Reflections on Communication and Sport

Why Communication and Sport Matters

A picture in the July 1973 issue of Ms Magazine, from an article titled “On the playing fields of history,” shows champion American softball player Joan Joyce about to pitch the ball (Loggia, 1973). For the time, it was a rare image of a strong, muscular, unsmiling, determined sportswoman in action. Yet, 11 years later, the Canadian women’s magazine Chatelaine was still showing stereotypical portrayals. The article on “The emergence of the female jock” (1984) was illustrated with carefully posed studio shots of five smiling women. Furthermore, ensuring that readers understood women’s “proper place”—literally on the sidelines—the next story in the same Chatelaine issue, “Getting glamorous: On-location makeovers in Edmonton,” showed the wives of the Edmonton Eskimos football team after their beauty makeovers (Lenskyj, 1984). The same year, the Coaching Association of Canada published an article titled “Making the right choice” (1984) which warned female athletes applying for American sport scholarships that “lesbianism was a popular practice on some teams” and that they should “avoid schools where such situations are likely to arise.”

These examples provide some indication of the climate of heteronormativity in the 1980s when I began researching issues of gender and sport. The concept of heteronormativity encompasses both homophobia and heterosexism, that is, active prejudice and discrimination against sexual minorities, as well as the implicit ideological assumptions that shape societal attitudes and practices.

Of the dozens of pictures I had collected by the end of the 20th century, few represented resistance as powerfully as Joan Joyce (except, of course, Martina Navratilova). For me, they serve as inspirational images that capture the essence of resistance to heteronormativity and demonstrate why communication and sport matters. Joyce’s sexual identity is not the most significant factor here. Recognizing the power of the media and the priorities of commercial sponsors, the gatekeepers of sport realize that heteronormativity is as much about “keeping up appearances” as it is about actual sexual orientation. In the world of competitive sport, from college level to the Olympic Games, the appearance of heterosexuality has long been promoted through implicit or explicit regulations concerning clothes, hairstyles, comportment, and personal narratives—images and information that are communicated through the print and electronic media.

What about boys and men? If gay males were to look for media images that challenge heteronormativity in sport, one might assume they would select Rudy Gallindo, Johnnie Weir, or other openly gay athletes whose appearance and performance pose a challenge to hegemonic masculinity. But ironically, Gallindo’s artistry and Weir’s gender-bending style tended to attract less gay admiration than Beckham’s semi-naked poses in gay (and straight) magazines. The emergence of the “hot jock” gay icon and sport pornography since the 1970s has resulted in what Brian Pronger (1990, p. 146) has termed a paradox: “Gay athletic pornography invariably has as its theme the appearance of orthodox masculinity, which is in fact paradoxical  . . . an ostensibly straight situation turns out to be gay.” ¹ Thus, from a gay male perspective, heteronormative media images of sportsmen embody athletic masculinity, which is a desired/desirable quality regardless of sexual orientation. And, in the actual sport context, if a gay male athlete has sufficient “masculine capital” in the form of athletic masculinity, this mitigates the impacts of homophobia and promotes greater acceptance on the part of teammates and coaches (Anderson, 2005).

My Journey

In 1976, when I was taking an undergraduate degree in sociology, a male student in a course on women and society gave a presentation on sport—a strange topic, I thought, and one that held little interest for me. I was relatively sedentary at the time; cycling to and from university was my main form of exercise, and it was not until the late 1970s that I began training in martial arts and running. By 1980, these new interests, taken up at a time when I was considering potential research topics for my PhD, led me to sport studies, specifically history and sociology. Further developments in my academic and personal life culminated in the 1986 book, Out of Bounds: Women, Sport and Sexuality, based in part on my 1983 dissertation (Lenskyj, 1983, 1986).

In my early research, examining developments from the 1890s on, I identified the centrality of the media in shaping attitudes and practices, long before the age of television, the Internet, and social media. Hegemonic views of gender and sport were entrenched through newspapers and magazines, as well as through prescriptive literature. Books on “healthy living,” including healthy sport and leisure pursuits, were aimed at socializing children, youth, and young adults into white, middle-class values. As the public appetite for prescriptive literature waned, doctors, educators, and ministers of religion began to circulate their views in the popular press: for example, the doctor’s advice column in women’s magazines and “women’s pages” in newspapers and other publications. Over the century, radio, cinema, newsreels, television, the Internet, and new social media have supplemented, and in some cases replaced print media in promoting heteronormativity in and through sport.

The 2003 sequel to Out of Bounds, Out on the Field: Gender, Sport and Sexualities, addresses contemporary issues, and the chapter titled “Sport Media, Gender Boundaries and Homophobia” examines media responses to various homophobic incidents in Australia and Canada (2003). My most recent book, Gender Politics and the Olympic Industry (Lenskyj, 2012), brings together my earlier Olympic critiques (Lenskyj, 2000, 2002, 2008) and my research on gender and sport. Again, there is ample evidence of the ways in which the mainstream media reflect and entrench heteronormativity in Olympic coverage. The chapter titled “In the Pool, on the Ice: Contested Terrain” includes discussion of heteronormative trends in media treatment of synchronized swimmers and figure skaters, while the chapter “Sex and the Games” includes media portrayals of femininities and masculinities, gender testing, and sexploitation.

After more than five decades of liberal sport feminist activism, starting with the western women’s movements of the 1960s, the mainstream media’s obsession with female athletes’ heterosexual appeal (or perceived lack thereof) has continued virtually uninterrupted. In the context of late capitalism, these trends are not surprising. Sportswriters, broadcasters, and sponsors have long operated on the valid premise that heterosexual sex sells, and most athletes “play the game” rather than risk losing the financial rewards that accompany sporting success. Although the “pink dollar” niche market, comprising mostly middle-class, gay males, has been recognized to some extent, as reflected in the occasional choice of a gay male or lesbian athlete to endorse a product, this does not represent a serious challenge to heteronormativity.

On Heteronormativity and Gender Identities

It is a common practice for scholars to examine sexuality issues by treating lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered peoples as an undifferentiated group—hence the abbreviation LGBT. This approach works relatively well in areas such as human rights advocacy, where desired outcomes involve policy change and legislation to ensure fair and equal treatment for members of sexual minorities. Some sport-related issues fall in the rights category, particularly in relation to the policies and practices of educational institutions and sport governing bodies. In discussing heteronormativity and sport communication, however, a more nuanced approach is needed in order to address other social variables—that is, an intersectional analysis that explores how gender, social class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and other identities intersect within sporting contexts and in the broader society. Given the central place of sport in male/masculine culture, and the threat to hegemonic femininity posed by women’s sport, it is inappropriate to treat gay male athletes and lesbian athletes as two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, particularly in American and Canadian contexts, the high representation of Black women and men in sport demands that race/ethnicity as well as gender should be taken into account.

Trends in the Research

Since the 1960s women’s movements in western countries, several generations of feminist sport scholars have rightly critiqued hypersexualized media images of female athletes. It was understood, if not always stated, that women’s heterosexuality was being exploited. Some of the early research focused on gender, using media coverage of male athletes as the measure of fair treatment, while neglecting social differences based on race/ethnicity, social class, and sexual orientation. A few commentaries discussed the issue of lesbian invisibility in sport media, as well as the systemic problems associated with homophobia and heterosexism, and, more recently, there has been some examination of the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity.

Some critics writing from a heterosexual standpoint identified homophobic prejudice more readily than heterosexism. Indeed, heterosexism is “in the air,” underpinning powerful social institutions including education, religion, law, and the mass media. To illustrate this, I recall two conversations that I overheard within a half hour on public transport this week; the subjects were babies 3 or 4 months old. The mother of a baby boy said, “He’s smiling at the ladies, Daddy will be so proud!” The father of a baby girl was asked, “Is she chasing boys yet?” and replied, “No, they’ll be chasing her soon.”

The world of sport is, of course, no different. During its coverage of the 2008 Olympics, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) failed to mention that the Australian gold medallist diver Matthew Mitcham was (openly) gay and had a partner, even though the NBC website had included that information. In its defence, NBC claimed that it did not discuss private issues such as sexual orientation, but its interview with U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps had clearly revealed his heterosexuality (National Broadcasting Company defends, 2008).

Some of the major anthologies on sport media, including MediaSport (Wenner, 1998), Handbook of Sports and the Media (Raney & Bryant, 2006), and Examining Identity in Sports Media (Hundley & Billings, 2010) addressed aspects of heteronormativity. Topics included general analyses of gender and sexuality issues in coverage of women’s sport (Creedon, 1998; Duncan, 2006; Duncan & Messner, 1998; Kane & Lenskyj, 1998), race, gender, and sexuality in media treatment of the Women?s National Basketball Association (WNBA) (Baroffe-Bota & Banet-Weiser, 2006) and the Rene Portland case (Hardin & Whiteside, 2010, to be discussed below). A number of journal articles also examined these issues, including media treatment of women’s rugby (Wright & Clarke, 1999), the Rene Portland case (Newhall & Buvizis, 2008), the WNBA (King, 2009), shock-jock Don Imus’ commentary (Cooky, Wachs, Messner, & Dworkin, 2010), and a women’s basketball newsgroup (Forman & Plymire, 2001). As well as the expected homophobia and heterosexism, new variations on the old “female apologetic” theme—the heterosexual attractiveness and wife-and-mother status of sportswomen—were reported, as well as the media’s tendency to gloss over issues of race and racism.

With the notable exception of the Gay Games, in which, like the Straight Games, males are overrepresented, the topic of media treatment of gay male athletes was long overlooked in sport media anthologies and sport sociology journals. Writing in 1998, Sabo and Curry concluded that sport media professionals and sport scholars alike had been relatively silent on the question of gay male athletes, apparently unwilling “to acknowledge the presence of gays in the proverbial shower” (Sabo & Curry, 1998, p. 214). This silence remained long after Pronger’s pioneering book of 1990. However, since 2000, some high-profile gay athletes have come out, and the topic has been investigated further. In addition to Eric Anderson’s 2005 book, In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity, some recent articles have examined cases such as the coming out of former National Basketball Association (NBA) player John Amaechi (Kian & Anderson, 2009) and the (rumoured) gay identity of baseball player Mike Piazza (Butterworth, 2006; see also Miller, 2001). Others have looked at masculinity and gay male athletes (Sabo & Curry, 1998), stereotypes of Black male athletes and gay male athletes (Anderson & McCormack, 2010), newspaper coverage (Hardin, Kuehn, Jones, Genovese, & Balaji, 2009), homophobic posts on blogs (Kian, Clavio, Vincent, & Shaw, 2011), and homophobic talk radio (Nylund, 2004). On those issues, Sport Illustrated’s “Homosexuality and Sports Survey” (2005) conducted in 2011 confirmed that homophobic attitudes persisted amongst its readers: close to one quarter of respondents agreed with the statements, “I would be less of fan of a particular athlete if I knew that he or she was openly gay” and “Having an openly gay athlete hurts the entire sport.”

As several commentators have noted, when the media recognised the presence of gays and lesbians in sport, they were usually reporting on the problems of discrimination, harassment, and loss of endorsements. The Rene Portland case, Harris v. Portland, provides a pertinent example. In 2012, Penn State University was the focus on international media attention following the charges of child abuse on the part of an assistant football coach and the long-standing cover-up of his behaviour by the head coach and university administration. However, at the same university, the coach of the women’s basketball team, Rene Portland, had managed to escape any negative press or administrative approbation from 1980 to 2007, a period during which she openly discriminated against lesbian athletes or those she perceived to be lesbian. Her policy of “no drinking, no drugs, no lesbians” was widely known (Newhall & Buzuvis, 2008), and for at least her first 10 years as coach, Portland was quite open about her policy, perhaps assuming that there would be few negative repercussions (Voepel, 2011). However, in 2007, following a discrimination lawsuit, a confidential settlement and Portland’s “retirement,” sport media reports were largely supportive of Jen Harris, the young Black woman whom Portland had dismissed from the team, allegedly because she was perceived to be lesbian. As Newhall and Buzuvis (2008, p. 346) reported, “In sports columns, on the blogosphere, in fan forums, and in other media outlets, there was near unanimous condemnation of Portland and her anti-lesbian policy and of Penn State for its failure to do more than mildly reprimand her.” One might ask why these progressive media professionals had been relatively silent in the period from 1980 to 2007. Equally significant, as Newhall and Buzuvis demonstrate, while most media reports validated Harris’ sexual orientation, they ignored or dismissed valid allegations of racism.

In a 2003 article, Krane and Barber identified the media tendency to focus on problems and risks, rather than benefits of coming out for lesbians. Citing the limited research on that topic at the time of writing—the experiences of four openly lesbian athletes and a group of college professors—they recommended that more lesbian sportswomen should come out. Benefits cited included “living with honesty and integrity, being able to express greater compassion, being in a better position to fight homonegativism and heterosexism, and being a role model for younger lesbians” (Krane & Barber, 2003, p. 340).

As a lesbian academic working for over 20 years in the relatively safe environment of a progressive graduate department, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, I agree that there are benefits to coming out. However, during a short stint teaching undergraduates in the same university’s physical education department in 1996–1997, I sampled a much chillier climate when students became aware that I was both feminist and lesbian. This experience alerted me to the challenges and possible dangers that my gay and lesbian colleagues in physical education departments experience on a daily basis.

Furthermore, in light of my more general, long-standing critique of “role model” rhetoric, I reject the idea that members of disadvantaged minority groups simply need the inspiration provided by one successful person who stands up in front of them and says, “I did it, you can too, follow your dream . . . .” “Role model” initiatives will not succeed without systemic change, for example, mentorship programs and affirmative action policies.

All the Men are Straight, All the Women Are Gay

This statement captures implicit assumptions in mainstream sport media for at least the last 60 years. In the 19th century and earlier decades of the 20th century, homosexuality was not a salient concept outside of the medical profession, but rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity, popularized in the print media, had their beginnings in that era. As the term homosexual gained wider currency, media stereotypes of the “mannish” lesbian athlete continued to have widespread negative impacts on all sportswomen, regardless of their sexual orientation.

For men in sport, the situation was different: They were generally evaluated on performance rather than appearance, and their heterosexual identities were usually assumed if they participated in team, contact, or combat sports, or in other sports characterized by strength, speed, and endurance. Boys who showed little interest in sport or had limited athletic ability were likely to be labeled sissy or gay, regardless of their sexuality, and those who preferred figure skating to ice hockey faced particular challenges. In 2010, the increasing emphasis on aesthetic dimensions in men’s figure skating prompted Canadian champion Elvis Stojko to call for more “masculinity, strength and power.” He targeted gays, claiming that their “effeminate” performances were damaging the sport (Rogers, 2010). During the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, two Canadian sportscasters made homophobic comments about Johnnie Weir, calling him a “bad example” for boys and suggesting that he should be subject to a gender test or made to compete against the women. Following a public outcry, the reporters and the TV station issued apologies (TV crew upsets gay rights group, 2010).

Coming Out Straight, Coming Out Gay

For the majority of athletes, male and female, disclosures about their personal lives in the media serve as heterosexual credentialing. A recent trend has seen the emergence of a “male apologetic,” with “coming out straight” becoming part of many male athletes’ repertoire. Ironically, while female athletes could satisfy some of their critics, some of the time, by having a beauty makeover—Babe Didrikson in the 1930s, Caster Semenya in 2009—there is no makeover route available for closeted gay male athletes (or straight athletes assumed to be gay), since they already look non-gay by virtue of their athletic masculinity. Hence, they resort to public assertions of heterosexuality, highly visible girlfriends, and so on.

With the increasing commercialization and globalization of competitive sport in the last half century, heterosexual credentialing has taken on greater economic significance for athletes during and after their careers in sport. Despite more accepting societal attitudes and practices in most western countries, sport remains one of the last bastions of heterosexism and homophobia. In 2011, the website OutSports published a list of “100 most important moments in LGBT sport history” that serves as a snapshot of the period 1975–2011 in the United States and Canada (Zeigler, 2011). The list included a small number of high-profile athletes, coaches, or officials who came out publicly during this 36-year period, most since 2000; no men in professional team sports have come out as gay until after their retirement. However, positive public and media responses to an individual athlete’s disclosure do not necessarily signify progress across the board. Analysing media responses to Black NBA player Sheryl Swoopes’ public coming out, King (2009, p. 290) persuasively argued that a queer studies (intersectional) approach requires researchers

In the broader social context of the last half century, the existence of gay men and lesbians has gradually been recognized, same-sex sexual activity has been decriminalized, and public and media attitudes have moved from condemnation to tolerance in most western countries. ² However, with a few exceptions, full acceptance and celebration of sexual diversity is a far distant goal, and in some contexts the pendulum has swung back. In the United States and Canada, the repressive influence of Christian fundamentalism on all sex-related issues, including premarital sex, abortion, birth control, rape, sex education, and gay marriage, has serious implications for members of sexual minorities, and indeed for the whole society.

In women’s National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball, for example, there has been a reemergence of the female apologetic in the form of media guides and recruiting materials illustrated with hyper-heterosexualized images of the players—glamorous studio photo shoots replacing the informal shots of women in uniform or in casual clothes (Evans, 2009). And the WNBA was reported to have held “beauty sessions” during its 2008 rookie orientation (Evans, 2009)—reminiscent of the comportment lessons provided for the women of the All American Professional Baseball League in the 1940s.

Heteronormativity as Social Control

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, a salient media message has been the usefulness of sport as a social control mechanism, with two important complementary functions: to shape young people’s behaviour in socially acceptable ways and to define and entrench hegemonic femininity and masculinity. In the earlier era, “the devil finds work for idle hands” was the underlying belief, and in later years this morphed into the “keeping kids off the street and out of trouble” approach. Unsurprisingly, the groups that the authorities targeted were “the other”: for example, Black inner-city boys and adolescents, working-class girls, Native youth, and children in remote African villages. Conveniently, while conforming social behaviour could be encouraged through sport, so too could conforming gender behaviour. Sexually non-conforming boys and young men could be led down the approved heterosexual path through manly sports, while access to those same manly sports was blocked for girls and women, in the interests of preserving their “femininity” (i.e., heterosexual identity). Appropriate “role models” could be enlisted to support these processes. Through a strangely reverse kind of logic, it was assumed that a hegemonic masculine or feminine exterior (the “sissy” boy suited up for football, the “tomboy” girl in her pink leotard) could shape basic sexual identity.

The role model concept, loosely derived from role theory of the 1960s, has become popularized in the media and dumbed down considerably since that time (Lenskyj, 2003, pp. 91–95). More accurately defined as a “moral exemplar”—a positive example worthy of emulation—the label of role model is now freely applied to any successful athlete who comes from an underrepresented group—women, Black, Native, and ethnic minorities—and who has not been caught taking drugs. In 2012, Nike, a champion in appropriating liberal ideas, marketed T-shirts with the message, “Making Role Models Since 1972.”

The New (Muscular) Woman, the New (Metrosexual) Man

In the 1960s in most western countries, three concurrent social movements—the sexual revolution, the women’s movement and the fitness movement (more accurately, the fitness industry)—all served to widen the scope of hegemonic masculinities and femininities. Women could attain some (not too much) muscularity, could even strain and sweat on the playing field, and maintain their femininity, and men could express (some of) their so-called feminine side without jeopardizing their heterosexual identities.

Sporting goods companies quickly co-opted this new image of the physically active, heterosexually attractive woman in their marketing campaigns. Nike, having gained the reputation for cutting-edge advertisements, showed pictures of a female runner resting after a strenuous workout. By 2001, more nontraditional images were appearing, for example, a Nike ad in Seventeen in May 2001 showed a Women’s Professional Football League player in full uniform, makeup-free, intense expression, untidy hair—all features suggesting an alternative, athletic femininity until one reads the female apologetic message in small print, “I paint my toenails.”

With the growing visibility of middle class gay men in western urban centres came a more widespread interest in men’s fashion, self-care, and body adornment, culminating in the emergence of the metrosexual. Significantly, as David Coad demonstrates in his 2008 book The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality and Sport, (self-identified) heterosexual male athletes Ian Thorpe and David Beckham exemplified this “new man.” Thorpe, Beckham, and others became gay icons, despite some notable examples of their heterosexist attitudes. Thorpe has “come out straight” publicly and repeatedly since 2002, offering rationales for his interest in fashion and appearance, and his apparent failure to conform to the “macho Australian” stereotype. In 2012, he made further avowals of heterosexuality, the first in a documentary on Australian Broadcasting Corporation television (Jordan, 2012), and the second in the Sydney Morning Herald, which gave his statement a front page spot on its online version during the 2012 Olympics (Wallop, 2012).

Where Are We Now? What's Next?

A preliminary search in the popular press suggests the emergence of more progressive trends in media treatment of sexuality issues:

And in September 2012, most Toronto newspapers across the political spectrum joined the international media in criticizing Toronto Blue Jays baseball player Yunel Escobar (and his coach and teammates) because of the homophobic message he had written in Spanish on his face-black (see, e.g., Kelly, 2012). However, since Escobar is Cuban, racism may have contributed to this critical coverage. In short, if researchers take these accounts at face value, citing them as triumphs over homophobia and victories for sexual minorities, they may be in danger of glossing over other forms of prejudice and discrimination. One might ask whether a white baseball player would have received the same media censure? Or why an “equal opportunity” bigot like National Hockey League commentator Don Cherry remains so popular? These, then, are major challenges facing sport media critics who examine heteronormativity and sexual identities: to develop an intersectional analysis that pays equal attention to the variables of gender, social class, race, and ethnicity.