. There is just something special about tight, padded spandex football pants. Amen” (Jacobs par. 7). Corporate sponsors of sports such as football have seen the statistics and are increasingly gearing their commercials towards women. This acknowledgement within the televised performances of sport lends a new type clout to women viewers. Now that sport programmers and advertisers know women are present, they need to keep them tuned in. As a white, heterosexual female gazer, I find myself being hailed by commercials within the sports narrative with increasing frequency, not only with the products being pitched, but in how they are marketed. I also find this hailing at work within game coverage through the inclusion of female sportscasters and the increasing coverage of women’s sports. Male athletes are beginning to occupy positions as sex objects as well, as the media focus on their athletic bodies. Each of these shifts indicates the broadening of the sports narrative to include multiple identities and subjectivities. However, the unequal power dynamics working in the sports narrative often serve to recontain these identities and subjectivities within the confines of white hetero-male gazing structures. Female viewers, although hailed occasionally, often find themselves complicit in the objectification of women working within the narrative. Women’s bodies continue to be common currency in sports. Although women’s sports are becoming increasingly visible, they are often ghettoized in non-mainstream magazines such as Sport Illustrated for Women, websites, such as ESPN Page 2, and television, such as ESPN2. Sporting narrative representations also materialize through the eye of the camera, and often multiple cameras, which direct and exercise control over the view of the female spectator. These cameras exercise surveillance over transgressive

gazes and actions. Transgression and interventions by multiple subjectivities into established white hetero-male gazing structures are quite often recontained. This recontainment apparatus is never quite absolute, producing gaps through which resistance is a possibility. An analysis of sports reveals an active site for feminist performance, particularly performances that resist the constraints of the male gaze. These radical oppositions are performed by female athletes and broadcasters within the televised sporting performance, as well as by the female spectators watching the televised event. These two areas of performance, from within the representation and from the outside looking in, resist the male gaze in separate, but complementary ways. Representations of female athletes and broadcasters’ bodies within the sporting narrative work as a type of textual performance that refuses the objectifying gaze of the male spectator, while female spectators watching representations of the narrative may use what bell hooks refers to as an oppositional gaze that challenges and deconstructs the narrative’s attempts to cater to the male gaze. I will use the tools of feminist performance analysis, cultural studies, media studies, and sport studies to explore how these performances are pitched to the white heterosexual male spectator and how heterosexual women, women of color, and lesbians within the structures of patriarchal sport trouble the dominant constructions and readings of sporting narrative representations.

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INTRODUCTION

TROUBLING SPORTS MASCULINE HETEROSEXUAL MATRIX

In the world of professional football, Monday Night Football is king, a microcosm of the Super Bowl appearing across the United States on a weekly basis. Monday nights during football season feature only one game, allowing it to be broadcast nationally and attracting the most skilled broadcasting performers. I found this skill to be lacking while watching the first Monday night game of the 2003 season, when I was dismayed by the exotic and objectified appearance of the new sideline reporter, Lisa Guererro. She was dressed in a pastel purple chiffon dress that hit above her knees with a matching scarf that flew up with the slightest movement. Her long, excessively styled dark hair flowed over her right shoulder. To add to the effrontery of this exoticized image, her reports were dull, short, and lacked confidence. As a female spectator I was disappointed by this image, which made me feel complicit in the objectification. I began to pay careful attention to the way women are represented in future football viewings, in beer commercials, shots of cheerleaders, and women in pre-game shows. I found myself in a similar position to Jill Dolan’s theatre spectator who see women relegated to supporting roles that enable the more important action of the male protagonist. She sees attractive women performers made-up and dressed to seduce or be seduced by the male lead. While the men are generally active and involved, the women seem marginal and curiously irrelevant, except as a tacit support system or as decoration that enhances and directs the pleasure of the male spectator’s gaze. (2) I began to instinctively deconstruct these images, analyze them, and confront them utilizing what I would come to learn has been variously called an oppositional, a deviant gaze, or a resistant reading.1 Along with these gazing practices, I also took notice of images that I found visually pleasurable and others that disrupted and troubled the masculine heterosexual matrix in which they exist. This thesis documents my explorations of these representations. The heterosexual white male is the assumed consumer of most televised sport. As a female football fan, I am continuously stunned by the lack of voice for female spectators, broadcasters, and athletes within the larger sports narrative, including televised coverage, and

popular press writings. Popular culture is full of tales of the young boy's first visit to Wrigley Field. Male sports commentators fill dead-time during games with clever quips and sports tales from their youth. It is rare that a perspective other than that of the white male heterosexual is heard within the larger field of the sport narrative. Being a sports fan and being anything but a heterosexual man is often difficult, but not impossible. The consistent perpetuation of common, demeaning stereotypes of women and ethnic minorities within this narrative forces marginalized spectators to read beyond its surface white phallocentrism. Sports scholars have long analyzed this masculine dominance. Sport has often been 2 thought of as a training ground for the military, another patriarchal domain. Sport is also considered ritual rehearsal in “becoming a man.” Many sports allegedly prepare a man for the real world of competition and confrontation. As sports scholar David Whitson explains, these competitions are a "narrative of pitting oneself against an individual on the other side and prevailing in the contest, dominating and subduing one's opponent" (358). Many articles and issues surrounding sport address this tendency toward overt violence and its relation to socially constructed masculinity. These fortifications around male sport are strong, but recently many of these metaphors of masculine confrontation and competition are being complicated and troubled by women’s presence within sport. While many sports scholars have explored the performance of sexuality and gender within sports narratives, performance studies scholars have neglected to analyze sports in any sustained effort. In Richard Schechner’s textbook Performance Studies: An Introduction he continually includes sport under the rather large performance studies umbrella, but tends to use sport as an analogy for theatrical practices rather than applying performance analysis to sports.3 His examinations also tend to view sports as a form of spectacle, an area that tends to be rather marginalized within theatrical scholarship. Other performance studies scholars also address connection between theatre and sport. Robert Rinehart’s book on connections between sports and the avant-garde focuses heavily on fringe sports rather than mainstream sports, and acknowledges his lack of focus on issues of gender and/or sexuality. Given performance studies’ interest in gender performance and theatricality or spectacle, sports studies is a ripe area of inquiry that has been strangely neglected. Furthermore, scholarly interventions into sports’ representational practices would challenge its hegemony. For example, sports scholar Lois Bryson asserts that "[s]ports is a powerful institution through which male hegemony is

constructed and reconstructed and it is only through understanding and confronting these processes that we can hope to break this domination" (47). This power is only becoming stronger as corporate interests and media add to the commercial sporting frenzy. In this thesis, I hope to expose some of the ways that sports’ white hetero-male domination is manifests itself through the sporting narrative, and address possibilities for female transgression and intervention into the traditional gazing structures of sport.

Description of Project

structures. Female viewers, although hailed occasionally, often find themselves complicit in the objectification of women working within the narrative. Women’s bodies continue to be common currency in sports. Although women’s sports are becoming increasingly visible, they are often ghettoized in non-mainstream magazines such as Sport Illustrated for Women, websites, such as ESPN Page 2, and television, such as ESPN2. Sporting narrative representations also materialize through the eye of the camera, and often multiple cameras, which direct and exercise control over the view of the female spectator. These cameras exercise surveillance over transgressive gazes and actions. Transgression and interventions by multiple subjectivities into established white hetero-male gazing structures are quite often recontained. This recontainment apparatus is never quite absolute, producing gaps through which resistance is a possibility. An analysis of sports reveals an active site for feminist performance, particularly performances that resist the constraints of the male gaze. These radical oppositions are performed by female athletes and broadcasters within the televised sporting performance, as well as by the female spectators watching the televised event. These two areas of performance, from within the representation and from the outside looking in, resist the male gaze in separate, but complementary ways. Representations of female athletes and broadcasters’ bodies within the sporting narrative work as a type of textual performance that refuses the objectifying gaze of the male spectator, while female spectators watching representations of the narrative may use what bell hooks refers to as an oppositional gaze that challenges and deconstructs the narrative’s attempts to cater to the male gaze. I will use the tools of feminist performance analysis, cultural studies, media studies, and sport studies to explore how these performances are pitched to the white heterosexual male spectator and how heterosexual women, women of color, and lesbians within the structures of patriarchal sport trouble the dominant constructions and readings of sporting narrative representations.

Theoretical Underpinnings and Methodology

I will be using critical theory from a variety of disciplines to analyze the construction and deconstruction of gendered sports narratives. Primarily, I utilize gaze theory developed in film criticism, theatre, and visual media, demonstrate how it is played out within the televised sports narrative, and then provide various examples of resistance from white heterosexual women,

heterosexual women of color, and white lesbians. The theoretical foundation will lie in gaze theory. Gaze theory has its roots in psychoanalytic feminist film criticism, but expands across disciplines such as art, media studies, and theatre. Secondarily, I draw upon scholarship from sports sociology and sports studies. This relatively new area of academic investigation reads sports critically and theoretically with the help of postmodern theory and cultural studies to deconstruct many of the hierarchies currently in place within popular sport. These two areas of scholarship work in concert for reading, analyzing, and interpreting the feminist performances present in the sports narrative. John Berger first defined gaze theory in relation to visual representation in his book, Ways of Seeing (1973), stating that “men act and women appear” (47). Berger asserts that a “man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies [ . . . ][whereas a] woman’s presence expresses her own attitude about herself and defines what can and cannot be done to her” (45-6). The spectator position is always masculinized regardless of who is doing the looking. As Berger asserts women “do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity” (63). In her influential article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” (1975) Laura Mulvey furthers the concept of the male gaze by focusing on how classic cinema assumes a male gaze She explains that classic cinema operates engaging two types of gazes. First is the scopophilic, which "arises from the pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (18). The second gaze type is rooted in Lacanian theory and, as Mulvey assertss, is “developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen” (18). The assumed male spectator identifies with the male protagonist who is responsible for the action of the movie. A female object also enters this narrative construction as the protagonist's love interest, inviting the gaze of the male spectator and stopping the action of the narrative. Mulvey further argues that the only way a female spectators can identify with the protagonist is if “she temporarily accepts ‘masculinization’ in memory of her ‘active’ phase” (37). Either way, all spectators become reinscribed within a masculine viewing position. Hence, both Mulvey and Berger argue that the man’s presence is active while the female’s is passive. This binary reasserts the male spectator’s ability to identify with the action of the male body and consume the passivity of the female body.

In Mulvey and Berger's male gaze construction leaves no possible agenct for resistance. Regardless of the gender of the viewer, the subject/object binary is already inscribed as masculine and feminine. In the late 80s and early 90s, many scholars both in film studies and in the burgeoning field of cultural studies challenged the essentialism of this theoretical construct. In 1989, Margaret Marshment and Lorraine Gamman's edited anthology, The Female Gaze, directly challenges earlier incarnations of gaze theory asking the question, “If patriarchy informs our political regimes, our economic systems, our culture, our language, our unconscious [ . . . ] How can we shift this perspective and inscribe a female gaze into the heart of our cultural life?” (1). The contributors to this anthology argue that female spectators can wield the gaze as well, in opposition to the fatalism and essentialism of earlier feminist film scholars. Soon, various other scholarly disciplines also asserted challenges to not only the psychoanalytic framework of the gaze, but its stabilizing gender positions. Cultural studies scholar Richard Dyer in 1992 examines the inability of the male body to be susceptible an objectifying gaze. This view was challenged by the emergence of queer readings of the gaze. The anthology, A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture (1995) challenges the heterosexism of gaze theory and its use of psychoanalysis and gender as its foundation. This anthology's authors shift to the Foucauldian panopticon as an alternative model of gaze theory that includes all identities within the surveyor/surveyed relationship, explaining how men become objects as well. Scholars in the feminist film anthology, Re-Vision (1984), edited by Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams also use a Foucauldian model to upset the psychoanalytic underpinnings of the male gaze. The contributors to this anthology use this model to upset the essentialism of the binaries posed by previous criticism surrounding the male gaze, and open up a dialogue rooted in “seeing difference differently, re-vising the old apprehension of sexual difference and making it possible to multiply difference” (Doane, Mellencamp, Williams 15). In 1996, bell hooks explores this type of gazing at and through difference, questioning the unstated assumption that white men and women are the subjects and objects of the gaze. She advocates an oppositional gaze which resists the objectification and identification of the male imperial gaze by reading texts against the grain of the status quo. Largely in response to hooks' article, E. Ann Kaplan in 1997 wrote Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze. Here Kaplan revises earlier gaze theory by coupling gendered and imperialist gazers, asserting that the “’male’ gaze and the ‘imperial’ gaze cannot be

separated within western patriarchal cultures” (xi). Kaplan's revision suggests this new model encompasses not only gender but racial and gay/lesbian perspectives as viewers and objects of the gaze. I will apply the gaze models to sports' narratives representations.. I will also utilize feminist theatrical performance analysis. Specifically, I will draw on the work of theatre scholars Jill Dolan, Lisa Anderson, and Peggy Phelan. Dolan suggests Brechtian alienation techniques not only as a means of deflecting objectification as a female performer, but also as a means to resist reinscription into a masculine viewing position. Dolan’s book The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988) also proposes a viewing position based on a “lesbian model of alternative spectatorship [which] might hold clues to developing a more tenable position for female spectators of any ideological persuasion” (17). I will use Dolan’s analysis of theatrical gazing structures along with her ideas on how a lesbian spectator might disrupt the male gaze and offer alternative ways of looking for both heterosexual and homosexual women. Lisa Anderson’s book Mammies No More addresses stereotypes of African American women in the theatre. The foundation of these stereotypes is key because they were initially created by white performers for a white audience in minstrel shows. The stereotypes persisted into classic films also crafted for a white male viewer. She complicates both the perception that these stereotypes no longer exist in representation, and also that they are necessarily disempowering. I will draw on her analysis while looking at representations of African American women in sport in chapter two. I will also use Peggy Phelan’s concepts regarding the problems inherent in visibility politics. Her book Unmarked complicates the alleged power of visibility as a progressive political strategy, an idea I complicate and examine using representations of women in sport. Combined with the feminist film criticism, these theatre scholars will help add depth to an analysis that looks not only at images through a camera lens, but also at performances on both sides of the lens. Sports sociologists' and scholars' critical readings of sport provide my final analytical tool. Scholars such as Michael Messner and Cheryl Cole look at, read, and dissect the power relationships inherent in the hierarchical power structures of sport. These power structures work against marginalized identities within sport such as heterosexual women, women of color, and lesbians. Susan Birrell and Cheryl Cole's edited anthology Women, Sport, and Culture (1994) provides a breadth of articles within it addressing everything from the female athlete’s body as text to the perceived threat of lesbians and the lesbian label attached to women in sport. This

area often overlaps with cultural studies and popular culture studies making these resources an effective complement to the works involving gaze theory. When I use the phrase “sports narrative,” I refer not only to televised representations of game performances, but also to all the materials that revolve around and support the structure of that representation. Print media such as Sport Illustrated, ESPN Magazine, and newspaper sports pages all contribute to and discuss these televised performances. Game images are crafted to appeal to a specific demographic of the fan base. I will be analyzing these images through recordings of various sporting performances as well as images used in sporting magazines and sports pages. The images of various mainstream sports produce a multiplicity of meaning. Cultural studies scholar John Fiske attributes the ability to read texts in multiple ways to popular culture’s “excess.” Although most representations allegedly cater to the hegemony, according to Fiske there exists an “excess of meaningfulness” stating “there is always too much meaning on television to be controllable by the dominant ideology” (91). This type of excess is present not only within the televised performance of games, but also in the commercials and advertising surrounding these representations. I will also be analyzing the commercial enterprise of sport through advertising. Most advertising in sports asks the male spectator to identify with the protagonist athlete by buying products that allegedly enhance the athlete's own performance. Commercials during the sporting events feature countless examples of celebrity athlete endorsements. Advertisers attach success, money, women, and various other "luxuries" to the consumption of their commodity and capitalize on the hero-worship that surrounds today's athletes. The representations in sport communicate on many different levels and span across diverse media. The commercials aired during these events provide particular insight into the target audience for specific events. It is often within these commercials that the networks need to cater to a variety of gazing positions. My own position within these looking structures must also be articulated here. As a white heterosexual female I occupy a position of marginalization as well as privilege in relation to the subjectivities I discuss. Many of the explorations in chapter one are a direct result of my own viewing experiences rooted in my resistant readings of televised sport. Chapters two and three represent possible readings and looker positions for women of color and lesbian subjectivities. However, as with all identities, I am working within gazing structures and ideologies I cannot escape. My resistance is also continually recontained. I plan to trouble this

recontainment using the master’s tools to deconstruct the master’s house, so to speak. The following oppositional readings are an attempt to unsettle the gazing hegemony I am always already complicit in creating.

Traditional Representations of Women in Sports Narratives

In order to trace transgressions of the male gaze, I will initially address the sporting narrative’s adherence to Mulvey’s construct and lay out how the male gaze functions within the narrative. In the traditional Mulvian psychoanalytic framework, the gaze has two components, scopophilia and narcissism. The scopophilic gazer consumes the passivity of the female object, while the narcissistic gazer identifies with the narrative’s hero; the male spectator fantasizes himself in the hero’s place. These two prongs of the male gaze play out in televised game representations, including actual game coverage as well as advertising. Women in these areas are consistently relegated to positions as passive objects including cheerleaders and sports reporters as well as women in commercials. Game coverage and advertising also invite the male spectator to identify with athletes on the field and the men who get the girls in the commercials. The hetero-male sports hegemony commercializes and commodifies the male gaze. Televised sports clearly embody and demonstrate this assumption of a male spectator. One of the ways this assumption is manifested is by inviting the male spectator to identify with the male athlete who is responsible for the action of the sports narrative. In sports, the main action of the narrative is the game. Television adds to this narrative by providing the story and exposition needed to motivate the action. Television gives the background of the players and details the rivalry between teams. The male spectator sitting at home in front of his television is invited to identify with the protagonist athletes who forward the action of the narrative. As Mulvey states the "character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator" (20). In the case of sports, the main characters are the athletes. Athletes possess skills and strengths, which the average male spectator does not. The athlete can certainly get the job done on the field better than the spectator. Advertising in sports also asks the male spectator to identify with the protagonist athlete by buying products that allegedly enhance the athlete's own performance. Advertisers capitalize on the identification the spectator has with the athletes in the game. Commercials during the

sporting events feature countless examples of celebrity athlete endorsements. As Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson suggest in their book about the history of Nike and its advertising Nike Culture "[m]ost advertising, of course, presumes that one can obtain an identity with the commodity advertised" (49). Advertisers attach success, money, women, and various other "luxuries" to the consumption of their commodity. As an example, Gatorade centered an entire stream of ads around the tagline "I want to be like Mike" (48). Of course, the moral of the ad is that if you want to be like Michael Jordan, you have to drink Gatorade. Advertisers capitalize on the hero-worship that surrounds today's athletes. Athletes appeal to white, middle-class, male, heterosexual spectators because of the athlete's embodiment of the "American Dream." They signify "the benefits of hard work and the achievement ethic" (48) that perpetuates the masculine hegemony in society. Athletes are consistently portrayed as actively working for the millions of dollars they are paid. Another example of the way televised sports caters to the male gaze is in its portrayal of women. With few exceptions, women are offered as the objects of the scopophilic male gaze in sports. Mulvey asserts that the woman's "visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation" (19). Indeed, in the sports narrative women provide both the "freeze in the flow of action" as well as the erotic object. Cheerleaders are an integral aspect of male scopophilic pleasure in football. During live football performances, the cheerleaders are only viewed by one section of the crowd. With television they can now be viewed by all the television spectators, close-up, numerous times throughout the game. They do not forward the action of the game. Their focus is on the crowd. They are offered as entertainment during game-breaks such as time-outs and halftime. Spot scholar Laurel Davis posits that cheerleading is "partially designed to further heterosexual male voyeurism." She also notes the "assumption that males not only make-up the majority of the men's sport audience but are also the important viewers of female cheerleaders" (151). The hyper-objectification of women within the narrative serves to reaffirm masculine status during the game. It also consistently relegates women to the status of supporter at best and "eye-candy" at worst. Cheerleaders function both as supporters as well as eye-candy. During the games, cheerleader shots usually appear during breaks in the game, often before or after a commercial break. Cameras allow cheerleaders to be viewed in excruciating detail. They are almost always shot with the camera aiming up in order to get a full shot of their bodies. The camera also allows

these women to look directly at the assumed male viewers watching television. Berger describes this type of look as "the expression of a woman responding with calculated charm to the man she imagines looking at her" (55). Their clothing also allows their bodies to be fully fetishized, especially compared to the uniforms of the football players. Sports sociologist Michael A. Messner asserts that in “contrast to the bare and vulnerable bodies of the cheerleaders, the armored male bodies of football players are elevated to mythical status, and as such give testimony to the undeniable 'fact' that there is at least one place where men are clearly superior to women" (71). The softer the cheerleaders look, the harder the football players will appear. This contrast serves to reaffirm the dominance of the active men on the field and the relative passivity of the cheerleaders on the sideline. The cheerleaders' uniforms reaffirm that they cannot participate in the action on the playing field. Within the sports narrative, many female sportscasters are turned into objects. The impact of their presence is shifted toward visual pleasure and away from the action of the narrative supporting the game. It is an example of what Stephen Buffery of The Toronto Sun says is a recent trend of "television executives attempting to boost ratings by throwing an inexperienced but good-looking woman on air to do TV sports, thus creating a double standard: A man has to know sports to get a job on TV. A woman just has to be good-looking and comfortable in front of the camera." (82). This type of assumption casts suspicion upon all female sports broadcasters, that if they are attractive it must follow that they are unintelligent. However, it is quite possible that if executives tried putting in intelligent, unattractive women they would be deemed too masculine and, therefore, homosexual. In another example, two female sports broadcasters for Sportsnet in Canada "presented the day's highlights from behind a glass desk, apparently so the viewers could view their legs" (Buffery 82). Even if women are allowed a voice in the sports narrative, their bodies are posed for consumption by a male gazer. In order to succeed in hyper-masculinized sport, many women market themselves as objects to be consumed in order to receive more media coverage and a larger sports fan base. Many female athletes cater to the male gaze outside their sport by posing in various male magazines. Similarly many female sports broadcasters do the same. Jill Arrington, a 2002 CBS football reporter, posed in For Him Magazine in a four-picture layout. In one shot, USA Today journalist Rudy Martzke describes her as shown "with her unbuttoned blouse tied at the bottom in a knot. Her breasts are not concealed by her bra" (2C). Tennis player Anna Kournikova is

pictured posing in the same issue. The manner of these images allows these women to be whittled down to images akin to those of the cheerleaders. Even without posing in magazines female sports broadcasters' appearances are used as crucial points of difference and are consumed in the same way as cheerleaders. The trend of putting women on the sidelines also serves to keep male broadcasters from being dwarfed by the players as well. By staying in the broadcasting booth and not being viewed in direct comparison with the players, male broadcasters maintain their autonomy. Women are also used extensively as objects in the advertising that surrounds sports. In football, particularly, the objectification and scopophilic consumption of women is tied directly to the game. In a 2003 advertisement for Coors Light, Kid Rock is shown participating in the action of the crowd at a football game. Clips of various plays are shown while Kid Rock passes Coors Light to people in the crowd all the while rap/singing the words "somebody's gotta feel this." After these words are spoken, a lingering image of a cheerleader is shown as she looks into the camera inviting the viewer to "feel this." In another example, an even more direct correlation is made between football and the objectification of women. The commercial is an advertisement for the new NFL network. In it, Rich Issen, the central commentator for the new network, is shown participating in various aspects of the game: helping an athlete in practice, meeting with the coaches, and helping refs with a play on the field. In the final shot, he is framed through the various legs of women as he attends the try-outs for the Raiderettes. As he views the women, the subtitle "Being rich isn't so bad" pops up on the screen. This particular commercial combines both elements of the male gaze. The male viewer identifies with Rich Issen as he gets the inside track and furthers the progression of the action of the game narrative. The male spectator's gaze and Rich Issen's gaze then combine to consume the fetishized legs of the Raiderettes. Commercials during sporting events take on this hyper-heterosexual male tone. The images crafted for the assumed heterosexual male audience become overkill to the point of being absurd. One of the clearest examples of hyper-masculine advertising is the recent onslaught of Viagra commercials during sporting events. The pill itself is a response to the threat of impotency. Of course, impotence is considered a direct assault on men's "sexual performance." In advertising for Viagra this threat must be squashed in order for man to "perform." Sex in society usually implies two people, but in Viagra, commercials the situation is skewed. Susan

Bordo asserts the "characters in the drama of Viagra were three: a man, his blessed power pill, and his restored power tool" (60) the male body. The symbolic representations of these characters, particularly the "power tool," vary in the different commercials. In a Viagra commercial shown during the 2003 World Series, it is Raphael Palmeiro who is endorsing the product. Palmeiro is shown making hit after hit during a game. Each time he does, newspaper headlines pop up with titles like "Raphael Palmeiro Comes Through in the Clutch," "Another Big Game for Palmeiro," and "Palmeiro Stars On The Diamond." Palmeiro then directly addresses the camera and says, "I've made a lot of news on the baseball diamond, but if you want to find out about this diamond you've got to go talk to your doctor. [ . . . ] My doctor says it's right for me. That's why I stick with it." The second "diamond" he is referring to is the pill, which this commercial promotes as "The Blue Diamond." The formula of the commercial is consistent with the one mentioned by Susan Bordo. The commercial is centered on Palmeiro, his Blue Diamond pill, and his "tool" symbolized “oh-so-subtly” by his baseball bat. At no point does Palmeiro's sexual partner come into play, unless you count the images that words like "clutch" and "diamond" conjure up in the assumed male spectator. The NFL has its own Viagra-like sponsors. This year it is Cialis. Last season it was Levitra. Levitra managed to pitch their product directly to a football audience by including the sport in its advertisements. The commercials do not explain what Levitra is for, but because it adheres to the same formula as Viagra commercials, its use is implied. An anonymous upper- middle-aged white man is throwing a football in his backyard. The narrator states, "Sometimes you need a little help staying in the game." The man is throwing the football through a tire swing. In this commercial his sexual partner, his wife, does appear at the end of the spot, but she steps in front of his throw stopping the action. They embrace and go inside the house. Again, there is a man, his "tool" this time a football, and a narration about the pill. The presence of his sexual partner upholds the male gaze and is secondary to his ability to "stay in the game" even through "the game" probably involves her, too. In these commercials, the narrative is always only about the man, the pill, and his "game" thus implying that, in reality, the story must only be about the man and his sexual performance. The audience for this performance is only minimally involved, if at all. This heightened view of masculinity attempts to pitch an ideal state of being of men. Masculinity is something these men in the commercials have complete control over, and no woman or any other outside force will call it into question. These commercials promote the

idea that masculinity is an island that cannot be compromised. These commercials also demonstrate a heightened version of the male gaze that rejects needing an object to consume. Men identify with the subject to the extent that women are present only minimally or in the symbolic form of a diamond or the hole in a tire.

Chapter Breakdown

Despite the ubiquity of female objectification in sports narratives, women resist the male gaze, enacting change and challenging the patriarchal sporting hierarchy by asserting their agency as players, reporters, and spectators. Chapter one, “Kickin’ It to the Man: Transgressive Interventions by Sporting Women" asserts that white heterosexual women are both producers and consumers of sport. This chapter will draw on alternative gazing structures proposed by bell hooks and Michel Foucault to articulate how these women might intervene in the traditional male gaze. The first section looks at how the female athletic body transgresses Western feminine beauty norms. Women athletes struggle for agency within a system that continually recontains their efforts by solidifying them as objects for the gaze. I will look at three athletes, Amy Acuff, Jenny Thompson, and Brandi Chastain, whose representations demonstrate varying degrees of recontainment. Readings of Acuff’s representations in Playboy reveal strong recontainment of her athletic body through objectification. However, similar images of Thompson in Sports Illustrated complicate recontainment and demonstrate attempts to wrest control of her own image in order to assert her agency. The now widely circulated image of Chastain ripping off her shirt in celebration after winning the World Cup is the most resistant to recontainment in its context and appropriation of a male tradition. However, even her representation risks recontainment read through her previous nude photographs in Gear Magazine and her subsequent endorsement of Nike sports bras following the game. All three athletes trouble the objectification structures of the male gaze, even as they succumb to it. The second section addresses transgressions by female sportscasters who actively intervene in the narrative by wielding language and logos, both traditionally male domains. The act of engaging in the male-dominated arena of sports broadcasting is a constant battle for women. They are frequently recontained by objectification and also delegitimization. The three

examples I examine also pose various transgressions and are recontained to varying degrees. Jill Barbierri, Fox’s pre-game “weather girl,” is doubly-recontained for her transgression into the male narrative; she is hyper-objectified and rendered irrelevant by both her reports and her fellow reporters. Lisa Olson’s transgression as a “looker” in the men’s locker room was punished by players who harassed her. Her highly publicized accusations and request for an apology were recontained by continued abuse from the sports media, leading her eventually to leave the country. Leslie Visser’s interviews place her in a privileged position as speaker and looker in interviews. Each sportscaster works to intervene in the male-dominated language of the game, but risk recontainment not only as objects but also as periphery sub-plots to the main game narrative. The final section examines interventions by female spectators. Using bell hooks, I examine the possibility for white heterosexual women to utilize an oppositional gaze, one that refuses identification and, therefore, maintains a critical distance. This critical distance is also advocated by Brecht, who used alienation techniques in order for the audience to maintain a critical distance from his plays. Both these techniques open the white hetero-male sporting narrative to resistant readings. One of these readings for a female spectator is the visual pleasure of the male athletic body. Although psychoanalytic gaze theory solidifies subject/object relations via gender, using Foucault’s Panoptic theory opens the visual field to all genders and sexualities. Through this analysis, I examine the possibility for women to occupy the gazing position in looking relations particularly with the scrutinizing exposure of athletic bodies during televised game representations. I indicate spaces in advertising that depict a female gaze, offering proof of women as “lookers” within the sporting narrative. Chapter two, “Sister Act: The Double-Bind of the Male Imperial Gaze,” will open by examining the position of women of color within sporting narrative. Representations of women of color within the narrative differ because the gazing structure shifts to include the imperial gaze, creating a double-bind for women of color working in sport. This double-bind sequesters these women into traditional, stereotypical categories that can be traced to post-Civil War minstrelsy in the United States. Three black female stereotypes, examined at length by theatre scholar Lisa Anderson, are found within the sporting narrative, the mammy, the jezebel, and the tragic mulatta. Examples of the mammy are the “mamas” of the NFL Campbell’s Soup commercials. The current “mama,” mother of football player Donovan McNabb, sports pastel

skirt-suits to cover her large frame while she tends to the players on the team in various ways, including feeding them soup. Sideline reporter Lisa Guerrero bears traces of the jezebel stereotype through representations that show her in clothing that emphasizes her sexuality. The tragic mulatta becomes the “token” female athlete, in this case Marion Jones, who shoots into athletic stardom on the tails of the white male hegemony, only to slip up and fall from grace. Despite these images, women of color resist these stereotypes. In this section I will look specifically at performances of both women of color who are sports reporters and black female athletes who assert their agency within the sporting narrative. These women trouble recontainment within the male imperial gaze by intervening in the narrative’s structure. Michele Tafoya effectively silenced a media waiting for her to make the same mistakes as her predecessor. Tafoya transgressed into white male territory, her solid, consistent performance silencing the media din. Sportscaster Pam Oliver transgressed boundaries by using language to tell a player’s story, a story he did not want told. After public verbal abuse from the player, Pam Oliver refused recontainment by turning his outrage into a joke. Two athletes who also resist recontainment and challenge stereotypes are tennis players Venus and Serena Williams. Both women attempt to wrest control of their representations from the media in order to assert their agency as players. Serena actively eludes an assigned media identity, refusing to play by the rules of the gaze. Utilizing what Peggy Phelan refers to as a “provocation of doubt” I will examine public representations of Serena and assert that they expose the media as the “absent” or objective eye of the camera in the gaze structure. I will also suggest that representations of the Williams sisters offer a creative reimagining of a recognizable trangressive self for female spectators. My third chapter, “Coming Out of the Locker: Lesbian (In)Visibility in Sport,” addresses the potential for sexuality to actively intervene in hetero-male gazing structures presenting a lesbian body that strongly resists objectification. Homosexual women are perhaps the most heavily punished for their transgressions of the male gaze. The “lesbian boogeywoman” is stereotype wielded to punish their resistance. In the first section of this chapter, I will identify some of the characteristics of this stereotype and point out how they might manifest in athletes such as tennis players Martina Navratilova and Amelie Mauresmo. Both came out publicly and were publicly abused by the media and fellow players.

The next section of this chapter directly addresses how the visibility achieved by women's entance into hetero-male gazing structures might be problematic. Using Peggy Phelan’s concepts of the unmarked, I indicate areas where I find a type of “invisibility politics” at work for lesbians in sport. One area is the now-popular participation of gay and lesbian athletes in the Gay Games and how this event is supported by the understructure of a gay sporting network. This arena operates outside the confines of the hetero-male gaze of mainstream sport. However, this community also risks ghettoization by operating on the margins of the mainstream rather than attempting to disrupt the mainstream's piercing gaze. I also assert that these invisibility politics are also working in representations of lesbians in the WNBA. The media contribute to and sustain the building tension and anticipation of a homosexual participating in a team sport to come out. After all the build-up, Sue Wicks and Michele Van Gorp made public announcements regarding their sexuality. The only aspect of their situations that was remarkable was how unremarkable these media announcements. Only local papers covered the stories. My third section looks at how, despite stereotyping and abuse, many lesbian, professional athletes use visibility to confront the male sporting hegemony and reclaim their identities from the stereotype. I again use Navratilova and Mauresmo as examples. Representations of both women continually force their sexuality to intervene in the hetero-male gaze by publicly displaying affection for their partners during highly public events. Navratilova’s representations turn her sexuality into a political issue because she is advocating for gay rights. Both women open doors for future transgressions by out lesbians. The next section explores how these transgressions by lesbian athletes might generate a reinforcement of the heterosexual matrix of sport. I point out ways this compulsory heterosexuality might work, through an “overdeterminded femininity,” and the imposition of an invasive Panoptic gaze. Overdetermined femininity works through forcing women in sport to deny their homosexuality by adopting traditionally feminine attributes leading to rampant sexual objectification. The need for a story or backstory, within the confines of the hetero-male gaze, works toward a panoptic gaze construction. Women in sport, as objects of the media’s panoptic gaze, again fall into the trap of visibility; their private lives are completely exposed. The use of at-home lives to either confirm or deny homosexuality works in concert with hetero-male gazing structures to render lesbians visible, and therefore objects of scrutiny.

In the final section of the chapter, using Jill Dolan, I examine the possibilities for intervention through lesbian spectatorship. Using the WNBA as an example, I suggest that lesbian spectatorship, in its ability to intervene in hetero-male gazing structures, might build its own independent gaze structure. The WNBA functions as an example because of its open policy toward lesbians as players and its active targeting of lesbians as a market niche. In game environments, a reimagining of a female gaze is possible.

Notes

1 The oppositional gaze is a term used by bell hooks, the deviant gaze by Z. Isiling Nataf, and resistant reader by Jill Dolan. Each scholar and their terms will be explored throughout this thesis. 2 There are many articles that deal with the relation between sport and war. See for example, Sue Curry Jansen and Don Sabo, "The Sport/War Metaphor: Hegemonic Masculinity, the Persian Gulf War, and the New World Order," Sociology of Sport Journal 11 (1994): 1-17. See also, Alan Bainner, "After the War? Soccer, Masculinity, and Violence in Northern Ireland." McKay, Messner, and Sabo 176-194. 3 Schechner does include an examination of the Olympic Games, but his analysis focuses more on the performance as a whole, on a global level, rather than specifically addressing the athletic performances occurring at the Games.

CHAPTER 1

KICKIN’ IT TO THE MAN: TRANSGRESSIVE INTERVENTIONS BY WOMEN

Despite these stereotypical images that render female athletes as passive objects of male consumers, other women continue to enact change and challenge the patriarchal hierarchy of sport by asserting their agency as players as well as spectators. Unlike many of the examples in the previous chapter, women in sport refuse objectification by insisting on inclusion within the sports narrative in broadcasting as well as active athletes with strong bodies on the playing field. These women’s attempts to deflect an objectifying gaze are met by resistance from the dominant male sporting establishment. As sports sociologist Cheryl L. Cole explains, the masculine hegemony of sport "remains suspicious" of the female athletic body "because of both its apparent masculinization and its position as a border case that challenges the normalized feminine and masculine body" (20). The strength and muscularity of the female athlete’s body positions it between normative constructs of feminine beauty and masculine strength. Perhaps this is why women's sports must constantly battle for a position within male-dominated televised sport. The female athlete is not content to be relegated to a position outside the action of the game. This chapter will address white heterosexual women as producers and consumers of conventional sports narratives. Male gaze structures in sporting narratives are deeply entrenched. Women are basically left out of the action of the game. When women are included as athletes, they are usually recontained through objectification. White heterosexual women are intervening in the operations of the male gaze in these narratives as both producers and consumers of sport. These women are disrupting the tradition of men as producers and consumers of sporting narratives in which women, at best, play a supporting role by reinforcing the male as the “looker.” This chapter explores how producers of alternative sporting narratives, specifically female athletes and sports broadcasters, and consumers of these narratives, female spectators, reposition themselves as “lookers” and “actors.” As more women move into this position, however, they are often recontained or punished for their transgressions. Some even actively participate in their own re-objectification. Despite the “success” or “failure” of attempts to invert the binary of the male gaze, I will argue that women’s practices as producers and

consumers of the sporting narrative have complicated the hegemony of male domination. In so doing, they are paving the way for future interventions by white heterosexual female athletes, broadcasters, and spectators. For this chapter my theoretical frame will focus on gaze theory posited by bell hooks and Michel Foucault. Bell hooks addresses the absence of black female spectators from discussion of the gaze in feminist film criticism. The first part of her article traces the various modes of oppositional gazing utilized by black women through the last several decades of movies. Looking at movies within the classic cinema hooks asserts that “black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence that denies the ‘body’ of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is ‘white’” (201). She suggests that recent movies do not conform to this paradigm. However, as I wil argue through through examples in this chapter, the sporting narrative, with few exceptions, does conform to this paradigm. Within the sporting narrative, it is the white woman, in commercials, as cheerleaders,1 as sexual object that elicit men’s desires. I will suggest extending this type of gaze to all women in sport. I will also use Foucault’s concept of a surveying gaze via Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1787). The Panopticon, imagined by Bentham, is an architectural concept for a prison. The prison itself would be a round building with a large circular courtyard in the middle. The cells line the outer building in single units for each prisoner. These cells have two windows; one facing out of the prison allowing light to shine through and illuminate the person inside the cell and another facing toward the courtyard where there will be a central tower. The central tower is in the middle of the courtyard with small windows facing all of the cells. This tower only needs one guard to police and watch all the prisoners. This guard can see the prisoners without being seen by the prisoners. The prisoners can only be seen by the guard, but cannot see the guard. Ideally, the prisoners, not knowing when the guard is looking at them or not, will internalize the surveillance and police themselves without a guard in the tower. I will suggest that women can wield this panoptic gaze (they can occupy the central position in the tower) as image producers of women in sport. As consumers, occupying the cells, they attempt trangressions of the panoptic gaze, where men inhabit the tower, and are punished through varying degrees of recontainment.

Transgressive Athletic Bodies

The rise in the female athlete’s prominence puts the female athletic body in the spotlight, questioning and providing alternative images of feminine beauty that are antithetical to traditional Western beauty norms that focus on women’s softness, passivity, and penetrability. Muscles, by contrast, denote “maleness” because muscles denote activity and power and female athletes defy this normative beauty construct by presenting their bodies as muscled and in action as opposed to soft and passive. Women wield a variety of strategies to represent themselves within the sporting narrative. While some of these transgressions seem to invite recontainment, others make a strong attempt to resist it. The following examples include high jumper Amy Acuff, swimmer Jenny Thompson, and soccer player Brandi Chastain. Each athlete is accused of blatantly objectifying herself for the male gaze. However, each representation complicates that objectification in differing ways. Many American journalists highlighted the high percentage of female athletes participating in the 2004 Summer Olympics. Special stories also ran covering the achievements of women from other countries, such as a Pakistani swimmer who received special permission from religious leaders in her country to compete despite traditional structures that prevent women from participating in sports. Another story highlighted an Iraqi track athlete, the first woman to compete for her country in its fifty-six-year Olympic history because of its repressive restrictions on women appearing uncovered in public. A story that was closer to home involved Amy Acuff, an Olympic high jumper who made it to finals, but did not earn a medal. Acuff’s story may pale in comparison to these others, but demonstrates the privilege of visibility fought for by previous American women in sport whose stories are similar to the Pakastani swimmer and the Iraqi runner. So why was her story so well covered amongst all these other groundbreaking plots? Her spread in Playboy came out the week she competed in Athens along with several other female Olympians who also posed nude for the magazine. The photos of Acuff are only atypical porn in that she refused to pose nude full frontally. However, her sleek body is greased up, a wind machine is blowing back her long blonde hair, and, for the most part, she is posed relatively passively (with one exception where she is shown jumping across an airbrushed sky background). In one shot, she is tying her cleats, and in another she quietly leans

on the high jump pole. Beneath these photos, as if the final example weren’t already dripping with phallic significance, she is quoted, saying, “I’m not doing brain surgery. I’m jumping over a stick” (Qtd. in Brownfield 13). More stunning than her own degradation of a sport in which she competes as an athlete was the lack of outrage from the Olympic sporting community. The media turned the incident into yet another marketing ploy for the Olympics, which was struggling to attract a more male audience. Acuff opened up this demographic through buying into male objectification, effectively recontaning her transgressive athletic physique. Another example involves swimming phenom Jenny Thompson who posed topless in an issue of Sports Illustrated. However, her pose is unlike Acuff’s Playboy spread in significant ways. In this photograph the athlete’s muscles are anything but soft. Her stance communicates defiance and triumph. Thompson, rather than seductively cupping or covering her breasts with an open hand, covers them with two powerfully gripped fists. The fact that she can cover her breasts with her fists and the appearance of her chest negate expectations for topless women who appear with overly large breasts. She does look at the spectator of the photograph, but her look is anything but “come hither.” Debate soon raged as to whether Thompson was selling herself as a sexual object. Her response was vehement, asserting [m]y stance in the picture was one of strength and power and girls rule! It’s nothing sexual. I wasn’t pouting or giving a sexual look. I was like, here I am. I’m strong. [ . . . ] Someone called this – this idea of being proud of who you are and willing to show it off – a new feminism. I think it’s pretty cool: I’ve started a new feminism. (Qtd. in Messner 104-5) Thompson’s comments on her own representation become a conscious act of resisting stereotypical representations. In contrast to Acuff’s quote which expresses the appropriate coyness and naiveté about her performance, Thompson calls attention to the attributes of her performance that are atypical of pornographic representations of women, emphasizing her strength and power and de-emphasizing her sexuality. She also labels her performance as an act of feminism, a loaded term in a sports world that continually labels women either as unworthy of the athletic label or, as Messner asserts, “butch lesbians who are only worthy of derision” (108). Thompson’s own comments reflect an attempt to wrest control of her image and resist recontainmnent through objectification.

Thompson’s representation in Sports Illustrated also communicates resistant meanings when viewed in the context of other swimming imagery. She even sports a more “masculine” bathing suit rather than the bikini cut preferred for most women posing in bathing suits. These attributes adhere to what Richard Dyer describes in images of men. According to Dyer even in picture poses portraying relaxation the male “tightens and tautens his body so that muscles are emphasized, hence drawing attention to the body’s potential for action” (129). This connection is demonstrated even more clearly when Thompson’s image is compared to a similar image taken nearly two decades earlier of swimmer Mark Spitz. Spitz’s achievement as well as his participation in a sport where his uniform left him nearly naked catapulted him to sex symbol status. The image of Spitz adorned many women’s bedrooms in the seventies and well into the eighties, solidifying his representation in sports and swimming iconography. In it he wears a Speedo suit very similar to that worn by Thompson in her picture. He also strikes a pose of strength with his legs slightly apart and his hands on his hips. Thompson’s representation can be read as a refiguring of that type of masculine iconography. The two together images blur the lines between masculine and feminine. The promise of power in Thompson’s body adheres to many of the characteristics that dominate male images, yet her body is still female. Hence, the female athlete’s body occupies a space somewhere in between the normative codes for male images and female images. However, this reading of the two representations is complicated in numerous ways. Thompson, unlike Spitz, is not wearing her achievements visibly as Spitz adorns his seven gold medals. Thompson’s position as the most decorated swimmer of all time, winning twelve Olympic medals all told, is not present within this representation. Even when men, like Spitz, are represented as objects they still retain their agency and power. Spitz does not tease the viewer by covering his chest, or even covering his prominently displayed, although clothed, crotch, as Thompson covers her breasts in her photo. Spitz’s agency is assumed in this representation whereas Thompson has to assert and verbalize her agency. In order to make it into the heavily male dominated Sports Illustrated Thompson had to take off her clothes, emphasizing her body as her achievement rather than her athletic prowess in the pool. The next example further complicates gazing structures that objectify and occurred in yet another highly controversial move made by a female athlete. At the end of the Women’s World Cup in soccer in 1999, U.S. player Brandi Chastain, following a long tradition in men’s soccer, ripped off her shirt and let out a cry of victory when the U.S. women’s soccer team won the

game. The media went into an immediate flurry following the game, and Brandi Chastain quickly put a memorable image on women’s soccer leading to immediate controversy. Although male soccer players had been ripping off their shirts for years, this “stunt” was labeled by some as an advertising plug for Nike sports bras. Not long after the game Nike rushed a line of sports bras with Chastain’s name into production with a full endorsement by Chastain, although she did not model them. The controversy continued into the 2003 season when the soccer federation banned both men and women soccer players from taking off their shirts. Perhaps it is the multiple levels that this image of Chastain communicates on that caused such a scuffle. Here is a female athlete caught in the action of a soccer game. The media must reinscribe her within normative constraints by suggesting that this image is unnatural, that she is, in fact, posing. Her ripped muscles and contorted facial features make her an unlikely candidate for erotic consumption, but the male dominated media and spectator pool cannot obtain subject identification with her either. This image shatters the binary, which reasserts the male spectator's ability to identify with the action of the male body and consume the passivity of the female body by envisioning a body that is not soft and passive, yet not male. Although this image is not from a men’s magazine or from a pornographic context, many in the media read this image through Chastain’s earlier appearances in Gear Magazine where she posed nude with soccer balls covering her breasts and groin area. Regardless of the spontaneity of the moment, it was ultimately reinscribed via previous images of Chastain and her apparent complicity in using the moment as a marketing tool for Nike.

Sporting Reporting

Women insert themselves into the sports narrative by becoming “lookers” and advancing their own opinions and analysis into the game itself. Female sports broadcasters also resist the male gaze by including themselves within the televised sports narrative. Women as sports journalists are shifting the narrative to include their perspectives. However, like female athletes, objectification often recontains the transgression into the male dominated terrain. Sports broadcasting focuses on language and logos to provide the structure of the sporting narrative, the sportscasters provide the brains behind the brawn. Logos as I use it here, refers to the “meaning, presence, idea, intention that is assumed to reside behind a text” (Childers and Hentzi 175). In

this case the “text” are the words and language used in the sporting narrative. Logos is privileged above language. In sporting narratives, the power of logos is driven by the hetero- masculine hegemony. Although women are often given the language in the narrative, the logos continues to be male driven. To maintain the focus on male logos, attention shifts away from female logos and focuses on the female body. In my first example of the transgression into the male terrain of logos, I will examine how this recontainment works on an extreme level by delegitimizing the female broadcaster not only through emphasizing her body, but by using language to undermine her authority. The next example demonstrates an active transgression on the part of a female journalist not only the male terrain of logos, but into the terrain of vulnerable male bodies, and how her transgression complicated attempts at recontainment. The final example demonstrates how an established female sportscaster can actually undermine the primacy of the male narrative of male sportscasters. One of the clearest examples of this type of recontainment through objectification of 2 female broadcasters is in the NFL on Fox pre-game show with Jill Barbierri. Barbierri is a meteorologist who visits the show to give the weather forecast for the day's upcoming games. However, the segments involving her have more to do with her body than with the weather. She is introduced by sportscaster James Brown who says "The real prize is over here" referring, of course, to Barbierri. The viewer is then "treated" to a camera shot starting at her silver-stiletto- heeled ankle, moving up to her tight, shiny, silver mini-skirt, and above to her snakeskin- patterned, silver, backless halter top which barely covers her breasts. She goes into the weather where the camera pans back to get a full shot of her body stretched across a map of the eastern United States. She jokes back and forth with the men in the studio set next to her who also provide a running commentary on her forecast. At one point, she is describing a cold air mass moving in for one of the games and one of the male broadcasters laughingly says, "Well, we've got a hot one over here." At the end of her forecast she is describing a phenomena that requires something called "a tight pressure gradient." After the forecast, James Brown asks Terry Bradshaw, "Do you know what a tight pressure gradient is?" Terry Bradshaw responds by completely collapsing into giggles as they cut to commercial. Regardless of her qualifications as a meteorologist, the viewer is cued to view her as an object by her clothing. As if that weren't enough, the male broadcasters must delegitimize her status by laughing at her and making crude remarks. Enjoy the game, folks.

Female sports reporters actively perform resistance to masculine hegemony of sports such as football, baseball, and basketball by insisting on their presence in the locker room. Entrance into men’s locker rooms by female reporters constituted a double-transgression. Suddenly, women were interpreting male athlete’s words as well as intruding into a space full of naked male bodies. In 1977, a federal judge ruled that male and female reporters should have equal access to the locker room. However, many coaches, athletes, and male reporters in the larger sporting establishment resisted the ruling, viewing it as an invasive transgression into a male only preserve. Inside locker rooms, female reporters were continually harassed. Female reporters’ perceptions that the behavior was an occupational hazard3 destined many occurrences of harassment to go unreported. One of the most well publicized instances of harassment occurred in 1990 in the New England Patriot’s locker room. Lisa Olson was interviewing a New England player when another player approached her and suggestively displayed himself while other players shouted phrases like, “Is she looking at it?” “Make her look, make her look” (Disch and Kane 124). Olson, rather than maintaining her silence, resisted the harassment by reporting the incident to her editor. Hoping the situation could be handled privately, she asked for the players to identify themselves and apologize to her. The situation was leaked to the press, and a major media circus exploded. The players explained their actions by accusing Olson of being a “looker.” The male athlete’s charge that Olson was a “looker” exemplifies the female broadcaster’s agency to intervene in the traditional dynamics of the gaze. Female reporters in the locker room invert the situation on the field where the woman appears vulnerable in comparison to the uniformed and, in the case of football, armored players. In the locker room, it is the woman who is uniformed and the players who are vulnerable, usually naked and often exposed in defeat. This situation leaves female reporters in a unique position as the wielder of the look. As feminist scholar Lisa Disch and sports scholar Mary Jo Kane assert, when the reporter, “the person with the notebook – and of course, the pen – is female, this combination of privileged access, critical gaze, and public voice is potentially explosive: She is in a position to demystify the phallic promise of unfailing potency not so much by what she sees but by where she sees and how” (122). The locker room reporter and the players are often in an adversarial relationship. It is the reporter’s job to ask the difficult questions, to probe into the mistakes made during the game. When women ask these questions of a man, he must defend his actions, while being physically

exposed. This reversal of the gender power constructions creates a threatening challenge to the patriarchal hegemony. The players’ reactions in the locker room contained Lisa Olson’s gaze. The female reporter’s access to the privileged domain of the masculine poses a threat to not only the players, but the entire patriarchal structure of sport. This threat may explain many of the vehement comments made about her once the story hit the press. Patriots’ owner Victor Kiam referred to Olson as a “classic bitch” (Disch and Kane 108). A player for a completely different team, the Miami Dolphins, referred to her as a “dick-watching bitch” (Disch and Kane 109) to a locker room full of male reporters. Disch and Kane cite the labeling of Olson as a looker, a bitch, and a dick-watching bitch as a “charge that players use to discipline a woman sports reporter, that is, to render her docile by displacing her from her authoritative position as a reporter who looks critically at players and reassigning her to a sexualized position of wanton femininity” (120). Lisa Olson and other female sports reporters in the locker room threaten to expose that “male physical superiority is not a biological given but an ideological construct that must be produced by ritual performances that promote male narcissism and exclude male vulnerability” (Disch and Kane 131). Olson’s performance of resistance is broad. She invaded the patriarchal establishment by walking into the locker room. She refused to be contained by the players, instead lodging a formal complaint and asking for an apology. After the story was leaked, she maintained her ground in the face of much negative criticism from the sports world and continued to demand an apology. Women are now a consistent presence in the locker room and Olson’s story opens up even more active resistance to harassment by reporters like Pam Oliver, whom I will discuss in chapter two. When women participate in the sporting narrative as part of the game broadcast their actions are compared directly to the actions of other male sportscasters, undermining the primacy of men’s positions as speakers for sport. As mentioned earlier, journalist Stephen Buffery pointed out that a "man has to know sports to get a job on TV. A woman just has to be good- looking and comfortable in front of the camera" (82). He forgot to mention that it also helps if the man is a former coach or athlete himself. In a game last season there were two pre-game interviews of players, one conducted by Leslie Visser and the other by former athlete-turned- 4 broadcaster Deion Sanders. The placement of these interviews within the same program allowed for some interesting comparisons. While Visser's interviews were professional and

obviously supported by her extensive broadcasting background, Sanders's took on the feeling of locker room chat. These interviews were conducted in the studio, therefore minimizing the enhanced bodily differences apparent in sideline interviews. Visser was not "sexed-up" in anyway. She was not wearing pastels or soft colors associated with femininity. Her make-up was very subtle. Her hair was very simple. Interviews such as Visser's allow the female viewer to identify with a female subject who is actively participating in the televised sports narrative.

Female “Lookers”

As spectators, women utilize what bell hooks refers to as an “oppositional gaze” (199). This type of resistance occurs when a spectator refuses to occupy the position demanded of her by the dominant paradigm. This concept implies various positions denied women within the construct of the male gaze. Hooks addresses the power in looking in an oppositional gaze, experiencing “visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation” (199). She moves on to directly analyze black women’s adoption of an oppositional gaze using Mulvey’s article as a guide. Race is left out of Mulvey’s landmark essay. As hooks asserts, black women were left outside the active/male and passive/female dichotomies allowing black female spectators to “actively choose not to identify with the film’s imaginary subject because such identification was disenabling” (204). The oppositional gaze inverts the power of the male gaze by positioning itself outside the double bind, shifting the foundations of the gaze of the spectator and asking instead for a critical gaze that challenges the construction of the images placed in front of him or her. It also challenges the male gaze by refusing identification with the images represented, calling instead for a deliberate alienation from these representations. Some feminist theatre scholars call for a similar disruption of the male gaze utilizing Brechtian techniques. Bertolt Brecht called for theatrical production techniques that caused alienation. This alienation applies across a broad spectrum of the performance including the actor, who is alienated from his character rather than adopting realistic acting techniques that attempt to blur the lines between actor and character, and alienating the audience. Alienating the spectator allows for a critical distance between the performance and the audience, preventing the spectator from losing himself or herself in the “reality” of the situation. Brecht calls for a

performance where the spectator is “not led but left to make his own discoveries” (Willett 54) in the play. Rather than identifying with the characters, the audience is asked to detach and critically view the performance, continually asking questions. Feminist theatre scholars such as Sue-Ellen Case, Elin Diamond, and Jill Dolan advocate using disruptive Brechtian techniques to trouble the male gaze. Dolan specifically addresses how a feminist spectator can use Brechtian alienation techniques to critically read against the grain of the male gaze in a manner similar to hooks’ oppositional gaze. Referencing Brechtian theory, she asserts that this spectator “should be led not to accept passively the representational conventions institutionalized before them, but to question the interactions and relationships played out in the representational space” (106). As televised sports spectators, women can employ this technique by refusing identification with the images seen. Rather than allowing inscription as either identifying with the object or becoming complicit in her own objectification by occupying a masculine viewing position, the female spectator can alienate herself, reading men as objects and women as subjects within the televised sporting narrative. One of the ways women can achieve visual pleasure as spectators is by shifting the male in the narrative from subject to object. Initially, psychoanalytic gaze theory did not allow for a male object. More recent scholarship, particularly associated with queer theory and politics, tends to adopt a more Foucauldian analysis of the gaze rather than using Mulvey or Berger. Foucault’s interpretation of the gaze rests in his exploration and analysis of the Panopticon. The Panopticon was an architectural design by Jeremy Bentham where prisoners could, ultimately, be trained to survey themselves. A guard tower is positioned in the middle of a circular courtyard. Surrounding the courtyard is a circular building containing the prisoners’ cells. Technically, one guard in the tower would be able to view all of the prisoners in their cells, but the prisoners would not know whether the guard was in the tower. This continuous suspicion of surveillance would ultimately result in the prisoners’ internalization of the guard’s gaze, as Foucault points out in a conversation with two other scholars concerning the Panopticon: There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. (Power/Knowledge 155)

This internalizing of the gaze is similar to Berger’s notion that women internalize the male gaze, becoming complicit in their own objectification. Foucault’s analysis, however, opens this surveillance gaze to include any and all subjectivities. Hence, men can also become objects of the inspecting gaze. Women are beginning to enjoy the visual pleasure of the male body or are, perhaps, only now beginning to admit they take pleasure in it. As Susan Bordo asserts "[w]e're just learning, 5 after all, to be voyeuses" (178). Breaking free of the surveyor/surveyed dichotomy within themselves, women are now attempting to survey other(s) bodies. The body of the male athlete is no longer an area that can reject the gaze. Richard Dyer asserts the male athletic body allegedly resists the gaze because his “muscles are emphasized, hence drawing attention to the body's potential for action” (110). Therefore, the emphasis of the man's attention remains outside the body and in the action of what he is doing. Mulvey agrees by asserting "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification" (20). However, new trends in advertising and other media over the past decade have slowly conditioned society to gaze more readily upon the male athletic body. Susan Bordo describes how this type of advertising reaches a broad crowd. A recent Abercrombie and Fitch ad, for example, depicts a locker room full of young, half-clothed football players getting a postmortem from their coach after the game. Beautiful, undressed male bodies doing what real men are "supposed to do." Dirty uniforms and smudged faces, wounded players, helmets. What could be more straight? But as iconography depicting a culture of exclusively male bodies, young, gorgeous, and well-hung, what could be more gay? (183) Bordo's analysis indicates the multiple levels that men's bodies communicate on and the multiple identities they communicate to, particularly in competitive team sports. The ability to gaze on men's bodies in advertising and other media has shifted how men's bodies are viewed in sports. Sports and cinema studies scholar Toby Miller asserts that the "male body is the standard currency of sporting discourse: it is on display, at work, being measured and evaluated - in short, being objectified for the purposes of pleasure - as nowhere else in contemporary life" (1). Through the years, as men's bodies have become a presence in mainstream visual art and popular culture, the mystique surrounding the male athletic body has begun to wear off.

Women are learning to use the gaze as well, capitalizing on the objectification of the male athlete. British cultural studies scholar Susan Moore believes that this ability to objectify the male athlete is afforded “via male gay discourse [which] enables a female erotic gaze” (53). Mulvey posits a “’masculinization’ of the spectator position regardless of the actual sex” (29) of the viewer. This position has been supported for decades by a myth that women do not take visual pleasure in the same way that men do. However, the ideas supporting this myth have begun to shift. The sports field allows free play for this type of female gaze. After shot upon shot of bone-crunching tackles and grunting, the long, slow motion shot of the receiver running downfield to catch the ball seems like art. Moreover, instant replay gives the viewer the opportunity to view all aspects of the athlete's body from various camera angles. Couple this with the football uniform. The heavily armored player is fully covered including his face. This allows for fetishization of the few body parts that remain uncovered such as arms, biceps, and calves. The incorporation of each of these aspects was clearly demonstrated during Super Bowl XXXIX between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots. The Eagles star receiver, Terrell Owens, was playing in his first game since going down with a severe ankle injury that required surgery. In order to assess how this injury affected his play during the game, the cameras continually focused on Owens’ legs in action. Every time he received the ball, and several times when he didn’t, there would be a replay, usually in slow motion, showing Owens’ legs in action coupled with the commentators’ evaluation of his performance. Although these shots were placed within the context of furthering the narrative, as a female viewer I certainly didn’t mind the continual shots of Owens’ muscular receiver legs in action. Recently, advertising surrounding these games is beginning to offer proof that women are being recognized as “lookers.” One recent example plays directly on the opposition between the male and female “lookers.” In a commercial for Motorola cell phones, there are four men shown at the same time on a split screen going into various night spots. The first man, using the new walkie-talkie function on his phone, says "eight," into the phone. The next man at a different bar does the same, but says "five." The third man in yet another bar says, disappointedly, "two." The final man is shown in another bar where he is seen counting the attractive women in the bar. He says "twenty-three" gleefully into his phone. The three other men are shown again in split screen rushing to the bar their friend is at. They are then shown at the bar gazing at all of the women. At this point the commercial seems to be at an end. It also seems just as blatantly

objectifying as many of the others discussed. However, the camera begins to pan away and focuses on a woman looking at the men. She then pulls out her phone and says, "Zero." The focus does not return to the men’s point of view, instead the narrative of the commercial ends its depiction from the woman’s point of view. A period is put on the men’s story and then picks up the woman’s story, which the viewer is left to speculate will continue after the commercial is over. This commercial stands out because of its shift to the female gaze. Granted, the male gaze directs the majority of the plot line in the commercial, but the female gaze slips in through a gap at the end. Another example of the female gaze in commercials occurred during Super Bowl XXXIX. The commercial was for sponsor Diet Pepsi, a product usually pedaled to women. In the commercial the viewer sees an attractive man walking down a city sidewalk casually drinking a Diet Pepsi to the music of the Bee Gees "Stayin’ Alive." Images of women, including police officers, suited professionals, and even model Cindy Crawford are shown gazing at the man. Then, the man is shown followed by a gaggle of women. When he pauses to drink his Diet Pepsi, the crowd behind him also pauses as they gaze at him. The shot then cuts to a slow pan up his torso as he takes yet another drink. He continues to walk as a tall blonde in a red coat passes him. When the tall blonde turns around, we see that it is Carson Kressley from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. After a lingering gaze at the man’s behind, Carson joins the group of women following him. The final shot shows a mass of women behind the man as he pauses, realizes he’s being watched, and begins to turn around. However, the commercial ends before he actually sees the women. This commercial reverses the usual advertising techniques catering to the male gaze and focuses instead on women not only doing the gazing, but also the desiring. However, as with Lisa Olson, this transgression of the male gaze in the advertising surrounding the game was immediately recontained. The viewer was not allowed time to linger on the images of this particular commercial. The commercial that followed the Diet Pepsi one reinforced the male gaze. The commercial promoted the website godaddy.com which sells domains on the internet. In the commercial a buxom model is sitting before a Senate committee hearing. She is asked why she is there and replies that she wants to be on a commercial. She is then asked what she will be advertising. As she stands up to make her case the strap on her already revealing tank top breaks, showing even more of her breasts. Across her chest is the logo and website information, to which she continually points and refers to throughout the

commercial. She is then asked what she will do to promote her product to which she responds, “I could do a routine.” The shot shifts to behind her as she stops attempting to hold up her strap and proceeds to do a suggestive dance. One of the committee members then tells her she is upsetting the committee followed by a shot of one of the members sucking on his oxygen mask as he gazes wide eyed at the women. She apologizes and begins to play with her strap again, calling even more attention to her breasts, simultaneously highlighting the website emblazoned across them. A female committee member then suggests she wear a turtle-neck as the commercial cuts to a frame with the website and its motto, “See more coverage at godaddy.com.” Both spots aired only one time during the Super Bowl. Although it is difficult to assert that this placement of commercials was done purposely, in opposition they can be read as a transgression in the Diet Pepsi commercial, which justifies the heightened reassertion of the male gaze in the commercial that followed. The gaps that allow the male gaze to be subverted in advertising are small. They stand out in contradiction to the hyper-male gaze exercised by the masculine sports hegemony. However, it is because these gazes are not particularly evident within the narrative that they squeeze in under the radar of the televised game's normative conventions. In many cases these gaps are caused by televised sport narrative's own internal contradictions such as homosocial/homoerotic or physical/emotional. Cultural studies scholars Lorrain Gamman and Margaret Marshment assert that it is these types of "contradictions [. . .] that allow space for disturbances of dominant meanings to occur in the mainstream, with results that may signify shifts in regimes of representation" (4). In order for sport to maintain its privileged status, it needs to shift in order to include its ever-widening audience. The slippage caused by televised sport's hyper-masculinity has allowed resistance to occur that signals a change in the hegemony of sport.

Notes

1 More and more cheerleaders are women of color during NFL games. However, from my viewings, shots of white cheerleaders are shown four times as much as women of color who are cheerleaders.

2 This analysis is of the NFL on Fox show that aired on November 11, 2003. 3 Jill Lieber, a writer for Sports Illustrated comments in “Conversations with Women Sports Journalists” by Judith Kramer that she “didn’t complain because she felt it would hold back her career.” She also asserts that her male colleagues are harassed too and that it’s part of the job (164). 4 The interviews occurred during "NFL Today," the CBS pre-game show before the Dolphins vs. Titans game on November 11, 2003. 5 The idea that women are both the surveyor (they survey themselves the same way men do) and surveyed by men is posed by John Berger in Ways of Seeing.

CHAPTER 2

SISTER ACT: THE DOUBLE-BIND OF THE MALE IMPERIAL GAZE

In the first game of the quarter-finals at the US Open last fall, Serena Williams hit a hard shot well inside the line of her opponent’s, Jennifer Capriati’s, side of the court. The line judge called it in. Serena moved back into position to serve and heard the umpire sitting on the opposite side of the court from where the ball landed, call out, “Advantage Capriati.” Serena argued the call, but was overruled. The match continued and several more, as many as five, calls went in Capriati’s favor that should have gone for Serena. She lost the match and her hope for the US Open title. In an editorial in the New Orleans Time-Picyune, columnist Jarvis DeBarry asserted that the match “serves as a parable about race: specifically, how the ones who benefit from injustices view them differently from the ones who are hurt by them” (7). DeBarry moves on to point out how the match underscores the type of unmentioned racism that exists in the US these days. He compares the visible emotions of Serena during the match to those of people of color across the country dealing with their inheritance of racism. In this moment, Serena Williams is positioned as a representative of her race. The article, as well as a follow-up article,1 did not mention Serena’s position specifically as a black woman, but as a pillar of race. This article is just one example of one of the dilemmas faced by women of color in sports. Many times these women are positioned either under the umbrella of their race through an imperial gaze or subsumed underneath the category of women, subjected to a male gaze. This chapter will open by examining representations of women of color within the sporting narrative, focusing particularly on black women. Their objectification as well as their position within the male gaze is markedly different from the position of white women. They too are subjected to a male gaze that objectifies. However, this gaze operates differently because of the addition of an imperial gaze. When these two gazes are combined, black women in sporting narratives become positioned in contradictory ways. Black women in particular also have to battle a media that continually paints them, as sports historian Susan Cahn asserts, as “animalistic, hypersexual, and inordinately strong” (271). They are then maculinized through association with black male stereotypes. In these settings, black women are represented as needing training by a strong black male hand. They are also disempowered through association

with black female stereotypes that subordinate them to men. The filmic, literary, and theatrical stereotypes, such as the mammy and the jezebel, permeate the sporting narrative where women of color are often viewed in connection with black male athletes. Even as athletes, women such as the Williams sisters struggle against representations that depict them as animalistic amazons or, as with track star Marion Jones, tragic mullatas. However, female athletes and broadcasters of color are intervening in the gazing strategies by refusing to allow their identities to be stabilized by stereotypes. This awkward double bind for women of color asserts itself not only in representations and commentary within the sports narrative, but also in the gazing mechanisms. Women of color are subject not only to the male gaze, but also to the imperial gaze, gazes, which feminist film theorist E. Ann Kaplan asserts, are not mutually exclusive. Kaplan analyzes travel films through both the male gaze and the imperial gaze. This gaze, she states, “reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central.” She goes on the assert that “anxiety prevents this gaze from actually seeing the people gazed at [ . . . ] [anxiety] is displaced into a condescending paternalism [ . . . ] aris[ing] from the fragility of being in the ‘master’ position [ . . . ] there’s always the threat of being toppled” (78-9). However, women of color end up at the bottom of both gazing hierarchies. In the male gaze the position of the white woman is privileged over that of the black woman. Women of color are at the bottom of the hierarchy involved in the imperial gaze. Both white men and women can wield the imperial gaze. Both white men and men of color can wield the male gaze. Women of color end up at the bottom of the heap unable to be anything but an object. Thus, the tendency of mainstream culture to make broad sweeps, including women of color into the more privileged categories, but rendering them doubly marginalized in the process.

Stereotypical Representation of Black Women

When women of color assert themselves as both/and, as in black and woman, they are often represented as stereotypes to be consumed by one or both types of gazes. In the sporting narrative, women of color who are not easily pushed into either “race” or “woman” are tossed into categories well established, albeit shifted, from the late 19th and early 20th century minstrel shows. African American theatre historian and theorist Lisa M. Anderson asserts that there are three prevailing stereotypes of black women portrayed on stages in the United States. The first

two are direct descendants of the early minstrel shows; the mammy and the tragic mulatta. The minstrel show mammy, Anderson states, was "performed by white men, was ignorant and spoke in malapropisms [ . . . ] was portrayed as large, happy, and aggressively or even animalistically sexual" (6). The tragic mulatta of minstrel shows was light skinned, "wore more refined clothes [ . . . ] and although she spoke English more properly, she was a coquettish character who inevitably possessed some tragic flaw that would lead to her downfall" (6). The third stereotype Anderson addresses is the jezebel, which she traces to the period before the Civil War, a time when black female slaves were often raped by white men. Black women were conflated with being sexually loose, in part as a "convenience for the white men who desired black women" (8). These images of black women, although sexual, are not sexualized in the same way as images of white women. The jezebel’s sexual looseness, in essence, justifies the violence done to that image. Whereas the white female image is often construed as teasing, but virginal, the image of the jezebel is openly whorish. Although many of these stereotypes have morphed, taking on new characteristics and shedding other aspects, they still bear heavy historical significance. Many representations of black women in sport fit into these stereotypical images of the mammy, the jezebel, and the mulatta. These representations proliferate within the mainstream men’s sports such as football where women of color are rarely present. When they are present, they are seldom presented as objects in the same way white women are. Occasionally, a black cheerleader will make a brief appearance, but women of color are not present in commercials, unless they fall into one of the three stereotypes. The most visible presence of women of color is in the NFL sideline reporters who, for the past two years, have been women of color, although each reporter performs differently. In women’s sports, the mulatta and the jezebel are the stereotypes most often depicted. In sports, the mulatta, with her position in limbo between black culture and white culture, can be associated with the standout black athlete who “exceeds her race” and becomes a token “white.” Michael Messner describes this “selective incorporation of standout” athletes as moments when the “media and commercial interests that promote sports [ . . . ] seize on the image of a woman athlete and pull her to the center of cultural discourse” (109). The standout black female athlete is doubly vulnerable to this type of incorporation because of her position as the borders of more privileged identities. For female athletes who do not adhere to this image of purity associated with white privilege, the jezebel is most often the tag. The jezebel, rather than adopting virginal purity, is depicted as flaunting her sexuality. In many of

these examples the jezebel athlete will need the hand of a strong black man as coach to tame her. For example, Florence Griffith Joyner, better known as Flo Jo, was often represented showcasing her outrageous fashion tastes such as extremely long fingernails that curve at the tip. The nails came to represent a sort of rebelliousness that had to be tamed by her husband/coach with discipline. These three images, with a few adjustments, remain present within the sports narrative. Commercials during the Super Bowl in January 2005 rarely depicted women of color. When minority women are present, they are usually in the background. When a black woman is the main character in a commercial, she most likely fits into one of the three stereotypes. This stereotyping bleeds into game coverage as well. Quite often the cameras will go into the stands and show players’ family members. For the white stars, particularly quarterbacks, they show their wives and even their children. If the white star is part of a legacy, like Peyton Manning, they will also show their fathers and brothers. For the black stars they show their mamas in the stands. Nowhere is this stereotype more clear than in the NFL’s Campbell’s Chunky Soup commercials. Campbell’s Chunky Soup is an official NFL sponsor. Years ago, the soup company began airing commercials with Broncos running back Terrell Davis and his mother, except it was an actress playing his mother. The actress who was hired had a large stature and wore clothing that also adhered to the desexualized mammy stereotype. The commercials showed Davis’s “mom” serving hot soup to the players in the locker room, wearing an apron and a smile. Davis’s star soon fell, and a new generation of soup commercials was born once the company signed a then-rising star, Donovan McNabb. Initially the company cast an actress to play his mom as well, but after the first day on the set, Wilma McNabb, who accompanied her son, suggested they use the real moms, and she soon began making commercials with her son. Wilma McNabb physically already adheres to the mammy stereotype. These commercials have become so famous that Wilma McNabb has become a bit of a celebrity herself. During the 2005 NFL season, the Campbell’s Soup commercial aired throughout most football games regardless of the network the game was on. In this season’s installment, Wilma McNabb, represented as the physical embodiment of the mammy stereotype, begins sitting in a motel room with several players gathered around her as she reads the players a “bedtime story.” The story is about legendary quarterback John Elway’s famous “drive.”2 The team is then shown on the bus asking “Ms. McNabb” to allow them to stop for a bite of fast food. Wilma McNabb

tells the driver to continue on to the groans of the players behind her. The narrative then moves to the locker room, where Wilma McNabb is wearing a green skirt suit with a cream scarf around her neck as she moves around the locker room with a tray of Campbell’s Chunky Soup, which she serves to all the players. The final shot shows her on the field before a game participating in the team cheer as she encourages her now well-fed surrogate sons and real son to play a good game, saying “lemme hear your battle cry.” This commercial portrays Wilma McNabb as the team mother, which, in effect, also serves to infantalize her son, Donovan McNabb, helped along by the name of this marketing campaign, “Mama’s Boys.”3 Wilma McNabb also occupies the traditional role of servant, a role established by years of Hollywood movies as far back as Gone with the Wind. Wilma is also assumed to be touring with the team, indicating that her sole role is to follow and take care of her son, even though he’s an adult. This mammy persona for Wilma McNabb in these commercials follows her into her public appearances as well. In a 2005 interview on the CBS Early Show the interviewer leads McNabb into upholding the representation established in the commercials, crossing the image into reality. He says he has heard she really does feed the team when they are in her hometown. McNabb responds by telling him she does feed them saying, “Every time they come to Chicago, I have to make sure my team eats” (Smith 2). This response could almost fit directly into the narrative of the previous commercial. She also talks about people’s reactions to her on the street saying, “They call me Chunky Mom, or they’ll kind of give me the commercial – ‘Miss McNabb, Miss McNabb.’ It’s really kind of cute” (Smith 2). The interview ends with the interviewer stating “it’s good to know there’s a real person on those Chunky Soup commercials” (Smith 3). The line between the character in the commercials, a character created by the writers of the commercials, and the “real” Wilma McNabb is blurred. The interview indicates that these representations are, in fact, not representations at all, but a mimetic reflection of the “real” Wilma McNabb, a mamma. The mammy stereotype is not the only representation that makes it into mainstream sports coverage of football games. The jezebel is also a frequent depiction of women of color within televised representations of football games. During the 2003-2004 football season, this representation was most visible in the Monday Night Football sideline reporter and Latina Lisa Guerrero. Although Guerrero is not an African-American, the stereotyping that leads to othering might still apply. In the following, sports journalist Mike Tierney of The Atlanta-Journal

Constitution describes the debut of Monday Night Footballs' latest female sportscaster Lisa Guerrero. Guerrero is the latest looker to handle the modest chore of ABC sideline reporter, following the equally fetching Melissa Stark. Even at age 39, she scores a 9 on the Bo Derek 1-to-10 scale. In modern parlance, she is fly. And she can ask softball questions of Hall of Famers and recite injury updates as well as anyone. (2C) He could easily be describing her in some seedy magazine spread as on the football field. Here is the paradox for women sports reporters; they can either take themselves lightly and do magazine spreads or take themselves seriously only to be turned into the same object as all women in sport. The female sportscasters body and dress are set up in direct opposition to the armor of the football players during interviews. For example, Lisa Guerrero, though not scantily clad, is almost always dressed in light, feminine colors, purples, teals, etc. which directly contrast the solid colors of the players' uniforms. She also wears her long hair down. These images serve to reassert through clothing that women can never be on the playing field as players in the action of the game. Her clothing in this instance, as well as throughout the remainder of the season, also works to turn her into an exotic sexual object, a common Latina stereotype. The mulatta stereotype is most commonly depicted in representations of women of color who are athletes. These athletes also tend to be swept into the broad category of “women” with the media representations focusing on their gender rather than their race. Track and field star Marion Jones is often represented as one of these standout athletes. Sports sociologist Michael Messner in Taking the Field refers to this mechanism as “selective incorporation of standout women athletes [ . . . ] [one of] four patterned ways the dominant sports media deal with women’s sports” (93). Prior to the 2000 Olympics, Messner claims, Jones was positioned as “’our’ hope and as ‘our’ representative and champion versus the rest of the world” (109). The “our” refers to the assumed and therefore invisible, white majority. Marion Jones was referred to as “America’s sweetheart” and “America’s glamour girl” rhetorically placing her in the same terms often used for the U.S. women’s gymnastics team or U.S. women’s figure skaters, both traditionally considered feminine (white) sports. However, as Messner points out, the rhetoric surrounding Jones quickly changed once her husband, also an athlete, tested positive for steroids. This discovery, according to Messner, “suddenly made race salient. Marion Jones, ‘our girl,’

through her association with her huge, black, supposedly bad-boy-drug-taking husband, [ . . . ] became black, other, and a tarnished subject” (111). The accusations soon began to focus on Jones as well, who entered the 2004 Olympics in Athens under the shadow of possible steroid use. Adamantly denying that such claims held any truth, Jones competed in the long jump and relay. The television gave excruciating coverage of her tragic defeat in both events and the media did not stop there. As one sportswriter for the St. Louis Dispatch wrote, “I kept thinking that maybe, just maybe Jones might have done something to deserve this. I kept wondering what in the world the formerly divine Ms. Jones could have done for the track gods to give her such an inglorious Olympic exit” (Burwell 16). Thus, Jones was represented as the tragic mulatta who fell from graces of her token white privilege.

Resisting Representations

Despite these images, women of color within the narrative perform resistance to these stereotypes. In this section of the chapter, I will look specifically at the performances of black female athletes and sportscasters, specifically sideline reporters, who are asserting their agency within the sporting narrative. I will show how women within the sports narrative perform their bodies in order to resist not only the male gaze, but the imperial gaze as well. Reporters such as Pam Oliver and Michele Tafoya resist being pigeonholed by bland material on the sidelines of football games. Both women go out and find their reports and stories, even when those stories ruffle the feathers of players and/or coaches. Athletes such as Serena and Venus Williams exert control over the performance of their bodies in the media not only by challenging expectations of their game performance, but also by designing their own clothing, allowing them some control of mediated representations. After many accusations that former cheerleader Lisa Guerrero was hired merely for her looks, a feeling supported by many live mistakes made throughout the season, she was replaced for the 2004-2005 season by another Latina, Michele Tafoya. Tafoya entered the season with a massive resume of work with ESPN and CBS Sports behind her. Although the sideline and also the booth reporters are all dressed by a specific store or label, Tafoya’s attire contrasts sharply with Guerrero’s. She has a medium length professional haircut and generally wears earth-toned clothing during games. In a recent interview, however, she does acknowledge the desire/need to

be attractive, but also asserts that women have to work harder, saying “You have to know coming in that you have to work much, much harder than the men. It’s just a fact of life. But you also need to know that it’s okay to be pretty doing it” (Burger 1C). In this case, Tafoya seems to orient herself under the more general category of “women” rather than through her ethnicity. In the various interviews and articles about Tafoya her ethnicity is never mentioned by either the article or by Tafoya herself. The most resistant action in Tafoya’s performance within the sporting narrative context is her lack of press coverage once the season began. The popular sporting press initially jumped all over the story of her replacing Guerrero and speculated on her ability to do the job. However, after the first Monday Night Football game of the season where Tafoya apparently “proved herself” she became un-remarkable. She is positioned in a rather lengthy line of MNF sideline reporter celebrities including Guerrero, whose attire and mistakes brought constant scrutiny, Melissa Stark, whose blonde-hair-blue-eyed charm made her a continual sex object, and Dennis Miller, who received large amounts of criticism for allegedly talking “over the heads” of the fan base. Tafoya finished the season without much comment from the press, doing her job well in a white male dominated arena, her performance of resistance. An example of a more outspoken resistance is found in an incident involving African American sports broadcaster Pam Oliver. Oliver is the sideline reporter for the Fox NFL game coverage. During the 2004-2005 season, Oliver was involved in a harassment situation similar to the Lisa Olson case in the New England Patriots locker room. The situation with Oliver also involved being a "looker," but the harassment ensued in a war of words rather than actions. During a game between the Cowboys and the Packers, Oliver saw Keyshawn Johnson, a player known for his tantrums, yelling at the Cowboys’ assistant coach. Oliver proceeded to report it during the game, a game Johnson's Cowboys were losing and in which he was performing poorly. The cameras did not catch the tiff, so it was Oliver's "looking" and words that made the actions public. Later, on his own satellite radio show, Johnson denied that he had argued with the assistant coach and asserted that Oliver was exaggerating the incident. He asserted on the show, "I will have a chance to rip her when I see her personally [ . . . ] Oh, I'm going to go at her when I see her [ . . . ] I almost wanted to get on a plane, find where she is at, and sit her down, and spank her with a ruler, really, really hard, because it makes no sense" (Wolfley 2). The network stood by Oliver and in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, Oliver stated that if

Johnson tried to spanks her she would "punch him in the face" (Wolfley 2). Oliver performed resistance by looking at a situation on the sidelines and then reporting it to the public. Sideline reporters, male or female, are usually limited to reporting on injuries, interviewing coaches, or adding little stories. Many in the sporting narrative complain that sideline reporters are, according to a New York sports columnist, “purveyors of impertinent information” (Raissman 80) or, according to a Toronto Star sports columnist, “masters of the obvious” (Zelkovich C06). Many sideline reports report information already reported by the men in the booth, or needlessly expand existing reports. These reporters often take the marginalized position in opposition to the commentators in the booth narrating the game. Oliver transgressed the line between the booth and the sideline by creating the report rather than expanding on previous information. She then made her looking public by describing the situation. After the threat of physical violence Oliver responded not with fear or silence, but by refusing to be a victim and countering with her own performance of verbal resistance. In the end, it was Oliver's "I will punch him in the face" that was the final statement in the battle of words. These words of active resistance allow her to fit into another resistant space, that of the warrior. In response to the jezebel, mammy, and mulatta stereotypes, Lisa M. Anderson calls for black women warriors. This concept, she asserts, grew out of the "womanist" movement within the black feminist community. The warrior is not "monolithic" as are the other stereotypes. This image, Anderson believes, "depict[s] a strong black woman without resorting to any of the three icons," (120) being the jezebel, mulatta, and mammy. This image seems an appropriate kin with sport where images of the warrior woman abound in feminist analysis. Women of color must be warriors because, as Michele Tafoya argues, women have to work harder than men. This is doubly true for women of color. The warrior image seems particularly fitting for women of color who are athletes. Two women in current sports who embody this image in numerous ways are Serena and Venus Williams. Women of color athletes also perform resistance to the sporting narrative’s white male hegemony by refusing to be represented as stereotypes or being lumped into the more visible categories with white women or men of color. An athlete who currently complicates stereotypical representations is tennis superstar Serena Williams. Williams and her sister Venus uproot assumptions about tennis’s position as a white-dominated sport. Although in the past black women such as Althea Gibson have become tennis stars, they usually enter those positions

through Messner’s “selective incorporation” concept. The Williams sisters are black, female, and proud, confounded any attempts to place them as either women or black. The sisters, particularly Serena, also problematize the stereotypes of the jezebel and the mulatta, positions that representations of these athletes occasionally slip into. Serena Williams makes an effort to continuously upset assumptions about the “real” Serena in resistant ways by consciously performing her image both on and off the court. The Williams sisters blew into the conventionally white sport of tennis and took control quickly and quietly. Two little girls from Compton weren't supposed to know how to play tennis; they should be playing basketball or running on the track field. For their entire careers in tennis the sisters have had to resist continuous stereotyping. Venus physically embodies the slim figure most often donned by tennis players, a sport obsessed with controlling its female athletes’ weight. Venus adheres to the new look of the young up-and-coming youngsters, slim hips, small chest, and long legs. However, rather than attempting to cover her body or play down its blackness by adopting the usual white, plain tennis outfits, Venus designs her own clothing and also markets these outfits through her corporate sponsors. Her tennis outfits tend to adhere to some extent to traditional tennis outfits in style, but add a touch of flare here and there with a bright color, or a cutout back or side, or even a lace up back. Venus’s outfits, however, allow for the foundational tennis uniform to remain intact. This step allows her a measure of control over her public representations that many other athletes do not have. However, she is also interested in modeling, an environment and representation she does not have as much control over. This year Venus posed for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. She is pictured three times in various suits, all white, emphasizing her particularly dark skin color. She is also pictured in each against a white background. Her “difference” is emphasized through these images. She is also pictured in a studio setting whereas every other model in the issue is posing outside. The issue includes two other African American models who, like the white models, are pictured in natural settings. Venus’s sexuality and blackness are contained in the environment. The blatant difference in context also suggests that her public persona as an outspoken athlete, may have led to this more contained setting, a setting not needed for the more anonymous professional models. Recently, Venus’s sister, Serena, has captured the spotlight. Although both sisters are very outspoken and often painted by the media as arrogant, Serena is the more flashy of the two. Serena's curvy, voluptuous body and smaller stature, as well as her blackness, do not easily fit

into the traditional assumptions of professional tennis. Many press images seem to delight in dissecting Serena's black body, in a manner similar to the fascination surrounding the Hottentot Venus.4 Some sports magazine images show full body shots of Serena, emphasizing her curves as protrusions by picturing her in awkward poses and her strength as an abnormality. These images also catch her mid-swing, showing her body as incongruous in comparison to the usual grace emphasized in images of tennis. They also show Serena's body as awkward, as if her own body is fighting against her athletic ability. Serena also designs her own outfits, but they have drawn much more attention. For the US Open she sported a denim tennis shirt with knee high boots. The boots were actually tennis shoes with piece of fabric that zipped on over the shoes to appear as boots, allowing Serena to sport them in warm-ups as well as during the game. In her next match at the Open, she lost the denim shirt and appeared in a pair of faux leather hotpants and the boots again, only they came off for play this time. Serena’s designs shatter the traditional tennis uniform, creating new fabrics, colors, and styles. This move not only points out the constructed nature of Serena's on-court persona, but also emphasizes the theatricality of the sport itself. Suddenly, even the boring tennis white clothes become costumes. These outrageous costumes also serve to delineate between the on-court Serena and the off-court Serena. The persona Serena exudes when not playing tennis is one of high fashion. She states on her website, “If I could be anything other than a tennis player, I would be an actress or a fashion designer,” a desire that leads some of the tennis community to accuse her of a lack of commitment to the sport. She is often pictured as much in a magazine like Entertainment Weekly as she is in Sport Illustrated. A year before her sister’s jaunt across the pages of the SI Swimsuit Issue, Serena also posed for the magazine. Again, thee images are more “staged” than images from her tennis play. Unlike Venus’s images, Serena is posed outside. She wears a variety of different suits in various colors, including a white bikini. The difference between her images and the way the other models are represented comes down to a more subtle issue; coverage. The lighter skinned Serena is shown in a black one-piece suit twice in the spread, a rarity in this issue. She is wearing a bikini in three images; in one the light on her face and torso leaves her hips and legs in almost complete darkness, another she wears a wrap around her hips, and the final one she is leaning over a pool ladder, again placing the emphasis on her large breasts. However, in comparison to the other models’ images, Serena’s breasts are relatively

unexposed. In these images, it is Serena’s black body that must be contained. In the images of the other models, including one African American, their bodies seems to be on the verge of either busting out of their suits or teasingly slipping them off. These images invite the viewer to voyeuristically imagine them without the bathing suits. Nothing about the images of Serena convey this type of teasing pleasure. Her images not only de-emphasize the voluptuousness of her curves, but also soften her strength. The Williams sisters, again, particularly Serena, are also well-known for infuriating the press. Many of Serena’s press conferences appear staged, baffling attempts to get to know the “real” Serena. Her style of interviewing is very aloof; she never allows the press to get a consistent representation of who she is. In a media interview in 2004, Karen Crouse of the Palm Beach Post described the event in very theatrical terms as Serena "exited stage right and swept down the hall with her entourage, happy to be done with another performance" (1B). In this article Crouse also points to why the press are critical of this type of staginess in an athlete asserting that "[t]hey wanted neurosis—or at least one soliloquy that moved them [ . . . ] If it was pathos the critics wanted, they were chatting up the wrong performer" (1B). Williams, who often claims in interviews that she doesn't keep up with her press, demonstrates a differing position through her spoken attempts to undermine popular press assumptions. When the press focus on her game she steers conversations toward her business and creative ventures. When they want to talk about her fashion designs, she talks about her game. This performance technique, in contrast to the earlier example with Wilma McNabb, refuses the portrayal of a "real" Serena. This constant complication disrupts attempts by the sporting narrative to construct a consistent narrative that might enable the placement of Serena Williams as an object and other. This incident also draws connections with Peggy Phelan’s idea of a “provocation of doubt.” Doubt is revealed by Serena’s refusal to commit to a stable sense of self, or at least the stable self the media attempts to assign to her. Phelan describes doubt in relation to the ghost characters of the Renaissance explaining that the ghost, “as a shadowy phantom [ . . . ] part of both an interiority and an exteriority which escaped proof, was always subject to doubt” (114). The media’s attempts to fix Serena’s identity are highlighted by their inability to find “proof” of who she “really” is. Doubt, however, also lies with the media as an audience to Serena’s performance who are like “the theatrical spectator waiting for a powerful presence to appear” (Phelan 115). This mutual doubt erases the distinctions between the audience and the performer,

in this case between Serena and the media. It suddenly becomes unclear whether the spectacle is Serena or the media circus surrounding her. In the rupture created by this doubt the media become highlighted, attested to by Karen Crouse’s article. In the world of sports, the media are expected to remain unmarked and invisible to the spectator. They serve as the gaze of the camera that guides what the spectator sees. The doubt surfacing in this incident marks the media and exposes them to the perils of visibility, which, by default, also exposes the limits of Serena’s visibility and raises doubts about the “realness” of her representations. Both her on- and off-court performances disrupt attempts to sweep Serena into broad categories that might make her black femaleness invisible. She exhibits traits that are traditionally viewed as feminine, which, in the context of this analysis, place her in the same category with white women. However, she also performs masculine attributes, which place her as a representative of her race. Her on-the-court performances of power and strength, serving at speeds fast for men’s tennis, create comparisons with male athletes. Ironically, her flashiness and strength, as well as her occasional bouts with attitude, often draw comparisons with white male tennis star John McEnroe, famous for on the court tantrums. However, her sometimes hyper-femininity of the court draws comparisons with the divas of Hollywood. She and Venus’s websites look like advertisements for Barbie, there is so much pink. This dichotomy confounds attempts to place her as either feminine or masculine. Serena performs her blackness and her femaleness, making any discursive attempts to render her invisible by sectioning her into broader categories futile. This leaves the question of how female spectators of color might interact with representations that are empowering, as I suggest the Williams sisters may be. Hooks asserts that the oppositional gaze goes beyond being a resistant reader of representations and includes a “broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels” (210). With a spectator who becomes actively involved in the process of meaning- making in concert with the representation, the interaction becomes a performance. Hooks identifies several films that critically engage the black female spectator, without asking her to identify with the images. In one example from the film A Passion for Remembrance, hooks cites a scene where the two girls who are the main characters are dressing to go to a party. They are “looking at one another, staring into mirrors, they appear completely focused on their encounter with black femaleness [ . . . ] they display their bodies not for a voyeuristic colonizing gaze but

for that look of recognition that affirms their subjectivity – that constitutes them as spectators” (212). The Williams sisters offer this type of “recognition” for black female spectators as well. They are in the position of spectators of their own representations and spectators of each other. They are also constantly complicating the existing narratives offered by the sporting establishment, offering new possibilities for various and differing subjectivities. The black female spectator is invited to critically view these representations and imagine transgressive identities for herself.

Notes

1 Apparently, the first editorial caused so much angry feedback that DeBarry wrote another editorial defending his position and qualifying his argument. The second article made an even stronger impression than the first regarding issues of race in America. See Jarvis DeBerry, “Parables, Part 2.” Editorial. Times-Picayune 24 Sept. 2004: 7. 2 In a (year) playoff game against the Cleveland Browns, Broncos quarterback, John Elway, with less than two minutes left in the game, turned his team around and marched 98-yards down the field to win the game and advance in the playoffs. It is the stuff fairytales are made of in the sports world. The story is also ironic as a recalling of this legendary white quarterback serves to contrast Donovan McNabb’s story of striving against the obstacles of being a black quarterback. Here, the McNabb is shown oohing and ahhhing and therefore emulating the tale of a white quarterback, an ironic twist to his assumption of a traditionally white position in football as quarterback. 3 When the “Mama’s Boys” marketing campaign was initially launched by the soup company, several players and their real moms were to participate including John Lynch and Michael Strahan. John Lynch was the only white player included in the 2003-2004 campaign. This season only the McNabb commercials were shown. “Campbell's Chunky Soup Announces 2003-04 Spokesmen & 'Spokesmoms'; Lynch, McNabb and Strahan Join Their Real-Life Mothers in New Campaign.” Business Wire 29 May 2003. 4 In the early 19th-century Sarah Baartman, a woman from the Khoikhoi people in South Africa, was toured around Europe as a freak show act. She was showcased because of her large buttocks

and extremely large genitals, the product of a labia stretching ritual common practiced by many tribes in Africa. Audiences were allowed and invited to poke her, examine her. When she died her skeleton and genitals were placed on display. Story found in Lynn Duke’s article, “Listening To the Lady in the Glass Case: With 'Hottentot Venus,' Barbara Chase-Riboud Writes a Historical Wrong.” Washington Post 16 Nov. 2003: D01.

CHAPTER 3

COMING OUT OF THE LOCKER: LESBIAN (IN)VISIBILITY IN SPORT

Homophobia is the often unspoken, ugly underside of women in sport. Women’s entrance into sport is often accompanied by not only sexist comments, but also heterosexism. Their presence is tolerated as long as distinctions between masculinity and femininity are maintained. As I assert earlier in this thesis, female athletes’ muscular bodies often blur the line between normative masculine and feminine body types. The female athletic body’s position on the borders between masculine and feminine stereotypes is a space of tension within the sporting narrative. Throughout the history of women in sport, the female athletic body has been and continues to be labeled as "mannish." More recently this label also equates female athletes with lesbians. “Lesbian" as a label has contributed to already widespread homophobia in sport, using the term as a derogatory term and further silencing lesbians within sport. In the sporting narrative, the harshest punishment is reserved for the transgressions of lesbians and assumed lesbians in representation. Sexuality assertively intervenes into the traditional gazing practices of the sporting narrative. The predetermined gender categories that operate in both the male gaze and the imperial gaze are complicated when women are both the objects and the “lookers.” Within the constructs of the male gaze and the imperial gaze, as discussed earlier, desire operates as a male commodity. It is this desire that, as feminist and queer theatre scholar Jill Dolan asserts, “has come to be seen as a male trap that automatically objectifies and oppresses women” (80). When lesbians enter the field of representation, both as spectators and as actors, desire is no longer owned solely by men. The tension brought by this desiring lesbian subject often creates doubt about male ownership of desire in the white hetero-male sporting hegemony and often leads to recontainment of that desire. This possession of desire by the lesbian subject opens up the possibility of wielding desire to both heterosexual and homosexual female spectators. This concept lifts the taboo surrounding desire as inherently male, and allows for experimentation with using the master’s tools to take down the master’s house, so to speak. Female desire in gazing relations can help disrupt the male desire of the male gaze. This idea does not imply a

simple reversal of the male/female or heterosexual/homosexual binaries, but acknowledges that desire placed in female subjects must necessarily operate in different and often disruptive ways. As Dolan asserts, “[i]n its refusal of heterosexuality, the lesbian body cannot be narrativized as spectacle” (115). Lesbian bodies in sports resist objectification and intervene in male gazing structures. This transgression is punished through the “lesbian boogeywoman” label, a cruel stereotype punishing transgression the hetero-male gaze. The first section in this chapter examines two athletes who adhere to this phantom stereotype. The stereotyping and abuse suffered by lesbians who publicly come out of the closet exposes many of the dangers of visibility. Using Peggy Phelan’s concept of the unmarked, I suggest in the next section that a form of invisibility is proving an effective tactic for some lesbians, allowing them to act outside the hetero-male gaze structure of sport. However, some lesbians within mainstream sport are reclaiming their lesbian identity and using visibility, with all its dangers, to intervene in the hetero-male gaze. I discuss these interventions in the third section of this chapter. My final section will address lesbian spectatorship and how many lesbian fansites on the web actively use an oppositional gaze, reappropriating heterosexual sports icons and enacting queer readings. In this section I will also explore lesbian spectatorship within mainstream sports and how this spectatorship intervenes in the male gaze and provides heterosexual women with possible opportunities to intervene in similar ways.

The Lesbian Boogeywoman Stereotype

Within the sporting narrative, homosexual women are the least visible. This absence is partially due to the relative invisibility of sexuality as a marked characteristic on the body. This invisibility is also a product of the fear felt by many lesbians who remain in the closet because of the outspoken homophobia often launched by the media, fellow athletes, and coaches not only at lesbian athletes who come “out” to the public and press, but also at female athletes regardless of sexual orientation. Homophobia in sport, and elsewhere, breeds a need to be able to recognize sexual orientation. In sports, homophobes tend to look for characteristics in women that are more masculine and then use those visual markers somehow as proof of “sexual deviance” because these characteristics are not compatible with a hetero-male gaze structure. However, in sport this opens almost all female athletes, because of their transgressive bodies, to the “threat”

of being labeled a “lesbian,” or “dyke.” The homophobic need to identify homosexuals using visible “symptoms” of a supposed inner “deviance” leads to a paradoxical situation that keeps homosexuals in the closet, but also sees homosexuals everywhere. This need to visibly identify the “symptoms” of lesbianism is played out in the stereotype of what Pat Griffin calls the “lesbian boogeywoman.” In sports this stereotype represents the unacceptable. She is masculine, unattractive, mean, and predatory sexually. The term “boogeywoman” not only conjures up the lesbian label, but also suggests this stereotype’s status as a myth, a phantom, a menace. Griffin asserts that this stereotype in sports “haunts all women, scaring young women athletes and their parents, discouraging solidarity among women in sport, and keeping women’s sport advocates on the defensive” (53). She goes on to say that the lesbian boogeywoman is only one of several stereotypical images of women in sport, some of which have already been addressed previously in this thesis such as the wife, the mom, the bitch, and the “girl next door.” However, like many of the media stereotypes discussed, Griffin asserts that there is no acknowledgement that a lesbian might occupy any one of these other categories as well. These stereotypes serve as controlling devices, maintaining the fixity of gender and sexual categories, which reinforce the dominance of the white hetero-male hierarchy. The lesbian boogeywoman is always butch, corresponding to what queer theorist Sally Munt asserts: [b]utch is the recognizable public form of lesbianism [ . . . ] it communicates a singular verity, to dykes and homophobes alike. Butch – despite the evidence of butch heterosexual women and the passion of femmes for women – is the gospel of lesbianism, inevitably interpreted as the true revelation of female homosexuality. (54) This stereotype allows for stabilization and the ability to visually (mis)recognize female homosexuals within sports. Maintaining the lesbian boogeywoman as a visible entity allows hetero-male control over images and representations as well as a policing of lesbian desire. However, this stabilization is often misleading and can be renegotiated in various ways, as I will address later in the chapter. Women’s tennis seems to have a penchant for lesbian boogeywomen. In the early eighties both Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova came out publicly, or were forced to come out publicly. In 1990 a former women’s tennis champion, Margaret Court, held a press conference where she allegedly alerted the world that tennis was full of predatory lesbians who seduced younger players (Miller 114). However, no names were mentioned, creating a myth,

which reified the notion that invisible boogeywomen lurked in sport. The National Inquirer further pursued Court’s story. Tennis player Gabriela Sabatini said, “I don’t even like to take my clothes off in the dressing room” (Miller 114) and several mothers of young players became suspicious and accused the women’s tennis circuit of having a group of predatory lesbians. These stories sound quite similar to monster movie plots. The fear is created by the anonymity of these “boogeywomen” and their ability to sexually prey on the vulnerable. Thus, the lesbian boogeywoman is equated with the creature from the black lagoon, Frankenstein, Dracula, and other infamous monsters. The hetero-male gaze’s inability to effectively recontain the lesbian subject leads to this type of demonization. The panic created by such stories also allows for diversion from the continuing problem of sexual harassment of women by men within sports. As Griffin points out, “lesbians are viewed as pseudo-men, exhibiting all of the worst aspects of heterosexual male sexuality” (58). Although the suspicion of predatory lesbians may have been instigated by the revelation of King and Navratilova’s sexuality, neither was competing regularly when the allegations were made. Hence, the lesbian threat posed by both women was effectively recontained by the hetero-male sporting establishment.1 A recent example of this boogeywoman stereotype is openly gay French tennis player, Amelie Mauresmo. Mauresmo is the first French athlete, male or female, to come out of the closet. Before her public announcement at the age of nineteen, she was covered little by the press, even though she had been marked as a rising star. Upon winning the Australian Open in 1999, Mauresmo ran into the stands and embraced her girlfriend, and "was cradled with hugs" (Miller 103). Fellow players and the media then began to pay attention to the young star, particularly calling attention to and constructing Mauresmo in traditionally masculine terms. A Scotland paper referred to her as a "bicep-bulging wonder" (Drysdale T12). This phrase immediately equates her with the male imagery of bulging muscles. Fellow American player Lindsay Davenport skipped over imagery and told the press after a game against Mauresmo that it "was like playing against a man" (Ackert 62). Another fellow player, Martina Hingis was quoted as saying before a match at the Australian Open that she thought Mauresmo was "half a man" (Qtd. in Miller 104). Both comments paint Mauresmo as the stereotypical masculine, butch lesbian. The comments from fellow female players also point out the homophobia launched at lesbian players by other women athletes because of the perceived threat and unfair "masculine" advantage Mauresmo supposedly may pose. Griffin identifies this as one of the

myths surrounding "lesbian boogeywomen" that they have " an unfair advantage over other women in sport because they are not 'normal' women" (55). The stereotype and the abuse suffered by those subjected to its cruelty expose the dangers of lesbian visibility in sport.

Invisibility Politics

Visibility is often touted as the way for marginalized identities, particularly homosexuals, to gain subjectivity and rights within the mainstream. Many sports scholars such as Pat Griffin heavily advocate and encourage homosexuals to publicly come out of the closet. As Jennifer Hargreaves asserts, [f]or lesbians in sport to ‘come out,’ to make their presence felt, and to claim personal and group space as lesbians, is a challenging act of resistance to homophobia and a refusal to be reduced to absence. Sexual (lesbian) categories of difference and identity that operate in sport are usually private; coming out makes them visible and public. Coming out is, therefore, a reflection of greater confidence, a more assured sense of identity and of self, and an act of personal politics. (146) This ideological stance is popular within identity politics and is generally advocated by various marginalized groups. However, visibility has its traps as well. Although many lesbian athletes personas can be read as a reclaiming of negative stereotypes, there is enough excess of meaning to allow for the opposite reading to take place as well. Both Navratilova and Mauresmo can be read as reinforcing the lesbian boogeywoman stereotype by their butch performances. Foucault asserts, in reference to the Panopticon that “visibility is a trap” (Discipline and Punish 200). Performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan also questions the efficacy of visibility as a progressive political strategy in her book Unmarked. Phelan asks, “If representational visibility equals power, then almost naked young white women should be running Western culture” (10). This phenomenon is seen in televised coverage of mainstream men’s sports, where women are a large visual presence, but as powerless sexual objects. It is important here to assert that Phelan is not asserting, and neither am I, that homosexuals should remain in the closet. However, as Phelan points out, “[t]here is an important difference between willfully failing to appear and never being summoned” (11). I assert that within sports, homosexuals are constantly being

summoned, through homophobia and heterosexism. In this case a willful refusal to appear can also be a politically powerful performance. Many homosexual athletes resist mainstream sport’s homophobia and assimilation by creating thriving supportive sports environments outside the scope of the sporting narrative and its media. Although such highly publicized “outings” as Navratilova, King, and Mauresmo have made visible strides toward lesbian rights within sports, they have not inspired many other lesbians associated with professional mainstream sport to come out. Even though each has made strides, all three have also been subjected to intense public criticism and scrutiny. They have all been victims of strong homophobic sentiments as a result of their visibility. On the other hand, there has been a rather large explosion of out lesbians in non-mainstream sports as well as the creation of a contingency of all-lesbian sports and sports teams. Throughout her book on lesbians in sport, Pat Griffin splices in photographic images of lesbian competitors participating in sport. The vast majority of these photographs are from various years of the Gay Games, an alternative international sporting competition for gays and lesbians. These events emphasize the strength of community and provide a relatively safe environment in which athletes can participate that exists outside the mainstream heterosexist sporting narrative. These games get relatively little press coverage and mainstream athletes rarely crossover into the Gay Games realm.2 This sequestering of the community can be read as a refusal to be represented by the mainstream sporting narrative. The invisibility of gay sport allows a(re)imagining of sport on queer terms rather than asking for acceptance from the heterosexual community. This refusal to operate within the boundaries and codes of male heterosexism also allows the athletes and participants to move outside of the male and imperial gazes inherent within the mainstream sporting narrative. However strong this reading of queer sporting culture may be, it also runs the risk of ghettoization, and therefore pandering to the desires of the heterosexist sporting narrative. While creating a community outside the influences of the dominant community may allow for more freedom, the marginalized community remains a ghetto. I use the word ghetto to refer to an area occupied by a segregated group as the result of social pressures. Michael Messner also addresses the issue of ghettoization in his book Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports. He uses the model particularly to address women in sport, but I find it might also prove useful in analyzing gay sport as well. Messner addresses both the benefits and dangers of ghettoization asserting

that “[t]hose inside the walls of a ghetto may feel some protection, safety, and autonomy, but these very same walls are holding them inside, containing and limiting their choices” (141). By marking out the boundaries of gay sport, the gay sporting community is automatically placing a spatial restriction upon themselves. Meanwhile, the dominant heterosexual male sporting community can continue homophobic practices unchecked. The gay sport ghetto, in a sense, ensures the futility of any challenges it may pose to the hegemony because of its limited community audience. As Messner points out as long as stigmatized identities “quietly play adapted forms of sports in their separate and unequal ghettos [ . . . ] the unmodified definition of ‘athlete’ remains securely male” (140) and heterosexual. The question is how can Phelan’s type of “invisibility politics” work within mainstream sports? I want to suggest that these invisibility politics are already at work within mainstream sport. Although several female athletes have come out publicly in sports such as tennis and golf, many have either dismissed or doubted a similar situation could occur in team sports. The risk of coming out publicly in team sports is elevated due to the constant physical contact not only throughout the game, but in the locker room as well. In individual sports, the athlete is sequestered, to a certain extent. In tennis and golf, physical contact between athletes rarely, if ever, occurs. The gazers in these sports are the spectators and the athletes, absorbed in the game, who rarely return the gaze and occupy the position of the object. In team sports, the same gaze apparatus is in place only it is now complicated by a series of looking relations that are occurring between the athletes playing the game. Suddenly, the question of who is doing the looking becomes important. The possibility and threat of a look that desires, and is not alienated by the representational framing or pseudo fourth-wall between the spectators and the game, enters not only the game context, but also the locker room. The tension rises in this space in part due to the absence of a controlled and controlling gaze structure between the audience and performers, spectators and athletes. In the locker room, the line between who is the “looker” and who is the “looked-at” is blurred. This anxiety is complicated by the presence of naked bodies interacting with one another. In an environment where everyone is essentially a “looker” attempts are made to stabilize the fluid gaze/desire structure by assigning a “looker/desirer” such as Lisa Olson in the men’s locker room or the absent and/or present lesbian in the women’s locker room. The taboo on lesbians in team sports was broken by two players in the WNBA, Sue Wicks and Michele Van Gorp. In the summer of 2004, WNBA Minnesota Lynx player Van

Gorp publicly stated her homosexuality in a local GLBT magazine called Lavender. She is the only WNBA player to be publicly open about her sexuality and only the second professional team athlete to be “out.” The first was WNBA Liberty player Sue Wicks, who is now retired and coaching the Rutger’s women’s basketball team. In both cases, the characteristic that is so remarkable is that the stories were completely un-remarkable. Both women nonchalantly spoke of their sexuality in the context of interviews about their status as basketball players and both received little to no press coverage. Perhaps it is the blasé attitude found in comments such as Van Gorp’s statement, “It’s no big deal. It’s just who I am” (Schmid 1C). Both players, particularly Van Gorp, do not adhere to the visual representation of the lesbian boogeywoman. Neither is particularly muscular and both sport bouncy blonde ponytails. In fact, Van Gorp, with her blue eyes, blonde hair and chiseled face bears more resemblance to a runway super model than the butch construction of a lesbian athlete. Wicks, whose career only continued to climb after her public announcement, spends time at sports camps for youth giving basketball workshops. No one seems to be crying foul and accusing her of seducing young girls. Although some online sites such as Outsports.com felt the relative lack of coverage, particularly in Wicks’s case, was due to a conspiracy by the sporting establishment to silence to homosexual voice, the players themselves seem to be well aware of their performances. Since Van Gorp’s announcement, the press has been silent about her sexuality, but continues to cover the Lynx games and Van Gorp’s play on court. Neither player made a big scene of their move to publicize their sexuality, but neither made a secret of the sexuality in the first place. Van Gorp stated, “I’ve never been in the closet” (Schmid 1C). When Phelan discusses the politics of disappearance, she refers to “an active vanishing, a deliberate and conscious refusal to take the payoff of visibility” (19). However, the “payoff” for coming out of the closet in mainstream sport is complicated, particularly when it associated with a scandal. Both Wicks and Van Gorp, separated by over two decades from Navratilova and King’s “comings out,” are products of a social shift in attitudes toward lesbianism. However, scandals involving perceived “lesbian boogeywomen” continue to attract fear and attention in the sporting narrative. In contrast to the relative unremarkability noted by the media in Wicks’s and Van Gorp’s cases, there are the allegations issued against former WNBA player Latasha Byears. In the summer of 2003, a year before Van Gorp’s announcement, Byears was released from the Los Angeles Sparks after allegations surfaced that she and “three men

with no connection to the Sparks allegedly raped [a] victim at a party June 5 after a Sparks victory against the Sacramento Monarchs at Staples Center” (Stevens S2). This story was covered much more extensively by the media, but was quickly dropped after charges failed to materialize. In November 2004, Byears sued the owner alleging discrimination because of her sexuality. This type of visible scandal was also associated with both King’s and Navratilova’s highly publicized “outings.” However, with the scandal of merely “coming out” on the wane and the palimony suits associated with King and Navaratilova a relic of the past, Byears dominated the spotlight, accused of raping a female with three men. Although the men’s identities remain a secret, Byears homosexuality and race (African American) position her within a newer model of the predatory lesbian; now it takes more than a homosexual affair to make headlines, it takes rape, even if the accusations are without merit. Many lesbian athletes hope to come out publicly without the threat of scandal, attested to by Amelie Mauresmo’s assertion, “I don’t want months and years of mindless speculation about my sexuality” (Drysdale T12). In each case, Mauresmo, Van Gorp, and Wicks, the athletes made a public statement and moved on. None professed to be actively advocating for rights or vehemently denying stereotypes. These athletes all circumvent the negative payoffs of visibility by refusing to make their appearance in connection with scandal. The unremarkability of their circumstances is quite powerful in the face of two decades of “lesbian boogeywoman” scandals.

Visibly Resisting Compulsory Heterosexuality

Despite the stereotypes and public ridicule, many lesbians in sport are resisting the hetero-male hierarchy by visibly intervening in its gazing structures. The next section will look at how some athletes, such as Martina Navratilova, and Amelie Mauresmo, all out lesbians, perform their difference through attempts to produce their own images. The dangers of coming out to the public while maintaining a professional sport career are severe. As shown in earlier sections, coming out in mainstream sport carries a backlash. It runs the risk of not only ridicule from other players and the media, but also larger financial risks involved in the loss of corporate sponsorship. Regardless of the risks, many lesbian athletes have chosen to defy the sporting hegemony. Many of their performances work to reclaim and reappropriate the verbal slurs and stereotypes as positive. This determination to be visible is read as an activist performance by

Jennifer Hargreaves who asserts that “[f]or lesbians in sport to ‘come out,’ to make their presence felt, and to claim personal and group space as lesbians, is a challenging act of resistance to homophobia and a refusal to be reduced to absence” (146). Many of these athletes, because of their determination to remain visible, are held up as heroes within the gay and lesbian community. Tennis player Martina Navratilova is one of the first lesbian athletes to not only “come out,” but to actively support and rally for the gay and lesbian community. Initially, Navratilova, like King, denied her homosexuality.3 She was outed not long after the King incident in 1981. She soon lost most of her endorsements and was subject to scrutiny not only by the media, but by players as well. Navratilova, unlike Mauresmo, was the top-seeded player in women’s tennis and continued to dominate the sport following the revealing of her sexuality. She also visibly performed her sexuality in front of the press. After winning her ninth Wimbeldon championship she rushed into the stands to embrace her then partner, Judy Nelson. She not only performed resistance by dominating the game and refusing to be erased, but continued to maintain her very masculine appearance despite continuous abuse from the media. Her arch-rival, Chris Evert, was represented as Navratilova’s antithesis. However, Navratilova’s insistence on a “butch” performance exposed and subverted the constructed nature of Chris Evert’s overdetermined feminity. As Munt points out, Navratilova’s performance of butchness synchronized the desires of a new generation of lesbians nurtured by ideologies of personal achievement, individualism, and commodity fetishism [ . . ] The new body culture of the 1980’s drew dykes to the gym in droves. Butch aesthetics became muscle- bound, nouveau macho replacing the finesse of 1950’s romanticism [ . . . ] In the new performativity an adjectival hardness became intrinsic to the reconstruction of butch. (71- 2) Navratilova helped demystify the lesbian boogeywoman stereotype by reclaiming butchness and, through her public performances, making it chic. This subversion opened general critique of the feminine in tennis allowing for further transgressions of the male gazing structures, like the Williams sisters and Amelie Mauresmo, to enter the court. During the early nineties, Navratilova began to actively advocate for gay and lesbian rights. She helped raise funds for the Gay Games. She was also involved in a joint lawsuit against Colorado’s Amendment 2, which denied homosexuals civil rights. She is now an

outspoken advocate for gay rights, utilizing her celebrity to gain visibility for the cause. In a 2000 speech in Washington D.C. at the Millenium March for Equality she states When I look back on my childhood, I left what was then Czechoslovakia so that I would be free to play tennis the way I wanted to play. In retrospect, I left Czechoslovakia so that I could be free to live my life as a gay woman. Or so I thought. For it did not dawn on me back then that freedom, fairness and the most basic of equal rights are granted to, and legally protect, heterosexuals only. And until that changes, our work for equality and for fairness is far from over. (Lieber 1C) As an advocate for gay rights, Navratilova participates visibly in both the heterosexual mainstream and the gay and lesbian community. Her activism invades the narrative of sports pages and intervenes in gazing structures by actively claiming her sexuality in interviews. Martina works against recontainment, continually inserting her sexuality into the hetero-male sporting narrative. Despite the initial negative press surrounding Navratilova, her public performance of sexuality paved the way for other lesbians in sport. The precedent set by Navratilova allows Amelie Mauresmo the ability to perform her sexuality differently. The first difference is that Mauresmo voluntarily came out to the public. A private scandal wasn’t uncovered, forcing an admission of “guilt” as with King and Navratilova. This change also disposed of the apologetic stance of King in particular. Mauresmo was far from apologetic, even in the face of the same public scrutiny and abuse. In an interview with a Scotland paper she describes her decision to reveal her sexuality stating “I didn’t want months or even years of mindless speculation about my sexuality. So I took a deep breath, told the truth, and I only hope I will be treated fairly for what I am because I love Sylvie, and I don’t care who knows it” (Drysdale T12). At the 1999 Australian Open, she mimicked Navratilova’s earlier performance by running into the stand and embracing Sylvie, her then partner. Another breakthrough for Mauresmo is that she did not lose her endorsements after coming out strongly asserting that “if they want to set me aside, there will be dozens more who will take me [ . . . ] And if they let me go, they are jerks anyway” (Miller 106). However, more recent publicity surrounding Mauresmo reflects a slightly different, and less overt prejudice against her sexuality. Recent press accounts tend to focus on steroid use allegations against Mauresmo. 4 As Toby Miller suggests, because similar allegations are not launched against extremely muscular players such as the Williams sisters and other players, the

accusations alleged toward Mauresmo “suggest that sexuality animated the controversy” (104). Here, Mauresmo’s butch performance is recontained by allegations of deviance through the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Reinforcing Heterosexuality

Images of female athletes and women in sport are infused with what figure skating expert Abigail M. Feder-Kane calls “overdetermined femininity” to stifle the threat of the lesbian boogeywoman. While Feder-Kane applies this model specifically to women’s figure skating, she acknowledges at the beginning of her article the presence of this idea in other women’s sports. The media tend to focus on the feminine aspects of certain female athletes who may challenge expectations of traditional femininity. For example, the extreme media focus media on Serena Williams’s clothing distracts from other aspects of her appearance, bulging muscles, blackness, vocal grunts during play, that tend to fall under the masculine category. By emphasizing her clothing choices the media highlights a typically feminine characteristic. Feder- Kane addresses this seemingly paradoxical emphasis saying that when “physical capabilities no longer distinguish men and women, femininity is overdetermined to keep female athletes from being labeled as masculine or lesbian” (208). This concept can also be applied to the type of voluntary and involuntary objectification of women within sport. Many athletes, such as Amy Acuff, who chose to pose in various states of undress for magazines, are represented in images that serve to contrast their usual sporting appearance. Female athletes are pictured in these representations with make-up and elaborate hairstyles, equating them with fashion models rather than muscles and sweat. Feminist Jennifer Hargreaves in her book Heroines of Sport claims these measures are an attempt by female athletes to bear visible signs of an "insignia of heterosexuality" and deflect the mannish stereotype. These characteristics, according to Hargreaves, include "make-up, nail polish, pretty clothes, jewelry, and to show off boyfriends and husbands" (135). Hence, in order to deny and deflect accusations of manishness and/or homosexuality, female athletes are invited to adopt a form of overdetermined feminity to negate the normative masculinity associated with mainstream sport.5

Another area of the sporting narrative that supports compulsory heterosexuality is the requirement of backstory for premiere athletes. Life stories are a requirement for the functionality of the hetero-male gaze in sports, allowing spectators to empathize and identify with athletes. This gazing/trespassing into the personal lives of athletes often requires disclosure of sexuality whether voluntary or not. In the case of the sporting narrative, private backstory is used as an excuse to reaffirm and prove heterosexuality. Athletes who attempt to keep their private lives private, outside the range of the gaze, are looked upon with suspicion by a public and a media that thrives on the fallacy that they have a right to know about athlete’s lives. The need to know about "private lives" exposes a silent homophobia within sport. Billie Jean King set up a “perfect” private image. On the court she was an outspoken feminist. However, representations of her at-home heterosexuality contained her on court rebelliousness. A similar situation recently occurred surrounding the sailing race, the America’s Cup. Dennis Connor, after being beaten by an all-women sailing team, labeled them “a bunch of lesbians” (Griffin 85). The reaction from the women’s team was to immediately go to press with stories about their boyfriends and husbands. They also were cited as saying, “Although there aren’t any lesbians among them, the sailors claim it wouldn’t make a difference if there were” (Griffin 85). This remark was used as an afterthought, once their heterosexuality was an unquestioned fact. No one questioned Connor’s response as homophobic. By using their private lives as proof of their heterosexuality the women, in a sense, justified the original accusation. In each case, visibility is again a trap. Once an athlete, gay, straight, black, white, wanders into the realm of the public gaze, no-thing is private. Like the window in Bentham’s prison cell, athletic celebrity leaves its objects nowhere to hide.

Lesbian Spectatorship

The lesbian spectator occupies a crucial role in the resistance of the hetero-male gaze. I will address not only how a lesbian spectator might use an oppositional gaze, but also how women as spectators of other women might break through the essentialism of the male gaze. Utilizing a burgeoning cyber community of homosexual fandom, I will analyze how lesbian spectators reconstruct and inscribe different meanings on the representations of sport provided by the popular media. I will then discuss Jill Dolan’s concept of the lesbian subject as the “Not . . .

But” from Brechtian theory and how this applies to a lesbian oppositional gaze. I will explore Dolan’s “lesbian model for alternative spectatorship” (17) and how it may be used to decenter the male gaze in the sports narrative. As outlined earlier, bell hooks in her article “the oppositional gaze” asserts the idea that there is a power in looking. She disagrees that spectators are cultural dupes and uses black spectators generally, and female spectators specifically, as examples of how a critical gaze may be used to rupture a male imperial gaze. Hooks’s viewers "experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation" (199). For homosexual sports fans much of this type of contestation and confrontation happens on gay sport fan sites such as Outsports.com and Gaysports.com. These websites critically engage with the dominant hetero-male sporting narrative and provide alternative and often contrasting readings to the dominant hegemony. These sites also allow and encourage "looking" by posting images of athletes and sporting events, some of these are for erotic visual pleasure, although most of these are of men. In a public space where homosexuals, such as Matthew Shepard, suffer severe punishment for "looking,"6 these sites offer a safe space for same sex looking, what hooks refers to when she asserts that "the private realm of television screens or dark theaters could unleash a repressed gaze" (200). These sites function on the level of visual pleasure while also offering an interactive community of critical engagement. Gay sport fan sites also differ from the previously referred to arena of gay sporting culture precisely because these sites engage not only with the gay sporting community, but also question and challenge the dominating sports narrative. These fan sites deconstruct hetero-masculinist representations and offer homosexuals as well as the homosexual view point as centered. The essentialism of the fixed gender categories of the male gaze need to be complicated and challenged before these gazing structures can be changed. In the traditional male gaze structure, visual pleasure can only be contained by the male spectator. Visual pleasure, in this psychoanalytic structure, can be accessed by women, but only if they occupy the male viewing position, therefore become complicit in their own objectification. When the gazing structures are reoriented around a lesbian subject and a lesbian viewer, the male gaze is disrupted because desire and visual pleasure becomes a commodity exchanged between women. This type of exchange is already happening within mainstream sport in the WNBA. As demonstrated by the now defunct WUSA national women's soccer league, professional women's sports exist on a

knife's edge. Recognizing the fact that they need to draw as large an audience as possible in order to stay afloat, the WNBA actively targets the lesbian community, a core fan base. Like most other sports it also actively targets families, creating an environment that Washington Post sports writer Tom Knott sums up by stating, "Dad and Mom in one row of seats, Mom and Mom in another row of seats" (C01). Not only might this situation create a productive interaction between gay and straight communities, but it also creates and environment where a female gaze becomes the currency of exchange. This complex community setting, in which a female gaze might become the normative construct, also allows for both gay and straight women to imagine the possibilities of desire and visual pleasure. As Dolan states, "Power, sexuality, and desire have historical connotations assigned by the dominant culture for reasons of social, economic, and cultural expediency that have restricted women's abilities to express themselves and their sexuality within this culture. But power, sexuality, and desire can be recuperated from the strictly male domain, and can assume distinctly different meanings placed in different gender and sexual contexts" (81). WNBA games open up the possibility of this empowerment because the gazing structure is reimagined around a female fan base.

Notes

1 Navratilova is playing professionally again, but receiving little “panic” press. Some in the media attribute this sense of ease to a new found freedom for lesbians in sport. However, Navratilova is playing in professional mixed doubles where her sexuality is tamed by the presence of her male tennis partner. 2 Martina Navratilova was honored at the Gay Games in 1994, but did not compete. 3 Initially, Navratilova denied her affair with feminist and lesbian activist Rita Mae Brown because she was afraid it would keep her from getting American citizenship (Miller 113). 4 Emily Nipps. “French fans may eye Mauresmo.” Tampa Tribune. 27 May 2001 final ed.: 9. also Selena Roberts. “Tennis: Amid Speculation, Mauresmo wins.” New York Times 2 Jul. 2002 final late ed.: D:1:1.

5 These representations also have the potential to be transgressive. The “overdetermined femininity” also highlights the constructed nature of that femininity, allowing more fluid gender categories. 6 Matthew Shepard was an openly gay college student who was brutally attacked and left to die in Laramie, Wyoming. He was the victim of a hate crime over his sexuality.

CONCLUSION

THE WINDS OF CHANGE

My own oppositional gaze has solidified itself in my sports viewing lately. As a white hetero-female football fan, I find myself avoiding games on Fox after several frustrating viewings of Jill Barbierri’s weather forecasts. I am also making a concerted effort to watch more women’s sports. This action tends to be difficult due to lack of coverage of women’s sports. Tennis and golf seems to take up most of the coverage. When all the mainstream men’s sports are on break, WNBA games occasionally slip in on the weekend. The Women’s Sports Foundation actively encourages its members and online visitors to watch women’s sports, an acknowledgement of the power to turn on the television. These days, turning on or off the television is an act of agency, sending a message to the demographics people that this “program,” NFL on Fox’s pre-game show for example, is not worth watching, while the WNBA is getting my viewer vote. I find it strange that it is sports reliance on commercialism that opens gaps in the spectator pool. A white hetero-male gaze is no longer sufficient to support the now massive sports industry. Whether it’s the NFL targeting a female audience or the WNBA pitching to the lesbian community, mainstream sport remains a slave to the almighty dollar. This situation forces televised sport to commercialize the gaze, wielding it to not only draw in viewers, but to sell those viewers products as well. The question is which gaze are they commodifying? Without a doubt, the white heterosexual male remains the dominant target, but the female spectator is becoming a presence in the demographic pool. During football games, I notice that I, as a white hetero-female, am not only being hailed by the advertising, but lately I also feel addressed by game commentary and coverage as well. More and more time is given to commentators like Michele Tafoya and Pam Oliver, while fewer and fewer shots focus on the cheerleaders. I attribute this shift to an acknowledgement by the televised sporting mechanism of a broader fan base, including women and families. However, it is the somewhat hesitant acknowledgement of the male homosexual sports fan that I find signals the beginnings of a paradigmatic shift in mainstream sport. The

incorporation of Carson Kresley into a commercial during the Super Bowl is emblematic of this shift. His presence in the Diet Pepsi commercial discussed in chapter two disrupts the accepted gazing hierarchy in football. Kresley is positioned within the commercial, like the women, as a “looker.” Initially, I thought that the commercial was a fluke, a flash in the pan of male hetero- hegemony. However, this breach in the wall of male heterosexuality widened a few months later when Bravo announced that this season’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” will include an episode where the Fab Five make-over baseball’s World Series Champions, the Boston Red Sox. In this context not only are gay men positioned as “lookers,” but assumed heterosexual athletes are positioned as objects of that look. Will this breach be recontained? Will it lead to an openly gay male professional athlete? Will the primacy of hyper-hetero-masculinity finally be overthrown? Stay tuned. We’ll return after these messages from our sponsors.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Shannon Walsh is currently completing her requirements for a masters in Theatre Studies at Florida State University. Originally from Colorado, Shannon received her BA at Colorado State University in Performing Arts. She will begin her PhD in Theatre Historiography at the University of Minnesota in Fall 2005 where she plans to continue research on connections between sports and theatre and also pursue her research interests in performance studies and feminist theory.