#to ethnic boundary maintenance theory

[egoarc4de]

multidisciplinary fields i love you

[marjbometivo-blog]

COLLABORATIVE PROJECT

Collaboration is the act or process of working together with other people or organizations to achieve a common purpose such as creating something or pursuing an intellectual endeavor. Thus, collaboration requires a cohesive team to follow a common process in working toward a shared goal.

Collaborative work or project means an open, transparent, and democratic work environment where all projects participants have access to the entire projects information at any time and from anywhere.

Characteristics of Collaborative Project

1. The work is open and transparent to everyone in the project

The project scope and the goals are known to all project participants.

2. Everyone in the project has access to the same data at anytime from anywhere.

Everyone can contribute to every part of the project. There are no boundaries on contributing and discussing ideas.

3. The project has open communication channels for all. Managers and contributors communicate and collaborate freely.

All ideas are heard and discussed without the fear of ridicule or put down.

No idea is deemed crazy; every idea is checked and discussed.

4. There is no fear of failure, people are encouraged to take risks and work on new ideas.

Benefits of Collaboration

Increases productivity

By distributing tasks to team members, who have the time and skills to complete them, rather than burdening one team member with too much work and neglecting others, you work more efficiently.

Better Problem-Solving

Giving team members the autonomy to work together to solve problems offers more avenues to success, as well as building team loyalty and morale.

Boosts Communication

The lines of communication need constant maintenance or misdirection can sidetrack a project. Collaboration facilitates clear communication and provides a solution to communicate effectively among even remote teams.

Lowers Overhead

One of the bigger costs in any organization is renting or buying a physical space in which everyone can work. With collaboration, however, team members dont need to be in the same place.

Improves Human Resources

By fostering collaboration between your team members youre not only building relationships but creating loyalty that helps with employee retention.

Common Barriers to Collaboration

A lack of respect and trust

Successful interpersonal relationships and, thus, the ability to collaborate effectively require mutual trust and respect. In todays diverse workplaces, trust and respect are vital. However, people sometimes lack respect for others who are different from themwhether because of differences in age, gender, race, or ethnicity.

Different mindsets

Diversity of viewpoint is an asset for collaborative teams. People with different perspectives see different dimensions of the problems teams are trying to solve and come up with unique solutions for them. However, diverse mindsets can also present challenges to teams. Our psychological types, needs, power bases, conflict styles, and stress quotients differ, leaving us open to potential misunderstandings.

Poor listening skills

The key to good communication is the ability to listen wellaccurately receiving and interpreting what people sayand good communication is an essential element of collaboration. However, there may still be some team members with big egos who dont really value the opinions of their peers and, thus, may be unwilling to listen to others.

Knowledge deficits

Knowledge deficits can negatively impact teams ability to collaborative effectively. Because teammates lack a common frame of reference, they may have difficulty understanding how best to communicate effectively and work well together.

Things to Remember that will Give Collaboration a Healthy Start

Communicate

Good communication is the foundation of everything, so it goes with installing a collaborative environment.

Train

Set up a training session for the team.

Change

The team needs to move away from old methods of communications, like emails, and get comfortable with more interactive and collaborative communications.

Share

Break down the virtual walls that have separated team members.

Check-in

The team must monitor the projects and have regular meetings to track the progress of the project.

Collaborative Project-Based Learning

It is an instructional method based on constructivist learning theory, in which learners work on an authentic, ill- defined project in a group and demonstrate their understanding by performing the project. In CPBL, learners constantly involve in problem solving in which they apply their content knowledge to address real-world issues.

Collaborative Problem-Based learning

It is a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject through the experience of solving an open-ended problem found in trigger material. The PBL process does not focus on problem solving with a defined solution, but it allows for the development of other desirable skills and attributes. This includes knowledge acquisition, enhanced group collaboration and communication.

Online Collaborative Space

Wikis

It allows researchers to share data files, edit documents, and discuss content. The online collaborative space serves as a central location for research documents, so individuals no longer need to clog their email inboxes with large data files or wonder if the file they're working on is the most recent version. Researchers can work together to build and share collections of internet links, citations, and articles.

REERENCES:

Robins D. (2018) Collaborative Project Management Explained. Retrieved from https://www.binfire.com

Landau P. (2016) What is Project Collaboration. Retrieved from https://www.projectmanager.com

Pabini G. (2017) Overcoming Common Barriers To Collaboration. Retrieved from

https://www.uxmatters.c

[motherhoodapocalypse]

Notes on Labor, Maternity, and the Institution

March 9, 2011 by Jaleh Mansoor

I.

Pro labor activism will not begin to overcome the injustices and indignities it purports to redress until it addresses an irreducibly (for now) gendered form of labor: labor, as in, going into labor, giving birth (or adopting). While much recent discourse attempts to account for the industrial or “fordist” to post-industrial shift in forms of labor, patterns into which workers are set, employment, and unemployment (I am thinking of the Italian Autonomist Marxists and Virno, Negri and Hardt in particular), and while so many statistics tell us that more women are in the workforce than men (in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008 to the present), maternity is scotomized. Is this just another not-so-subtle form of gynophobia? A fear on the part of feminists of essentialism? A critique of the emphasis French Feminists of the 70s placed on maternity? An innocent oversight in recent iterations of Marxist analyses?

Artistic practices of the last decade highlight the remunerative system of a global service industry, one in which “art” takes its place fully embedded in–rather than at an interval of either autonomy or imminence–the fluid, continuous circulation of goods and services: Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2002) in which Fraser had her gallery, Friedrich Petzel, arrange to have a collector purchase her sexual services for one night, Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People (1999) in which the artist paid six unemployed men in Old Havana, Cuba thirty dollars each to have a line tattooed across their back. Fraser’s work was characteristically “controversial” in the most rehearsed ways, and Sierra’s drew criticism for having permanently disfigured six human beings. The misprision and naivete of the critics spectacularized both, of course. Sierra’s retort involved a set of references to global economic conditions that the critics may not have liked to hear: “The tattoo is not the problem. The problem is the existence of social conditions that allow me to make this work. You could make this tattooed line a kilometer long, using thousands and thousands of willing people.”1 Both Fraser and Sierra point to the quasi-universality of what autonomist Marxist theorist Paolo Virno calls a “post-fordist” regime of “intellectual labor” to describe the shift from the assembly line to a wide range of labor in which traditional boundaries and borders no longer apply. Virno says, “By post-Fordism, I mean instead a set of characteristics that are related to the entire contemporary workforce, including fruit pickers and the poorest of immigrants.”2 This post-fordist regime is characterized by flexibility, deracination, and the shift from habituated work to contingency. Concomitantly, the post-fordist laborer does not take his or her place in the ranks of he masses, but flows into a multitude, differentiated by numerous factors, among them, post-coloniality, endless permutations at the level of gender, ethnicity, race.

For Virno and the autonomists, art and culture are no longer instantiations of exemplarity and exceptionality, as for Adorno, but rather “are the place in which praxis reflects on itself and results in self-representation.” In other words, the cultural work operates as a supplement, a parergonal addition to an already existing logic. It neither passively reflects nor openly resists. There is no vantage or “outside” from which art could dialectically reflect and resists, as Adorno would have it. Long since the work came off its pedestal and out of its frame, from the gallery to the street, the ostensibly non-site to the site as Robert Smithson put it, cultural production is too embedded in social and economic circulation to reflect let alone critique. Virno sees this limitation—the absence of an outside—as one shared with that of activism and other forms of tactical resistance: “The impasse that seizes the global movement comes from its inherent implication in the modes of production. Not from its estrangement or marginality, as some people think.”3 Ironically, the luxury of estrangement and marginalization enjoyed by the avant-garde and neo avant-garde is no longer available.And yet, it is “precisely because, rather than in spite, of this fact that it presents itself on the public scene as an ethical movement.”4 For if work puts life itself to work, dissolving boundaries between labor and leisure, rest and work, any action against it occupies the same fabric.

Among others, a problem that surfaces [too quietly and too politely, with a kind of ashamed and embarrassed reserve] is that of gender. The issue is not merely that Fraser puts her body at risk while Sierra remunerates others to place at risk, and in pain, their bodies, that corpus on which habeus corpus is founded. Needless to say, Sierra has organized projects around male prostitutes, such as that of 160 cm Line Tattooed on Four People, executed for the contemporary art museum in Salamanca, Spain, in 1999.

The problem is that the category of disembodied labor, or intellectual labor as Virno alternately calls it to describe its reliance on abstraction, scotomizes a form of irreducibly gendered embodied labor: labor. Now let the cries of essentialism! ring. Where is Julia Kristeva when you need her? Hélène Cixous telling us to allegorically write with our breast milk?5

Many feminist artists of the 1970s—in a historical moment that has both formed and been occluded by the artistic pratices of the last decade which I mention above–explicitly addressed the category of unremunerated labor: Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1973-4), for instance; Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman which explicitly draws an analogy between house-work and prostitution. Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document (1979) elevates maternity to the level of analytical research, part of the putative archival impulse. Merle Laderman Ukeles tacitly situates domestic work in a category with the service industry understood historically, before all labor became maintenance labor, as “maintenance.”6 Ukeles’s differentiation of production and maintenance almost seems romantic in hindsight. As though there were creation/production rather than reproduction. And yet…..

Radical Marxist and feminist activist Silvia Federici, author of Genoa and the Anti Globalization Movement (2001) andPrecarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint (2008) argues against the gender neutrality of precarious labor theory, that of the Marxist autonomists Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri.7 Federici situates the commonality of rape and prostitution as well as violence against women within a systematized appropriation of female labor that operates as accumulation, much as accumulation did atavistically, long before the formation of commodity economies, or the development of general equivalence. Atavism as a repressed matrix for putative modernity—a modernity in which gender determination describes one of the greatest forms of uneven development—supports Ariella Azoulay’s claim, in The Civil Contract of Photography, that modernity did little to alter women’s positions in relation to discourse, the institution, and civil rights greater than the vote. Just as for Foucault the modern biopolitical regime compounds the old to achieve a more thorough penetration of everyday life, modernity permutes previous hegemonies “shaped and institutionalized over thousands of years.” In twentieth-century battles for the right to corporeal self-determination, to reproductive rights, for instance, “the body itself underwent a process of secularization, …this body came into the world without any of the normative defenses of citizenship to regulate it.”8 Under “Universal” rights, the contingencies of the body, deemed particular, did not become part of the discourse around citizenship, thus abandoning it to a renaturalized precariousness. Premised on a set of Enlightenment Universalist claims purportedly neutral to the particularities of corporeality, modernity failed to account for the specificities of women’s lives. Instead, the body, or “bare life” tacitly continues to be the way women are viewed, here commodified and sexually fetishized (neo-liberal “Western” democracies), there regulated within disciplinary, and often violent, parameters, as in Islamist cultures.9 These differences in hegemonic models of femininity may be theorized;10 the process of biological labor, however, slips the grasp of discourse, and, with it, policy. This last term would include international policies in which Enlightened self-interest are legitimated by the roles of women, of women’s bodies to be more precise.

Federici links her notion of atavistic forms of reserve—the accumulation of women’s labor—to colonial expropriation. She argues that the IMF, World Bank and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common from water to seeds, to our genetic code become privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.

Pop culture, as always a place where cultural articulations happen within normative parameters that may differ from “discourse,” presents the most direct expression of this that I have yet to come across. The high/low binary was a false product of fordism, one that no longer operates. When a famous male rapper says, “gonna get a child outta her,” he is speaking hegemony, not “marginalization.”

II.

Labor: If Virno is “correct,” in his analysis, there can be no “perspective” from which to think labor. From what fold within labor might I think it? I’ve worked as an hourly wage earner, a mother, and a salaried “professional.” One of these three terms is incongruous; discourse has hit a false note. My description of something about which I should know a great deal, my own history as a laborer, has already committed a rather egregious crime according to the law of discourse. As De Man has famously said, “abuse of language is, of course, itself the name of a trope: catachresis. …something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of a table or the face of a mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters.” What thwarted terms, or monsters, are barred from an account of my accounts? Discourse be damned, or in this case, personified; I am using “I.”

At 13, 22 years ago, I was what Siegfred Kracauer might have referred to as “a little shop girl,” working at a T shirt store for 3.75 an hour, selling 20 dollar Joy Division T-shirts and 5 dollar Grateful Dead stickers to other, older, teenagers [with allowances or their own jobs]. My mom had to accompany me to the first day to make good on PA labor laws. 7 hours of my labor/boredom would have bought me one of the T-shirts I sold. I’ve worked, like so many artists and academics, as a museum guard, 17 years ago, for 7/hr, or 10.50/hr for working past the 8-hour shift. Needless to say, none of these jobs had benefits. I’ve written articles for prominent scholarly journals where the pay may roughly be calculated at 3 cents/word, 1 percent of what a glossy magazine would pay for non-scholarly work. Let’s not get distracted by the amount of time that scholarship requires: travel; archives; dozens if not hundreds of books read; writing; and editing. But that “let’s not” is a sliding glass door of sorts: it articulates the injustice of unremunerated work, but it also stands as a reminder that the pleasure [and/or displeasure] of some work is irreducible to money, acts as an irreducible quality. But isn’t everything held in the matrix of currency [fiction]? All process, a term inclusive of work, skilled or unskilled, is irreducible to the monetary value assigned it. A bibliography supportive of that last statement alone would entail a foray into a discursive terrain bordered by Vico, Marx, Weber, The Frankfurt School, Foucault, Post Structuralism and practically every title in Verso, Stanford’s Crossing the Meridian and the University of Minnesota press, and the work of countless others. Irreducible labor. Or as Thomas Keenan has recently put it, the irreducible “jelly” of work that remains after the abstractions of exchange value is “accounted.”11

I’ve worked for 19 thousand a year as a gallery receptionist 14 years ago; for nothing, in monetary terms, writing a proto-book as a PhD candidate to produce a dissertation, partially about labor and art in reconstruction era Italy; for a stipend of 18 thousand per annum teaching college students courses that full [celebrity] professors were also teaching; for one glorious year at 55+ thousand a year as a “term” assistant professor at a prominent women’s college affiliated with an ivy league university; and some ten k (+) less a year as a tenure track assistant professor at a state institution. The latter ostensibly includes compensation for teaching Art History to undergraduates and studio practitioners, directing advises toward theirs MAs or MFAs, and coming to countless faculty meetings. I can retain that salaried position if I produce enough of those journal articles, at 3 cents a word, so let us include the latter, now that I HAVE a tenure track position, in that before-taxes salary. And I get benefits. I am by all [ac]counts VERY lucky and yet the contradictions in the remunerative system are too many to count. I am not compensated in any way—including in University evaluations and other assorted forms of self-regulative beaurocracy—for the 5 or so, sometimes more, hour (+)-long studio visits I conduct every week. An aside on the studio visit: it is by far more intense than an equal measure of time, the hour, of teaching, advising, or any other form of labor but one. And that latter, around which I skirt, is a term from which I steal to work. “Robbing peter to pay Paul.” Wait, I thought I was the one getting paid?

And I “speak” from a vantage of extreme privilege, of multiple privileges, of all privileges but one, to which I stand in a relation of excess and lack. That excess and lack revolves a particular embodied form of labor, a production that is a non productive labor unlike the non accumulative labor of which the autonomists speak…

The discursively impossible: I have given birth through the labor process to a child. “Let’s not,” in the interest of not getting caught in the sliding glass door, “count” pregnancy, or post pardum recovery or breast-feeding. Let’s try to isolate labor in order to attempt to, tautologically, quantify it, as the issue of labor conventionally requires us to do. That labor was 32 hours long. Not one of those 32 hours was commensurable with any other hour. Time contracted, not necessarily in rhythm with those of my womb (hystery in Greek), time dilated, not necessarily in tandem with my cervix. It was working parallel to me; no, those organs were working in tension against me. Dissonance. I have never been capable of thinking my body’s labor in what I will call, despite the need to shore it up by the labor of discursive legitimation, my experiential time. This time shrank and stretched like hot taffy. I would need the proper name “Deleuze” here, and The Logic of Sense, to get the discursive sanction I need to support this last claim. That would take a little labor, labor time I could punch in as academics will no doubt do some time soon, or rather do now however elliptically in requisite annual self reports. But those 32 child labor hours defy break down into 32 units of 60 minutes, 1920 units of 60 seconds, etc. This form of labor slips the grip of discourse; even metaphor.

Catachresis is not monstrous enough to operate as a medium for the articulation of this [non] event. There was, however, a quantifyable cost for the hospital ante-chamber, the delivery room, the “recovery” room, and the first examination of the infant. And there were more complex “costs;” I was “let go” of the second year of my position as a term assistant professor at a prominent women’s college associated with an ivy-league university. The Chair responsible for my firing, I mean, liberation, is a “feminist,” and a mother of two. She thought it would be “for the best,” for me to have time off. I never asked for time off. This did allow her to win a point or two for her annual docket; I was hired back on the adjunct salary of 3 thousand per class the next semester. This allowed the department to save 50 thousand dollars in 2007-2008, and the cost of benefits. Did I mention that the semester after giving birth, after having been “let go,” I still made it to campus to attend all advising sessions? 50K in savings that the institution no doubt never even registered, my loss. But who cares, I had a healthy beautiful bright baby!….. to love AND support. BTW, diapers are 20/box. Currently, I calculate that I make about 12 dollars and fifty cents an hour given that I work at least sixty hours a week. Ergo, a box of diapers is equal to over an hour and a half of work. I go through many of these per month still. At the time of being fired/demoted/whatever, I lived in NYC, where diapers cost more than 20/box. And I made, about 4.16 and hour. A box of diapers cost 5 hours of work. But like many women, and unlike many others, I had assistance, that of a partner and that of a parent. Let’s not address the emotional and psychological cost of the latter; let’s please not address the price dignity paid. Oops, prosopopeia. Does dignity have agency? I hope the reader knows by now that I find calculations to be absurd. “How do I love Thee, [dear child, dear student, dear reader,] Let me count the ways….” I am, however, serious in the following query: how do others less lucky than I make it in the global service industry (in which education and so called higher education now takes it place, now that Professors at State schools are classified as mid level managers?) How do women who have babies and work make it? They pay to work; they pay with their children. Sacrificial economies.

Now again, let’s not get caught in that door by even discussing the 24/7 labor of parenting. The pleasures of this last, and the agonies, are irreducible. But, again, isn’t everything? So: Suspended. Bracketed, a priori. A discursive delimitation or repression? It is in such poor taste to discuss this: bad form. Just a note, daycare is 10 thousand dollars per anum. A baby sitter charges 10-15 an hour. I over identify with the sitter and guiltily–as though I even had the luxury of being a fat cat liberal riddled with guilt–pay said sitter 20. But no worries: I don’t believe in baby-sitting. I have no life outside of the working and the parenting, no leisure. I mistrust the latter. I dislike being appeased. No compensatory blah blah for me. I do, however, want the hours taken away from my child by studio visits and the like to be remunerated HER. She keeps track of when I am missing. I can’t keep count. Guilty interstitial pleasure: Facebook, whom (uh oh) I can credit for the honor [snarkery free] of labor on the present piece.

III.

Like most institutions of its kind, the University at which I have a tenure track position, for which I am reminded to be eternally thankful—and I AM—does not have maternity leave. Were I to choose to have a second child (this statement requires an exegesis into the word “choice”), I would take sick-leave, as though giving-birth were an illness; as though [biological] labor were a subtraction from the forward march of time, of production and productivity, of progress. Sick-leave, time taken while ill ad ostensibly unproductive. Sick leave, the concept if not the necessary practice, is sick. More perverse still is the idea that populating the next generation, however selfish this may or may not be in many way, however narcissistic or not, is not a form of non-productivity. The double negative in this last should raise some flags in the space of textual analysis, labor analysis, gender analysis. An aside: I never felt less ill than during pregnancy, childbirth, and so called recovery. The use of the word biology will deliver the present text, again, to the accusation of essentialism. I will add that it goes without saying that maternity need not be biological. But it is still labor. A colleague recently adopted a child. Said colleague travelled to a distant continent to retrieve the child with whom she had spent a year establishing an intimate, if painfully digitally mediated, long term relationship. She took family medical (sick) leave. It, apparently, is against an ethics of work to be preoccupied with a new baby.

Moreover, were I to have a second child, my tenure clock would stop if I took that odiously named family/sick leave. My opportunity to make a case for my own worth via tenure review would be deferred. Of course, were we unionized, there may be a fighting chance, were our esteemed male colleagues to support us, for maternity leave, or, more unthinkably, paid maternity leave and no punitive tenure clock [beyond the normative punitive parameters]. “We” are our worst obstacle. As a prominent political science academic and feminist recently pointed out to me, one of the greatest obstacles to unionization or any form of collectivization, for artists and academics, is that they think of themselves as “professionals” and associate unions with blue color workers. Were they to peek around, they would note that these workers are practically extinct. We are all in an endless lateral plane of service. As one student told me, “my parents pay your salary,” to which I responded, “like the cleaning lady.” Note that there is no “liberal elitism” lurking here. We are all, to some extent, unless we work for JPMorgan Chase or some hedge fund, the cleaning lady (many nannies, like many cabbies, have a string of PhDs. My republican aunt once told me with delight that her cleaning lady had worked with my dissertation adviser when she, “the cleaning lady” was in grad school). Anyway, the student just nodded. I told him he should work to get his parents’ money’s worth.

Professors and academics like to think that they transcend as they were believed to do in a previous disciplinary socio-cultural regime. Jackson Pollock thought that too. He was an easy puppet in Cold War politics.  Teaching undergrads in a core curriculum of an ivy league university that shores its superiority and identity around said core curriculum of old master literature, art and music—in other words, utterly dependent on a labor pool of graduate students—I participated in the effort to unionize. The threats were not subtle. The University’s counter argument was that students study; they don’t labor.

And women work, they don’t labor. There is no language.

1 Marc Spiegler. “When Human Beings are the Canvas.” Art News. June, 2003.

2 Interview with Paolo Virno. Branden W. Joseph, , Alessia Ricciardi trans. Grey Room No. 21 (Fall 2005): 26-37.

3 Ibid. P. 35.

4 Ibid.

5 The Laugh of Medusa.

6 For an excellent panoramic overview of these practices, see Helen Molesworth. “House Work and Art Work.” October No. 92 (Spring 2000).

7 Reprinted in Occupy Everything January 2011. http://occupyeverything.com/news/precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/

8 Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract Of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. P. 226.

9 Ibid. For a discussion of the blind spot of sexuality and embodiment in Enlightenment thinking, see Jacques Lacan’s “seminal” “Kant with Sade.” Critique (April, 1963).

10 “Nothing, we are told by Western Hegemonic discourse, so differentiates “us” from “them” as the lack of freedom for women in Islamist societies. It needs to be noted, however, that far from silencing the power of women, Islamist regimes highlight it, acknowledging through severe and violent restrictions that what women do is crucial to political and social order. The argument justifying the strict codes of conduct, based on respect for women (in contrast to the Western commodification of women and their disparagement as sex objects), has a dialectical dynamic that can lead to its own undoing.” Susan Buck-Morss. Thinking Past Terror. P. 12. London: Verso, 2003. P. 12.

11 Thomas Keenan. “The Point is to (Ex) Change It: Reading ‘Capital’ Rhetorically.” Fables of Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.

[sweet-god-almighty]

Architecture in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

2014

Kimberly E. Zarecor Iowa State University, zarecor@iastate.edu

Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are often associated with grey, anonymous, and poorly constructed post-war buildings. Despite this reputation, the regional architectural developments that produced these buildings are critical to understanding global paradigm shifts in architectural theory and practice in the last 50 years. The vast territory of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union covers about one-sixth of the world’s landmass and currently contains all or part of 30 countries. Since 1960 other national boundaries have existed in this space, including East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Given the region’s large size, numerous languages, and tumultuous recent history—communist and authoritarian regimes, democratic revolutions, civil war and ethnic strife, political corruption, prosperity, EU accession, and economic instability—a comprehensive summary of 50 years of architectural developments cannot be achieved in one chapter. Rather than survey individual architects or projects in depth, this chapter instead explores the shared transformation in architectural discourse and practice that resulted from the region’s political and economic shift to communism after World War II, and the changes that followed the fall of communism in the 1990s.

Countries include Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, East Germany (now considered Western European as part of a unified Germany), Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Architectural Practice during Communism

After World War II and the rise of Communist parties across the region, architects living in Eastern Europe and the new territories of the Soviet Union found themselves in a novel position. Unlike the lean years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when most architects were left without work, they now had guaranteed employment and their services were in high demand for post-war reconstruction. Many were politically leftwing and supported the social agenda of the Communist Party, such as providing a minimum standard of housing for all citizens, whether or not they were party members. In territories that had been part of the Soviet Union before the war, architects also prospered due to the growth of the Soviet economy, a benefit of the expansion into Eastern Europe and the Baltics, and new investment in industrial infrastructure. Soon, however, the initial enthusiasm was tempered in Eastern Europe by the realization of the authoritarian nature of the regimes and the lack of professional freedom.

The professional lives of architects in communist economies differed significantly from the experiences of architects in capitalist countries. In this system, architects worked directly for the state or for state-owned enterprises; private practice was abolished. These changes first occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and after World War II in Eastern Europe and the new Soviet territories. Communist economics relied on planning—the prediction of future input and output needs for all sectors, typically in a five-year increment called “the five-year plan.” This system relied on quantifiable targets and quotas, which forced architects to evaluate building projects in terms of material and labor costs—quantities of concrete and steel, number of units, volume of skilled and unskilled labor, and so forth. The experiential and formal aspects of architecture had no measurable value, and therefore had little relevance to design decision- making, except for one-off projects with political significance to the various regimes. As a result, architects across the region became technicians producing an industrial commodity, rather than creative artists executing an individual vision.

At the same time, and perhaps as a result, the social status of the architect diminished. Architects had once been at the center of the avant-garde (one can think of the Russian Constructivists and the Yugoslav Zenitists, as well as other groups such as Devě tsil in Czechoslovakia and Blok and Praesens in Poland), but during the communist period architects typically worked anonymously at state design offices where they functioned as engineers and managers more than designers. Those unwilling to accept new working conditions or unsuited to the professional environment took less visible positions at universities, historic preservation offices, archives, or consumer product enterprises such as furniture and industrial design companies. By the late 1960s, few practicing architects had any personal memory of architectural practice before World War II.

Because of this shared set of priorities emphasizing typification, standardization, and mass production, architectural practice across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc shared more similarities than differences among the various countries by the 1950s. This represented a significant shift since Eastern Bloc countries like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Hungary had sophisticated building industries before World War II, while the construction sector in the Soviet Union had been underdeveloped and largely unmechanized. New methods and processes for design, finance, and building construction were developed and shared between professionals in the various countries, often through travel exchanges and research visits. These architects also shared the everyday economic realities of communism: unyielding labor and material shortages; the push toward faster and cheaper construction methods; and the lack of long-term investment in public space and building maintenance. As János Kornai and others have noted, shortage was the system’s defining characteristic. Therefore, as in other sectors, architects focused on strategies to address the problems including prefabricated building elements, lightweight building materials, and the mechanization of work on building sites.

The consistency of architectural strategies across the region was remarkable both for the discipline that the economic model imposed on production and for the scale of construction (over 50 million standardized housing units were constructed in the Soviet Union alone from 1957 to 1984). Manufacturing and distribution were streamlined to such a degree that one was likely to find the same building and hardware components across large swathes of the region.

Stephen Kotkin, author of two books on the Soviet steel city of Magnitogorsk, writes this about the general conditions:

The Soviet phenomenon created a deeply unified material culture. I am thinking not just of the cheap track suits worn by seemingly every male in Uzbekistan or Bulgaria, Ukraine or Mongolia. Consider the children’s playgrounds in those places, erected over the same cracked concrete panel surfaces and with the same twisted metal piping—all made at the same factories, to uniform codes. This was also true of apartment buildings (outside and inside), schools, indeed entire cities, even villages. Despite some folk ornamentation here and there (Islamic flourishes on prefab concrete panels for a few apartment complexes in Kazan or Baku) a traveler encounters identical designs and materials.

R.A. French and F.E. Ian Hamilton made similar observations in their 1979 book, The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy, writing that “if one were transported into any residential area built since the Second World War in the socialist countries, it would be easier at first glance to tell when it was constructed than to determine in which country it was.”

This stress on sameness was also ideological, since the communist ethos of a minimum standard for all was integral to thinking about designing cities with undifferentiated class structures. Housing was the most indicative of this approach as a homogeneous housing stock of mainly two- and three-room apartments was built from East Germany to the Soviet Far East. The resulting buildings were not valued as architectural objects, but rather as indicators of production performance. Meeting quantitative targets was more important than evaluating what had been produced, thus removing any incentive to improve architecture on aesthetic or functional grounds. Mark B. Smith writes that “to some extent, this [mass-produced similitude] was the end of architecture” and “the final takeover of the profession by construction experts.”9 After decades of conforming to this system, Polish architect Maciej Krasiński had this to say in 1988, “the Polish architecture of the present is bad ... The idea of “maintaining a building” both as regards its function and its technological state practically is non-existent, and if here we add, to put it gently—the hopeless quality of the work—then the general picture provides us with no reason for optimism.”

This sentiment was widespread in the Communist Bloc, particularly in the 1980s, when economic and political crises led to even more acute material and labor shortages and worsening construction quality. The building technologies and construction practices developed for prefabrication and panel construction in the 1960s had not changed much by 1989. Economic planning in multi-year increments slowed down processes of change and innovation. Given the myriad architectural developments in the capitalist West in the same decades, this stagnation and failure to keep up with international standards became more apparent with each passing year.

Design Culture in Communist Europe

From the perspective of architectural form making, the buildings of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, have their origins in earlier struggles to find an appropriate architectural language for the “ideal” communist society. The Russian avant-garde provided the first images of the potential for communist architecture in the 1920s, but the style was later denounced as “bourgeois formalism,” and replaced in the Soviet Union by historicist Socialist Realism after 1933. Eastern European architects, many of whom had been trained and practiced as modernists in the interwar period, faced a similar crisis when pressure mounted in the late 1940s to embrace the principles of Socialist Realism to symbolize their countries’ new affiliations with the Soviet Union. The necessity to work in a Socialist Realist style was short-lived, however. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s 1954 call to reject Stalinist aesthetics and “useless things in architecture,” Socialist Realism quickly receded.11

Khrushchev’s “thaw” followed—the liberalization of the most repressive policies of Stalinism in politics, culture, and everyday life. With this change to official discourse, architects

5

were able to return to avant-garde forms from the 1920s and re-embrace the Constructivist legacy. A highlight from this period was Expo ’58 in Brussels when the Soviet, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, and Yugoslav pavilions showcased an unexpected new communist style expressed in glass, concrete, and steel. The change was striking to many given how recently the region had been associated with Socialist Realism with its monumental scale and opaque materiality. This new version of modernism was not a reimagining of post-war practice as something akin to the interwar years, but rather a revival of forms and concepts that had figured prominently in avant-garde circles such as functionalism, mass production, and prefabrication, now deployed in support of the communist system by architects working for state design institutes. (Figure 13.1) 13.1 Vjenceslav Richter, Pavilion of Yugoslavia at EXPO ’58, Brussels, 1958. (Photo: Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade)

In these years, architects once again adopted an internationalist perspective that sought out universal, rather than regional or national, principles for modern architecture including standardized building types and industrial building methods. This transformation occurred in many countries outside the Soviet Bloc, notably in Western Europe, but on a much more limited scale. Virág Molnár writes that by the early 1960s, Hungarian “architects were ready to accept their subjugation to industrialized mass production because they envisaged state socialism as an alternative route to modernity.”12 In fact, Western ideas about architecture and urban planning, particularly those derived from CIAM and Le Corbusier, were widely promoted and implemented by architects and planners working in communist countries. Exemplary manifestations of tower in the park urbanism and zoned cities can be found throughout the region. (Figure 13.2) As James Scott discusses in his book, Seeing like a State, this was part of the global phenomenon of post-war high-modernist city building, examples of which were found in capitalist and communist countries, and in developed and developing economies.13

6

13.2 Tower in the Park Urbanism in Bucharest, Romania. (Photo: Arhitectura 4 (1966): 31)

Architects in communist countries, however, had no choice about the direction of their work. The generation whose careers started around 1960 had few opportunities to challenge a consistent and systemic preference for typified, standardized, and mass-produced buildings. Prefabricated concrete—used for structural elements, facade panels, and exterior landscaping—was the primary building material available for the majority of projects, forcing architects to find creative ways to work with its limitations. Other components, such as windows, doors, and fixtures, were industrially produced in mass quantities, and in limited sizes and finishes, adding to the repetitive and uniform nature of the environment. Concrete facades were often left grey and undecorated, although better examples incorporated colored panels or carefully detailed window assemblies. For new housing developments in many countries, a portion of the budget had to be spent on public art, thus fountains, sculptures, and murals, often made of concrete and tile, were common elements in public spaces.14 Unfortunately these attempts to beautify neighborhoods were undermined in many cases by poor workmanship during construction and a total lack of maintenance in subsequent years that hastened deterioration.

Despite these challenges, there are many examples of good design work executed in communist Europe, although the architects themselves remain largely unknown. Rather than radically departing from conventions or expectations, these projects succeeded by using a restricted palette of building elements and materials in exciting and novel ways. Noteworthy examples in the Soviet Union include the Palace of Sports in Minsk by Sergey Filimonov and Valentin Malyshev from 1966; the Lenin Museum (now the Museum of the History of Uzbekistan) by V. Muratov in Tashkent from 1970; the Cinema Hall “Rossia” in Yerevan, Armenia by Artur Tarkhanyan, Grachya Pogosyan, and Spartak Khachikyan from 1975; as well

7

as the venues built for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games which included the Dynamo Sports Palace and the Druzhba Multipurpose Arena (Figures 13.3–13.4).

13.3 Sergey Filimonov and Valentin Malyshev, Palace of Sports, Minsk, Belarus, 1966. (Photo: © Hanna Zelenko / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL) 13.4 V. Muratov, Lenin Museum (now the Museum of the History of Uzbekistan), Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1970. (Photo: © Stefan Munder / Flickr / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL)

In Eastern Europe, the reliance on prefabricated and standard elements was just as fundamental. A few representative examples are the Spodek Stadium in Katowice, Poland by Maciej Gintowt and Maciej Krasiń ski from 1960; Przyczółek Grochowski housing estate in Warsaw by Oskar Hansen from 1963; the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia in Prague by Karel Prager from 1966; the Czechoslovak Radio Building (now the Slovak Radio Building) in Bratislava by Štefan Svetko, Štefan Ď urkovičč and Barnabáš Kissling from 1967; the National Gallery in Bratislava by Vladimir Dě dečč ek from 1969; the Palace of Culture in Dresden by Wolfgang Hänsch and Herbert Löschau from 1969; and Republic Square in Ljubljana by Edvard Ravnikar from 1977 (Figures 13.5–13.6).

13.5 Spodek Multipurpose Sports Arena, Katowice, Poland, 1960. (Photo: © Jan Mehlich / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL) 13.6 Štefan Svetko, Štefan Ď urkovičč and Barnabáš Kissling, Czechoslovak Radio Building (now the Slovak Radio Building), Bratislava, Slovakia, 1967. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

In terms of square meters, the design of housing and community buildings in new neighborhoods dominated architectural practice in this period. The planned economy

8

fundamentally changed approaches to housing design and construction as repeated apartment buildings organized in large districts replaced virtually all other residential types in most countries.15 Starting in the early 1970s, when the regimes finally acknowledged their collective failure to adequately raise living standards for the majority of residents, these new methods were deployed on a massive scale. In cities and towns across the region, low-cost prefabricated apartment towers sprung up creating whole new urban districts, and even new cities (Figure 13.7). In Bratislava, for example, more than 90 percent of the city’s 430,000 residents lived in post-war industrialized housing by the late 1980s.16 In the Soviet case, whole post-war cities, such as the 1960s-era car-manufacturing city of Togliatti, were built with prefabricated concrete.17

13.7 Housing Estate in Bratislava, Slovakia. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

A small intellectual class of architects rebelled against this standardization, and instead turned toward postmodernism and High-Tech in the 1970s and 1980s. They knew of these developments through architectural journals, either smuggled into the countries or available in the libraries of the state design institutes. The work of the Czechoslovak SIAL group (The Association of Engineers and Architects of Liberec) is one example. Following the Prague Spring in 1968, Karel Hubáč ek and Miroslav Masák, from the state-run design office in Liberec, established an independent design studio and began to train young architects. They called their operation the SIAL Kindergarten (SIAL-Školka). The studio’s work coupled the legacy of the avant-garde in central Europe with an interest in contemporary British High-Tech and engineered buildings. Hubáč ek’s own science-fiction-inspired Ještě d Hotel and Television Transmitter won the 1969 Perret Prize, awarded by the International Union of Architects (UIA) for its application of architectural technology (Figure 13.8). In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion in 1968 and the “normalization” period that followed, SIAL lost its independence and again became part of the state-run system in Liberec in 1971. But its architects continued

9

working and a group from the SIAL Kindergarten won the competition for the now iconic Máj Department Store in the center of Prague in the early 1970s.18

13.8 Karel Hubáč ek, Hotel and Television Transmitter, Ještě d Mountain near Liberec, Czech Republic. (Photo: © Ondř ej Žváčč ek / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL)

Unlike SIAL, which operated publicly and with state consent, many architects who wanted to challenge the official discourse were forced into secrecy. Ines Weizman writes about East German and Soviet architects who gathered in private apartments to discuss magazines illicitly brought into the country and to prepare competition designs that would then be smuggled to the West or sent to international architecture competitions, such as those sponsored by the Japanese journals, Japan Architect and Architecture and Urbanism (A + U).19 She positions these practices within the culture of dissidence, more often associated with literature and music, which was a critical development in establishing a theoretical basis for intellectuals’ opposition to the regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. Depending on the local political situation in their respective countries, these “dissident” architects were subject to various levels of retribution for their lack of cooperation. Some like John Eisler from SIAL went into exile in the West, while others, like Imre Makovec in Hungary, were forced to live in rural isolation. In extreme cases, architects, including Maks Velo from Albania, and Christian Enzmann and Bernd Ettel in East Germany, were imprisoned for their perceived architectural actions against the regime (Figure 13.9).20 13.9 Maks Velo, Apartment Building, Tirana, Albania, 1971. (Photo: Elidor Mëhilli) Architecture after Communism This was the state of things in the late 1980s when the various regimes began to fall. By the early 1990s, the European communist experiment was over and countries went through a period of turbulent change, including the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the

10

Soviet Union, as well as vast transfers of state wealth into the hands of individuals through privatization programs. The architectural profession, centered for more than 40 years around a system of state-run design offices, had to be reinvented.

The transition was both conceptual and practical. Architects went from salaried employment in large public offices with regimented cultures to the capitalist model of private practice. Architects now had to find clients and financial backing for projects on their own, but they gained creative and conceptual freedom. The lack of intellectual rigor that characterized the state design system also had to be overcome. A high level of architectural discourse emerged into this void, particularly in Eastern Europe where many theorists and designers had continued writing in the communist period. Professional organizations and cultural institutions continued, active galleries and ambitious publishers dedicated to architecture appeared and numerous online venues for disseminating information sprung up in regional languages. All of which created a fertile intellectual context for the profession to make the difficult transition into the capitalist system.

Once the political and professional situation stabilized in the early 1990s, domestic and foreign investors were eager to tap into the region’s appetite for new buildings, especially in large cities like Budapest, Moscow, Prague, and Warsaw. By the early 2000s, this demand even reached smaller cities in less developed regions, like Baku in Azerbaijan, Bucharest in Romania, and Kiev in Ukraine, making this a truly region-wide phenomenon, except perhaps east of Moscow where the financial and social situation remained difficult.

In terms of building typologies, production since the early 1990s has focused on types neglected in the communist period or which never existed at all in the region—commercial skyscrapers, office parks, luxury apartments, suburban houses, boutique hotels, high-end commercial properties, and shopping malls. Such buildings fulfill residents’ yearnings to have what they missed during communism, not only the physical presence of new, colorful, and well-

11

made buildings, but also architecture practiced as a creative act by a known author. Financing for these projects came from multiple sources, both legal and illegal. Some were spurred by the concentrated wealth, influence, and political power that the privatization process generated, including money gained through criminal, deceptive, and corrupt means. This includes villas and vacation homes for rich oligarchs and ex-Communist officials, and office buildings, condominiums, and cultural centers financed with suspicious funds.

Investors in legitimate projects were often large international real estate companies, many headquartered in Western European, looking to take advantage of pent-up demand in the region. The real estate arm of the Dutch Bank ING was typical. In 1992, ING commissioned Frank Gehry’s Dancing House in Prague and then two years later hired the Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat from Mecanoo to renovate a nineteenth-century palace in Budapest for its Hungarian offices (Figure 13.10). In 2001, ING went back to Van Egeraat for the design of a newer 41,000-square-meter (441,000-square-foot) headquarters in Budapest. In the last 10 years, ING has funded a number of large mixed-use urban developments in cities such as Warsaw, and Liberec and Olomouc in the Czech Republic. Local entrepreneurs were also rich enough as the global building boom started in the early 2000s to commission commercial and residential projects, on their own or with international partners.

13.10 Frank Gehry with Vlado Milunić , Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic, 1996. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

Rather than hire the local architects trained in the communist system, many large developers hired Western “starchitects” for their speculative projects, such as Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano. Their work in the region included Nouvel’s Galeries Lafayette (1996) and the Potsdamerplatz redevelopment (2000) by Renzo Piano and others in the former East Berlin, Gehry’s Dancing House (1996) and Nouvel’s Zlatý

12

Andě l/Golden Angel Building (2000) in Prague, and Foster’s Metropolitan Building (2003) in Warsaw (Figure 13.11). 13.11 Jean Nouvel, Zlatý Andě l/Golden Angel Building, Prague, Czech Republic, 2000. (Photo: © Petr Novák / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-2.5 / GFDL)

Successful émigrés such as the Czechs Eva Jiř ícná and Jan Kaplický, and Polish-born Daniel Libeskind, also returned to the region and built successful practices using their knowledge of the region’s languages and building culture. More recently, specialist architects such as American retail designers Jerde Partnership and Austrian housing designers Baumschlager and Eberle, have also been brought in to raise the notoriety and technical level of new projects. Other developers, like the Dutch Multi Corporation, have stopped hiring outside architects altogether, and rely, instead, on an in-house team of unnamed designers to spread its global brand of commercial modernism (Figure 13.12).

13.12 Construction of Forum Nová Karolina by Multi Corporation, Ostrava, Czech Republic, 2011. (Photo: Kimberly Elman Zarecor)

A continuing interest in international architects can certainly be seen as a reaction against decades of anonymous design culture, but it is also reflects a desire to have some global status and proof of economic viability in the post-communist era. Not surprisingly, some starchitect proposals remain unbuilt because of inexperienced developers with overly ambitious designs. For example, Norman Foster had at least seven large Russian projects cancelled during the recent economic crisis, including the Crystal Island (2006) in Moscow, which would have been the world’s largest building with 2.5 million square meters (27 million square feet) of floor area and the Russia Tower (2006), designed to be the world’s tallest naturally ventilated building with 118 floors. There is also a scarcity of highly qualified workers in the construction industry and a

13

lack of government transparency and corruption in some countries. Recently this pattern—the preference for starchitects, corrupt politics, labor shortages, and a high rate of failed projects— has been repeated in Asia and the Middle East on an even larger scale.

Local architects have started to prove their potential to do work equal to their international peers. Some trained in the 1970s and 1980s have been able to adapt to the new conditions successfully, such as Vinko Penezić and Krešimir Rogina in Croatia and Josef Pleskot in the Czech Republic. There are also young practitioners, many educated both at home and in Western Europe or the United States, who are building reputations through small commissions and architectural competitions. One standout is the Slovene firm, Ofis Arhitekti, who started by designing innovative low-income housing in Slovenia and now have a global practice. Those looking to sample the region’s young talent can often encounter their work at the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale where the small size of the region’s countries allows for the work of many of the best designers to be exhibited. The ubiquity of English-language skills and the digitization of architectural practice mean that young Eastern European and Russian designers can now compete for projects outside their own countries, but so far few have made a name internationally.

Not surprisingly, the recent economic downturn has slowed the pace of development across the region and stopped the progress of young practitioners who are now struggling to find work. Some countries, including Latvia and Hungary, were especially hard hit by the 2008 collapse of the financial markets and subsequent crash of real estate prices. Cities and towns across the region were overconfident in the demand for new residential construction and currently have thousands of unsold units on the market. In many countries, residents have stayed in their communist-era apartments, spending money to renovate kitchens and bathrooms, instead of investing in costly new construction. The current situation is by far the worst in the former Soviet Union. Unlike countries that have joined the European Union, or the

14

former Yugoslavia which has finally recovered from the destructive 1990s, much of Russia and its former territories suffer from poverty and severe social problems. Little investment has reached beyond the large Russian cities on the Western side of the country or the oil-rich nations in the Caucasus Region like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Most Russians still live in unrenovated communist-era housing that continues to deteriorate with few options for financing improvements.

Contemporary Practice

Two examples suggest the diversity and complexity of contemporary practice in the region. The Jerde Partnership’s Złote Tarasy/Golden Terraces (2007), next to the Main Train Station in Warsaw’s central business district, is a mixed-use development with 232,000 square meters (2.4 million square feet) of office, retail, entertainment, and hotel space and 1,400 underground parking spaces. The complex brought an American-style mall experience to Warsaw with brands like Victoria’s Secret, The Body Shop, and Levi’s, as well as a multiplex cinema, Burger King, the Hard Rock Cafe, and two food courts. Its signature architectural feature is an undulating glass roof, one of the largest in the world, which emerges amoeba-like from among the complex’s more traditional office and hotel towers to enclose the retail space (Figure 13.13).

13.13 Jerde Partnership, Złote Tarasy/Golden Terraces, Warsaw, Poland, 2007. (Photo: © Kescior / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL)

Like many similar mixed-use projects in the region, including Jerde’s own WestEnd City Center (1999) in Budapest, it was designed to enhance the commercial infrastructure of a city that had previously relied on networks of small, poorly stocked shops and dismal office spaces. The city and ING Real Estate jointly financed the project, which was led by Chicago-based

15

Epstein in consultation with Jerde Partnership. Epstein opened a Warsaw office in the 1980s and helped shepherd the project through the complexities of local building codes and contractors. Like other large cities in the region, new construction is a point of pride for the city’s image. Złote Tarasy is just one of many new projects by international architects in Warsaw including an office building by Norman Foster, residential towers by Helmut Jahn and Daniel Libeskind, a museum by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlemaeki, and the German Embassy by Kleine Metz Architekten. In speaking about the boom in new buildings, and reflective of a general regional attitude, T omasz Zemla, Deputy Director of Warsaw’s Department of Architecture and City Planning, recently said, “we intend to build skyscrapers, yes ... to be honest, we want to show off.”21

A different view of contemporary practice comes through in a Russian example that shows the challenges of working in the region, especially when a building has national cultural significance. The new stage for the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg finally opened in May 2013 after 11 years of planning and construction. In 2002, Los Angeles-based architect Eric Owen Moss was hired to expand the theater by adding a second stage to the existing historical complex. His proposal, which included an exuberant glass façade that appeared to explode out of a rectangular volume, drew ire from the citizens of St. Petersburg and theater professionals and worried the Ministry of Culture who had to pay the bill. The ministry decided to fire Moss and then announced an international design competition for the same site. Moss was invited to submit a new design, but did not prevail. Instead, French architect Dominique Perrault won with his vision for a new theater volume encased in a web of gold filigree. Construction started on the project and work continued for five years, but by then only the foundations were complete. At that point, the government abandoned the design due to cost and scheduling concerns.

Finally in 2009, a second competition was held and the commission awarded to Toronto- based Diamond and Schmitt Architects who had to partner with local architects, KB ViPS, who

16

had been working on the foundations of the Perrault proposal. The new design, which had to be adjusted slightly to incorporate some already-built foundation walls, is a contextual and comparatively conservative project with a masonry facade that matches the existing streetscape. According to the architects, its curved metal roof with a glass canopy “gives the building a contemporary identity rooted within the context of St. Petersburg’s exceptional architectural heritage.”22 Unhappy with its less ambitious design, some locals have likened it to a “supermarket.”23 Even so, it is notable that the theater actually opened in 2013 after such a protracted design process.

Conclusion

The history of architecture in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the last 50 years offers instructive lessons about the relationships between models of architectural practice and design culture. Communist economic planning imposed a set of priorities and restrictions on architects that were not formal, or even material, but rather established a professional culture through which a set of practices and standards emerged. This building culture operated for more than 70 years in the Soviet Union and 40 years in Eastern Europe. In this period, cities were created, expanded, and remade. Millions of modern apartments were built that still house the majority of the region’s citizens. However these environments were left to deteriorate without proper maintenance or investment. The last 20 years have been a period of reinvigoration and stabilization of these degraded spaces. For the most part, this has been a massive rehabilitation project, rather than the widespread demolition that some predicted. Thus Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have an imprint of their communist years that will not easily be erased, even as new building types and international architectural trends become the norm.

Scholars use the terms communism, socialism, and state socialism to refer to the systems in these countries. For clarity, communism will be used here. Political scientist Andrew Roberts describes communist countries as “ruled by a single mass party that placed severe restrictions on all forms of civil society and free expression ... [had] almost complete prohibition of private ownership of the means of production and a high degree of central planning ... [and] were committed to revolution and the massive transformation of existing society.” Andrew Roberts, “The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology,” Slavic Review 63/2 (Summer 2004): 359.

[wical]

The Good and the Good Looking: Exploring the Mediated Representation of the Aesthetic/Athletic Hierarchy in Women’s Professional Tennis

Carol Wical

  A thesis submitted (Unsuccessfully) for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at

The University of Queensland in January 2010

School of Journalism & Communications

Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the General Award Rules of The University of Queensland, immediately made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material.

Statement of Contributions to Jointly Authored Works Contained in the Thesis

“No jointly-authored works.”

Statement of Contributions by Others to the Thesis as a Whole

“No contributions by others.”

Statement of Parts of the Thesis Submitted to Qualify for the Award of Another Degree

“None.”

Published Works by the Author Incorporated into the Thesis

“Out at the Open : Amelie Mauresmo and the Australian Press ”. Sexualities. Special Issue: European Culture, European Queer. Lisa Downing and Robert Gillet (Eds.). Forthcoming.

Additional Published Works by the Author Relevant to the Thesis but not Forming Part of it

Stand Still, Look Pretty : Representation and Tradition in Mainstream American Women's Country Music 1972-2005. Saarbrucken: VDM, 2009.

 “Disguised as ‘One of the Guys’? The Contribution of Terri Clark to an American Country Music Women’s Tradition”. Rhizomes : Connecting Languages, Cultures and Literatures. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006.

 Acknowledgements

This project would have been impossible without the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award and the smooth machinations that saw it make its way into my account – my enduring respect to the folk at the Graduate School and the School of Journalism & Communication. It would also have been impossible without the following folk to who boundless thanks are due:

Firstly to the Drs John Cokley and Murray Phillips who patiently waited for me to discover what story I wanted to tell then cheered from the sidelines until it was done. My colleagues at AustLit: The Resource for Australian Literature, especially The Boss Kerry Kilner. To the Gordon Greenwood/ Room 317 gang – it could have gone very wrong without you all there to remind me of the reasons for my love affair with diversity. Particular thanks to AL and Ellen who kept 2.0 from forgetting to have fun and the importance of cake. To Emma, who has managed to share a flat with me all the way through it and still thinks I’m an OK Aunt – thanks for the company and the cleaning and the cat wrangling. Thanks to my mother who in her eighties continues to learn something new every day. And to the staff of 6N.

 Abstract

 This project concludes that different narratives need to be built around sportswomen if their elite level competitions are ever to have a sustainable future on broadcast television. Particularly, I suggest avoiding dependence on the instability of a single, accredited model to which all other players must conform.

I have taken up a strategic position at the intersections between feminist theory and queer theory in order to re-read how broadcasters, journalists and other stakeholders in women’s tennis events participate in the constructions of sportswomen’s identities, especially in elite professional tennis. Theoretically underpinned by Foucault, Butler, Halberstam, Tasker and McRobbie this project uses a high-functioning popular culture to disconnect notions of sex, gender and sexuality in order to advocate for the representation of diversity. Taking cues from the boundaries placed on public performances of gender by women in the public eye, the narrative themes present in the Channel 7 broadcast of the 2007 Australian Open tennis championship match between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova are identified and analysed. I especially note themes supported by the major stakeholders in women’s tennis: infantilisation, the erasure of difference, the denial of effort, and the insistence on normative performances of femininity.

I use theoretical approaches in an exploratory way to try to unearth areas of cultural uncertainty such as gender performance where the vernacular might best be exploited to align female professional athleticism as an accepted cultural practice. Attention to broadcasters’ vocabulary is not the issue but that entire narratives must be renovated or constructed in the broadcast of women’s sport. Players, I argue following Peterson, need to actively engage with authenticity work – plundering their own life facts and the tradition of their sport to build intertwining narratives of self – as a part of their job that needs constant maintenance. Narrative cohesion and sustainability on the individual, community and cross-cultural levels are suggested as a viable basis for a stable cultural profile. Ultimately, I question whether increasing the quantity of women’s sport available to be viewed on television can have the positive impact government and NGOs seek. I suggest that unless the content and presentation of these broadcasts are first addressed, increased broadcast quantity may have a detrimental overall effect.

Keywords

Queer theory, feminist theory, sports broadcast, gender, narrative, tennis, women, journalism

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

20 Language, Communication and Culture 100%

  With diversity there is strength. In the end, we have to celebrate our differences, not tolerate them. – Billie Jean King (Steele, 2007: 93)

  Contents

Abstract. 4

Keywords. 5

Chapter 1: Introduction. 10

Beginnings and Underpinnings. 10

Defining Some Key Terms. 13

Systemic Diminution. 14

A Cultural Studies Approach. 15

Quantity v Quality of Exposure. 17

Other Backgrounding Factors: A Cluster of Anxieties and Tensions. 20

Chapter 2: Outline: Sport, Women, Media. 23

Research Purpose. 23

Research Objectives. 23

Research Questions. 24

Rationale of Study. 24

Operational Definitions. 24

Women, sport, media. 25

Theoretical Framework. 28

Image maintenance: narratives of self, tradition and progression. 28

A Queer Feminist Perspective. 30

Methodology. 31

Thesis Outline. 32

Chapter 3: Literature Review.. 34

Women in popular culture. 34

Positioning the media. 34

Positioning the audience. 37

Gender Identity. 39

Gender, sexuality, sport. 41

Cohesion and credibility. 45

Chapter 4: Findings: Stereotype and the Authentic. 49

The Performer and the Authentic. 49

Adapting and Applying Petersen’s Authentic – Problems and Possibilities. 50

Connections to the Authentic. 52

The Player and Stereotype. 53

The Stereotype/Authentic Connection. 55

The Narrative Power of Authenticity and Stereotype. 56

Celebrity and Authenticity. 57

Amplification of Uncertainty. 58

The Model/Player. 60

A Problem Like Maria. 60

The Trouble With Serena. 63

Straight Sets : Heterosexual Cohesion. 64

Role Models. 65

Conclusion. 66

Chapter 5: Discussion: Chosen Narratives: Wasters, Low Stakes and Divas. 69

Some Prevalent Concerns: Race,  Power,  Ease. 69

Race. 70

Power. 70

Ease. 73

Same-ing the Players?. 75

Divafication: What’s ethnicity got to do with it?. 78

Prima Divas: Waste and Work. 79

Origin mythologies. 81

Innovators. 82

Noise and Silence. 86

Theme Songs : Singing The Survivor and the Object of Desire. 87

Feminised Uber Narrative. 91

The Incident at the End of the First Set. 94

Conclusion. 97

Chapter 6: Conclusions: Towards a Sustainable Female Sporting Stereotype. 98

The Model/Player Dichotomy. 99

A Cluster of Promises. 103

Constrictions to the Search for a Cohesive Identity. 106

Gender, Sex and Sexuality Anxieties in the Contemporary Australian Context. 107

Gendered Space. 112

Space. 112

Individuation. 115

Economy and Culture. 119

Race. 120

Nation. 121

Class. 122

Conclusion. 123

Chapter 7: Cohesion, Community, Difference: Setting Other Imageries. 124

Same-ing. 125

The Importance of Being Earnest. 126

A Clear and Present Legacy. 128

Overregulated Identities. 129

Agency and the Constructed. 131

The Promise of Community?. 133

On the Margins of What May Be Represented. 134

Really?: “Reader” Sanctioned “Authenticity”. 136

Conclusion. 138

Where Does It Hurt? : Towards Identifying and Utilising Porous Boundaries. 138

Chapter 8: Conclusion and Recommendations. 142

Stories Told Well 1: Organisational Narratives. 143

Stories Told Well 2: Player Identity Narratives. 145

Stories Told Well 3: (Hardly) Sporting Narratives. 146

What Does It Matter?. 147

References. 149

  Chapter 1: Introduction

 This thesis explores and exposes sites of access to sporting narratives towards sportswomen and women’s sports being represented via a non-heterosexist, non-misogynistic broadcast culture. The main text interrogated is the “live” free-to-air Australian broadcast by Channel 7’s 7Sport of the championship match of the women’s draw of the 2007 Australian Open tennis tournament (see Figure 2). For comparison I also analyse the internet home pages of Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova (the antagonists in the match of the main text) and also that of Ana Ivanovic. My approach is from the intersection of feminist and queer theory. My particular interest is in what is said in the broadcast before the action on court began to override the pre-prepared narrative trajectory. This turning point occurs just over an hour into the broadcast (see Appendix 1 – Transcript at 1:04:00).  

Beginnings and Underpinnings

 The two following quotes hold within them the concerns that initially generated this project. The first quote succinctly encapsulates the ascendency of aesthetics over the ability of sportswomen and challenges heterosexism particularly as it is linked with the confusion

 Match

Championship Game, Women’s Draw, Australian Open

Date Played

26 January, Australia Day, 2007

Match Stats

S. Williams d. M Sharapova 6-1, 6-2

Venue

Rod Laver Arena

Stadium Audience

Capacity 15, 000

Broadcast Team (on screen)

Bruce McAvaney – 7Sport host (BM)

Tracy Austin – imported expert commentator (former champion player)  (TA)

Sandy Roberts – journalist and sports commentator (SR)

Neil Kearney – journalist (NK)

Kerryn Pratt – expert commentator (former player) (KP)

Kylie Gillies – interviewer (KG)

Chris Ditmar – interviewer (former player) (CD)

 Broadcast Summary

Kearney (NK)  narrates the  introduction and interviews Ana Ivanovich.

McAvaney hosts from the studio.

Austin hosts then commentates.

Roberts commentates.

Pratt is the inserted interviewer in the packaged pre-match interviews  with Williams and Sharapova; she takes over commentary momentarily in  Austin’s absence.

The broadcast consists of a pre-match introduction, the match and  post-match presentation ceremony and interview with the winner.

Audience

Whole tournament figures: 6,176 hours of television broadcast in 174  countries; 554,858 fans through the gate

Sponsors

Kia, Garnier major tournament sponsors

Included Packages

Introduction (including player profiles); interviews with the players;  a review of player statistics; predictions from Austin and fan interviews

Script Annotations

The transcript avoids any highly technical annotations. Use of commonly  understood shorthand such as CU for Close Up; VO for Voice Over are clarified  by context.

Home Pages

The internet home pages of Williams, Sharapova and Ana Ivanovic are  analysed for comparative purposes.

Figure 2: Detail of texts interrogated

 arising out of dominant and wildly inaccurate discourses of gender, sexuality and biological sex rooted in an inherent and unchecked homophobia:

Media representations focus on conventionally, that is, heterosexually-attractive female athletes, and much is made of their appearance and personal lives. As well as being heterosexist, this line of thinking suggests confusion between the concepts of sex differentiation (male/female), sex-role orientation (masculine /feminine/ androgynous) and sexual orientation. (Lenskyj, Hemphill and Symons, 2002: 2)

The second quote is an example of the tendency for media outlets to seek and report the opinion of dominant male stakeholders on the question of a systemic diminution of sportswomen.

Australia’s former Federation Cup captain John Alexander is appalled by the decision of the All England Club to take the physical appearance of women into consideration when planning their schedule for Centre Court matches at Wimbledon…the chief executive of the WTA Tour, Larry Scott, denied appearance was paramount. (Swanton and Hinds, 2009)

As Jagose (Jagose, 2002: ix) suggests, these sequences need to be broken: “both the reification and the hierarchical valuation of heterosexuality and homosexuality are achieved as if through nothing more than the uninvested narrative mechanisms of numerical order or chronological progression. These cultural narrativizations of sexual sequence produce the very hierarchies they are taken to describe.”

Another central overarching concern here is the persistence of the dangerous notions arising out of Ann Brooks’ (Brooks, 1997) and others reductive view of feminisms.  The introduction of this narrow notion of feminisms as the enemy of femininity – which some use as an interchangeable synonym for difference – characterizes the space occupied by post-feminism into the milieu of cultural studies. I take the approach that this is a complete misreading of not only the significance but also of the signifiers of both feminisms and femininity as they exist in their social, temporal, geographical and economic context. The fact that the idea of post-feminism was taken up so eagerly, and came so quickly to mean that the need for a feminist approach was over, speaks strongly for the strength of the patriarchal normative constructs against which feminisms railed. One set of perceived gender boundaries, I argue, was exchanged for another more normative and thus less obvious perimeter. A decade later, alternatives to this capitulation such as Femmes of Power (Dahl and Volcano, 2008) are beginning to arise out of queer theory to unpack the dichotomous assumptions surrounding the relationship between feminism and femininity outside the constraints of heteronormativity. This project embraces the idea of a range of difference in gender performance based on the assertion (Connell, 1995: 69) that “the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ point beyond categorical sex difference to the ways women differ among themselves, in matters of gender.”

Some critics (Boyle, 2008: 182) see “studies of representational practices” of women in the media such as this project as potentially damaging because of the tendency of these representations to be “divorced from a broader feminist political project and history” and to focus on the white middle class and “the failure to connect the analysis to a broader feminist praxis”. This project, in the sense that it is mine, originates with the middle class. It is a study of the representation of the mostly white, vastly privileged community of professional tennis players. It argues that even these seemingly powerful women are diminished by mediated representation and that this is why showing more women’s sport without changing how it is shown will, in the end, do more damage than good.

Defining Some Key Terms

With the help of the quote from Lenskyj and colleagues I define my terminology.

Lenskyj terminology

Pertains to normative hierarchies:

My terminology

Sex differentiation

Male/female

Sexes or biological sexes

Sex-role orientation

Masculine/feminine/ androgynous

Genders

Sexual orientation

Hetero-normative/non-hetero-normative

Sexualities

 Informed by the early work of Halberstam (1998) and Butler (1990) I approach gender as a matter of doing rather than being. From this standpoint and underpinned by McRobbie’s (2009) analysis of postfeminism I seek to uncover indicators of the deep-seated cultural constructs and constrictions that set the boundaries for public performances of gender for women. In the broadest possible sense my research pursues answers to the query:

Does the interpretation of the public performance of woman by dominant masculine public sphere narratives mean that broadcasting these performances creates or at least amplifies a cultural dissonance?

I approach what Wenner (1998) calls the “sports/media production complex” as a communication between one culture (in this case the sporting subculture of women’s professional tennis) and another (the wider culture to which their audience belongs). This communication is carried out on the widest, immediate scale by a third culture – sports broadcasting.  Of prime interest to me is the representation of women in (or rather, out of) popular cultures although this approach has obvious applications for the representation of women in other fields such as politics and business each of which also have their own correspondent journalistic subculture. My work on sport and the mass media then is – to use Kinkema and Harris’ (Kinkema and Harris, 1998) categorisation – an avenue of approach to the “message or content of mediated sports texts” and is less concerned with – though not insensate to – matters of production and audience interaction.

Systemic Diminution

 The news that the All England Club considered women player’s physical appearance when planning which court they would play on (and thus which players were shown on television) made the front page of the Australian broadsheet The Sydney Morning Herald (Swanton and Hinds, 2009). Published under the caption ‘The Good … And The Good Looking’, unflattering photographs of Serena Williams and Svetlana Kuznetsova in the former category were contrasted with attractive photographs of younger, lesser known, less accomplished players Sorana Cirstea and Maria Kirilenko. The text was headlined "Sets Appeal: Beauty Aces Talent at Wimbledon." Comments were sought from Williams who said she “didn’t mind” being on court two and Kuznetsova who found the scheduling “weird” and wondered “what’s their strategy?” Although former player and Federation Cup coach John Alexander found the suggestion that beauty had been elevated over – or at least put on a par with – sporting prowess in an official and deliberate way “appalling and repulsive”, the CEO of the WTA Tour Larry Scott found it acceptable as a consideration. Thus Scott would seem to corroborate the views (immediately preceding his statement in this article) of the WTA’s “regular antagonist” Pat Cash and another former Wimbledon winner Michael Stich who is quoted as saying: “That’s [sex] what they sell”. The common dichotomization of the talented and the ornamental echoed in the caption “The Good and the Good Looking” that heads and accurately reflects the situation reported in this article also indicates that Stich’s view is at least partially accurate.

This leads to a focus away from the game and a community of players towards a more individuating and divisive representation that I argue has become the norm. As Boyle (2008: 180) warns, focus on the individual erases feminism and simultaneously renders all that feminisms have battled against invisible:

The critical focus on individual women allows the challenge of feminism to disappear as it is positioned as a lifestyle choice (being feminist) rather than a movement (doing feminism). If feminism is equated with women’s agency, choice and subjectivity, then questions about gender, about structural inequalities, discrimination, oppression and violence are allowed to slip from view.

I argue that there are parallels between this situation and confusions and anxieties over “being” and “doing” sportswoman where non-conformant gender performance can directly diminish exposure and therefore income. Although largely ignored in cultural studies of sport, it is undeniably an industry – albeit a highly privileged one – in which athletes labour for a living. A letter to the editor (Sabine, 2008) recently criticised the naiveté of Gideon Haigh’s review of Simon Barnes’ book The Meaning of Sport for ignoring sport’s economic dimension:

Sport is an industry, a key subset of the entertainment industry, and the whole glorious business is awash with money, kept afloat with money, essentially advertising money.

A Cultural Studies Approach

 As with many cultural studies projects I am highly visible within this text. This is an exploratory document: a beginning. Like any explorer my sense of a new place in the world as informed by my class, my upbringing, my education, my sex, my gender, my sexuality and my age colours these findings. I pursue knowledge to learn the answers to questions I pose about the world. Here, I both trace an evolution in my understanding and foreshadow what is to follow. That said this is not merely an exercise in self-reflexivity. I am neither a social scientist nor a journalist but work in the field of cultural studies. This background determines the shape and direction of my academic approach to women’s sports and sports journalism as subcultures of sports and journalism and of sports and sports journalism as support mechanisms of resurgent patriarchies in Anglo-European “advanced democracies”.

In many senses this project follows on from my Master of Philosophy thesis Stand Still Look Pretty: Representation and Tradition in Mainstream American Women’s Country Music 1972-2005 (Wical, 2006b). Tradition is used here and throughout not in the classical sense as a repository for the unchanging but in the more fluid, discursively active sense of a past “continually reinterpreted to fit the changing needs of the present” (Peterson and Anand, 2004: 326). Discourses generated by the actions and behaviours of the most elite professional women tennis players will also serve me as a text that can illuminate the process of challenging narratives of a dominant culture. My current project situates gender representation as one site of the tension between tradition and innovation that drives all popular cultures including both women’s sports and the broadcast and mass-mediation of them. I borrow from Couldry’s paper on Big Brother (Couldry, 2002: 283) approaching sport as a media event which he defines as “an insistent representation of participation”. Further, he suggests (Couldry, 2002: 284), an event is “transformed in certain analyzable ways by being mediated”, being “amplified, retextualized, transposed onto other dimensions where its significance could be debated or contested”.

 Media professionals work inside the contested space of the cultural contradiction of female athleticism (Malcolm, 2003: 1387-1388). It is my assertion that, from this position, they amplify the dissonance. I interrogate the mass mediated representation of players in the light of Festle’s (1996) assertion that “female athletes no longer downplay the traditionally male traits of aggression and toughness” and Theberge’s that it “remains imperative that they also be appropriately feminine” and Griffin’s (1988) “claim that the apologetic defense is closely linked to sexuality and homophobia” (Malcolm, 2003: 1388). Broad (2001), citing Felshin (1974), Griffin (1998) and Sabo (1993) lists “[c]laims to a traditional female role and public displays of femininity by women athletes” as the “assumed standard of the ‘female apologetic’”. As the notional distance decreases between what is understood as signified and what is recognised as the sign, the more power what is shown accumulates, and the more threatening what is withheld becomes to the source of that power.  Thus the “powerful seen” will always attempt to dominate the threat of the unseen, to present it as at worst destructive or at best non-normative. This power dynamic is central to the continued viability of a culture’s chosen codes and signifiers. In popular cultures, the “powerful seen” must be both contemporary and attached to the culture’s dominant tradition to be viewed as “authentic” (Peterson, 1997; Wical, 2006b).

I chose discourses surrounding elite, professional sportswomen partly as a reaction to Senate Committee Report About Time! : Women in Sport and Recreation in Australia (2006). This report would concludes that more exposure (in broadcast media in particular) will bring a larger audience and thus more money to women’s sport. This seems flawed. Much academic work on women in sport (work that is designated, inaccurately, sport gender studies) seeks to highlight the broadcast and print media imbalance between the sexes. For example, Rowe reports that the International Sports Press Survey 2005 revealed “a heavily gendered sports world…with women the focus of only 14 percent of sport coverage and constituting 5 percent of sports journalists” (2007: 187). This debate’s history informs my choice of women’s professional tennis which Bernstein suggests (2002: 415) “might be the only clear example of a [women’s] sport to which television dedicates much airtime”.

Quantity v Quality of Exposure

 My argument departs from attempts at quantitative measurement of sex discrimination and runs counter to presentations of tennis as an accepted “feminine-appropriate” sport (Brown, 1997: 25). Indeed, Blashak (2005: 16) catalogues an institutionalised agenda of the masculinisation of tennis in Australia, a movement that he argues was “critical to the game’s long-term development and modern popularity…[that]…served to transform the genteel pastime of tennis into a modern competitive sport”. Instead, this I focus on the need for a careful, cohesive, culturally intelligent, self authenticating, inscriptive construction of identities to replace what has become a slippery and hesitant representation of variant genders in the female-based popular subculture of women’s sport.

Halberstam (1998: 268) proclaims her work Female Masculinity as “a seriously committed attempt to make masculinity safe for women and girls”. Though this project is produced in much more modest circumstances, it honours that commitment by exploring the mediated representation of women who queer gender in the act of performing their work in plain sight of a heteronormatised culture. This project aspires to a queer feminist approach with the Butler and Halberstam as theoretical antecedents for the former and McRobbie for the latter. In keeping with her background with the Birmingham School, McRobbie (2009: 1) does not shy away from characterising the current post-feminist social and cultural landscape as one foregrounded by a new kind of anti-feminism giving rise to a faux-feminism via institutionalized and politicized individuation.  Further, she suggests, once elements of feminism are “converted into a much more individualistic discourse, they are deployed in this new guise, particularly in media and popular culture … so as to ensure that a new women’s movement will not emerge”. Her book (McRobbie, 2009: 1) The Aftermath of Feminism demonstrates “how this takes place at ground level”.

To be perfectly clear, I approach sport and the broadcast of it as supporting discourses of the patriarchal, heteronormative culture constructs often referred to as western democracies (Hargreaves, 2000: 138-139; Kennedy, 2007; Griffin, 1998; Cahn, 1994: 5; Hall, 1996: 41; Theberge, 1987). Some of the findings of the 2006 Senate Committee Report that counter media representation of women’s sport suggest this. I quote the findings from ‘Chapter 6: Women’s Sport and the Media’ at length:

The major argument sometimes made is that women just are not as good at sports as men, and people want to watch and read about the best.

 There is also evidence to suggest performance is not necessarily related to media coverage. There are some sports that only women play at the elite level, and others that only men play. Even in these cases, the sports dominated by men get far more media coverage. If the argument were valid, then those sports where only women play at the elite level and are therefore by definition “the best” would get media attention. Yet in general they do not.

             Another complaint about women’s sport is that it lacks depth of talent [but] just as many different women have won major individual sporting events as have men.

 The reasons articulated in the Report for these anomalies are:

 Men’s sport has the advantage of incumbency.

The sporting marketplace is crowded.

The coverage of sport is to some affected by the attitude of the media and sports organisations. Most reporting is by men, under male editors or program managers.

 The perceived minor status of women’s sport also affects the way newspapers go about covering it.

 Women’s sport is trapped in cycles of neglect, poor funding, poor infrastructure and low levels of interest.

  The FFA recommendation was for “government intervention, particularly in terms of a mandatory minimum coverage of women in sport”. The committee begged to differ: “It is not only the quantity of coverage that is at issue. There are differences in the way the media portray women’s and men’s sport, mostly reinforcing gender stereotypes, or undermining women’s achievements.” Further, even though the overwhelming recommendation of submissions received was that quantity of coverage was the issue, the committee found that “Reporting of women’s sport that reinforces stereotypes and trivialises women’s achievements could be worse than no coverage at all”. Ten years earlier a report on media coverage and the portrayal of women’s sport in Australia (Phillips, 1997: 29) had recommended that:

 Men and women who understand women’s sport need to be behind the camera/microphone to ensure those who know about the sport are presenting it professionally and putting the sport in the best possible light.

 There is, then, a history of acknowledgement at the highest national administrative levels in Australia of the need for quality, positive, knowledgeable broadcasting of women’s sport not just an increase in quantity. This project investigates why this process is proceeding so slowly – where it is proceeding at all. I argue that this traceable anxiety over deep-seated cultural and economically fuelled prejudices has not been addressed at the level of cultural change. In the end it is this void that this project begins to fill. This is especially so when the government incumbent at the time of writing seems to have shied away from the difficult implications of these findings. A recent report from the Department of Health and Aging (2008: 7) stated that “the Rudd Government believes women’s sport has not received the profile that it deserves in a country that idolises its sporting heroes”. The report further committed the Rudd government to breaking “the vicious circle in which poor media exposure leads to lesser profile and exposure, which leads to lesser sponsorship and remuneration opportunities, which leads to less financial support and opportunities for promotional activities which leads back to less media coverage.” The report goes on to highlight that women’s sport has only a 2% share of televised sport. This intention by the government to pursue the quantitative path is made clear later in the document: “The Government made election commitments to help televise a new national soccer league for women and has also invested in the new Trans-Tasman netball competition.”

Other Backgrounding Factors: A Cluster of Anxieties and Tensions

 This work argues that efforts made to mitigate gender performances categorized as masculine by sportswomen paint over an unchallenged acceptance of homophobia and other controlling gatekeepers. Signifying, heteronormative aesthetics are easy to apply: the removal of hair, the application of make-up (literally painting over the problem), covering tattoos, even the wearing of dresses which now serve no purpose except to cover the shorts players wear and perhaps to enhance the illusion of grace rather than power. Power is difficult to disguise and one can only wonder at the training and dietary disciplines that go in to making young women strong without an obvious show of muscle – particularly at rest.

Sport, like other popular cultures, is easy to approach as a sight of body-based cultural anxieties. Messner and Sabo (1994: 95) tell us that "athletes are taught to regard their bodies as machines and weapons”. Clearly this runs counter to the hard [male]/soft [female] body hierarchy (Clover, 1992; Gallardo C. and Smith, 2004; Tasker, 1993) operating commonly in the wider cultures of Anglophone western democracies. Butler (1999: 237) tells us that the body is “a concrete scene of cultural struggle”. This description reflects the strength and resilience of the discursive gendered constructions of bodies. It is the architecture and consequences of threats to these structures that concerns this project. I have already mentioned McRobbie’s misgivings about the construction of post-feminist woman. Tasker and Negra (2007: 3) also express consternation over post-feminism’s perpetuation of “woman as pin-up” that they characterise as a “peculiarly silent visibility”.

In Boxing, Masculinity and Identity Woodward (2007: 64-65) suggests an important tension in the polarised interrelationship between beautiful bodies and “the threat of damage and the broken body”. This tension underpins the dissonance between the sporting and the model body.  Once presented as a normative aesthetic the sporting body becomes complicit in the potential transgression of damaging beauty. Lyng and Matthews (2007: 78) point out the highly gendered nature of risk discourse detailing the masculine construction of “edgework” which they identify as being seduced by “a clear and vitally consequential boundary line (edge)”. Here we see the mechanism by which the transgression becomes highly gendered. Toughness as well as risk is highly gendered. Innes (1999: 5-7) has suggested that the tough girl “plays numerous roles” and a “paradoxical role” in popular culture and that toughness is read as a signifier of gender identity. Innes says that the tough girl’s

tougher and more masculine image suggests that a greater variety of gender roles are open to women; at the same time however, her toughness is often mitigated by her femininity, which American culture commonly associates with weakness.

In the documentary Lavender Limelight (Maurceri, 1997 (2009 DVD)), feature film director Maria Maggenti articulates a wider-culture anxiety about public ensemble performances by women thus:  “People are confused by a film with a lot of female characters.” This confusion is hardly surprising given Schaffer’s observance that dominant discourses tend to erase difference – that is, to make all women “the same”. It is possible that this cultural tendency to be confused about the meaning of women without men explains the higher instance of television exposure of women’s tennis as part of a mixed competition such as the Grand Slam circuit. In her work on the significance of woman-as-sign within the discourse of Australian identity Schaffer (1988: xii) contends that “in the discourses which inform an Australian cultural tradition, women carry the burden of metaphor”. Further, she suggests, “dominant discourses on cultural identity tend to mask a recognition of difference, of cultural plurality [for women]. They disguise the existence of open and endless possibilities for meaning, subjectivity and cultural representation”. This thesis argues for a move toward plurality in the representation of women, and the acknowledgement, exposure and eradication of this masking and the choosing of alternate disguises.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 Chapter 2: Outline: Sport, Women, Media

 Research Purpose

 In the light of governmental anxieties at a federal level (Australia. Parliament. Senate Environment Communications Information Technology and the Arts References Committee and Bartlett, 2006.; Phillips, 1997; Working Group on Women in Sport (Australia), 1985), this project questions the efficacy of mass mediation out of the professional women’s tennis subculture into the dominant culture. In particular it explores this landscape within the western, democratic Anglophone culture of Australia. It is concerned initially with the representation of gender identity by communication professionals and the impact of that representation on the subculture’s personal and cultural agency. Specifically, by examining the Channel 7 broadcast of the championship match of the Australian Tennis Open 2007 between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, it shows that sports and celebrity journalisms are most often corrosive to attempts to construct a tradition separate from that of the dominant culture. This indicates a likelihood that by neglecting to contextualise the individualities that they emphasise, sell and celebrate within their own subculture these lucrative journalisms are destroying their own key texts. There are broader implications here for both practitioners in and journalists mediating out of public spheres such as political and economic subcultures, for example, but my work focuses on the representation of champion, elite, professional women tennis players. To borrow from Veronica Hollinger’s (1999: 23) statement of intent in her paper on queer readings of science fiction, this project aims to position itself strategically at the intersections between feminist theory and queer theory in order to re-read how sports journalists and other stakeholders in women’s tennis events participate in the constructions of players’ gender identities.

 Research Objectives

 1. To theorise media representation of gender identity out of a sporting subculture using the Channel 7 broadcast of the championship match of the Australian Tennis Open 2007 as my central text.

2.  To suggest alternative representational strategies.

 Research Questions

 1. Do mass media narrative constructions of gender identities erase the counter-hegemonic encodings of women in sporting subcultures?

2. Is there space for a separate women’s sporting narrative?

 Rationale of Study

 Many scholarly and governmental approaches to women and sport take the view that the quantity of mass mediation of elite sporting contests can be used as both a measure of success and an avenue for future growth (Australia Senate Environment Communications Information Technology and the Arts References Committee and Bartlett, 2006). The approach of media coverage is a vital component in the shaping and the success of a popular culture economically dependent on acceptance in the wider community. My research pursues the idea of mediating a communal cohesion that is not constructed on erasure of intra-sex gender difference and one that does not rely on homophobia as an accepted disciplinary measure.

 Operational Definitions

 Commentators : Performers (sometimes journalists) involved in the broadcast of live sporting events including the pre-recorded sections

Gender identity : This thesis follows  Butler’s assertion that gender is fluidic and doable, not a pair of biologically exclusive, hierarchically oppositional categories (masculine and feminine) (Butler, 2004: 41).

Queer theory : My analysis reflects that in an overtly counter-heteronormative way “queer performativity is the name of a strategy for the production of meaning and being, in relation to the affect shame and to the latter and related fact of stigma” (Sedgwick, 2003: 26).

Sports journalists : Journalism professionals who work entirely in the area of sport.

Subculture : This thesis accepts sports sociologists’ approach to sport as a subculture that reflects the dominant culture but considers the potential benefits of women’s sports embracing a subcultural identity as a deviant group. (see Spencer, 1997: 363)

Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) :

 The Sony Ericsson WTA Tour (the “WTA Tour” or “Tour”) is an international award competition open to all female players. Tournaments on the WTA Tour are connected by a points system in which players earn ranking points based on the Tournament category level and their performance at each Tournament. The WTA Tour is administered and governed by WTA Tour, Inc. (“WTA”), a US registered corporation whose members are the players, its recognized WTA Tour Tournaments worldwide, and the International Tennis Federation (“ITF”). (Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, 2009: 5)

 Women, sport, media

 Feminist sports historians and others have long argued that professional sport and its discourses support patriarchal, Eurocentric culture systems to the detriment of women’s sports (Hargreaves, 2000: 138-139; Kennedy, 2007; Griffin, 1998; Cahn, 1994: 5; Hall, 1996: 41; Theberge, 1987; Rowe, 1990, 1995b, 2004; Rowe, McKay and Miller, 1998; McKay, 1991). Additionally, my work is driven by my concern with the wide-spread acceptance of the notion of post-feminism in that it, in my view, dangerously for women implies in the common use vernacular that all wrongs have been righted and all inequities vanquished. McRobbie (2007: 720) articulates this anxiety thus:  “[M]y own account of post-feminism is equated with a ‘double movement’, gender retrenchment is secured, paradoxically, through the wide dissemination of discourses of female freedom and (putative) equality. Young women are able to come forward on condition that feminism fades away.”  

Women’s professional tennis became a logical choice as my text, representing as it does, a seemingly successful yet identity-poor community. Like most other women in popular cultures who are presented as “role models”, players in this subculture are young, privileged, wealthy, mostly white and scrutinised to a high degree. They also could be said to have two public personae: the on-court or overt persona (the so-called ‘game face’) and the off-court or covert persona, most commonly seen in interview/press conference situations. This thesis explores more fully the complexities of presented personae. Also, this progresses my investigations by asking questions of the roles journalists and other communications specialists play in the representation of identities, particularly gender identities.

Critical arguments such as Allen Guttmann’s (1991: 261, 264, 265) run counter to those of Theberge and her successors (with whom I associate myself) labelling us, and not in a complimentary way, “Marxist radical feminists”, “Neo-Marxist” and “militant feminists”. He dismisses as impossible the feminist notion that men having “erotic fantasies about female athletes are not treating them as persons” (his italics).  Additionally, Guttmann constricts the range of the female athletic erotic to the playing arena, suggesting that they and their eroticism are out of place elsewhere: “The marvel of their athletic performance eroticizes them…In fact an athletic body in an evening gown can cause the same sort of cognitive dissonance as obesity in a track suit.”  Although my disagreement with Guttmann exists at an almost visceral level, he is illustrative of one interesting thing: by reflecting this notion of cognitive dissonance (whether created by spatially specific desire alone or not) sports narratives may be able to tell us much about watching, belonging, and crossed boundaries. Further, results from a study of viewer reaction to television advertisements during coverage of the 1997 Women’s National Basketball Association season in the United States suggest, in part, “that it’s acceptable for women to be powerful and aggressive, as long as they limit that behaviour to sports” (Weardon and Creedon, 2003: 207).

This illustrates the central importance of context and space and the negation and negotiation of it is instrumental to understanding distortions of meaning between one system of signification and another.  Further, it is the utility of the bodies of professional sportswomen that most obviously positions the representations of the players outside the discourses of normative femininities. Normatising discourses of women’s bodies exclude them from industrial (productive as opposed to reproductive) and militaristic discourses whilst athletes are most commonly encouraged to view their bodies as machines and weapons (Holmberg, 1998: 85; Michael A. Messner and Sabo, 1994: 95). Sportswomen, reflecting the erasure of women from these spheres in the wider cultures, are excluded from the hero, champion and war narratives so often adapted by communications specialists mediating out of sports subcultures.  

Elite athletes’ bodies need by definition to be capable of highly (self-)controlled motion. Obviously this is so on the court. But it is also an imperative off it as they travel from one competition to the next. This trope of movement – this ‘new global nomadism’ (see Albrecht and Johnson, 2002; Tennant, 2007) – has particular resonance within the appropriated journey and hero narratives that imbue sports discourses in a time when aeroplanes and airports have become signifiers of fear. Further, I particularly choose the mediation of identity representations out of the professional women’s tennis community as my text to highlight disruptions of the normative feminine. Specifically, I argue, disruption of the normative feminine is caused by this community’s overt presentations of individuality, a nomadic lifestyle, by gladiatorial opposition and by the single-sex conflation of the highly gendered and oppositional mind/body binary. In regarding professional women tennis players as nomadic I mean not only in the physical, literal sense in that they have arguably served as the vanguard of the new international nomadism but also that they need be what Braidotti (1994: 1-2) called “nomadic thinkers”.  A nomadic thinker, Braidotti further explains, has “no mother tongue, only a succession of translations, of displacements, of adaptations to changing conditions”. Additionally, she offers nomadic subjects as a suitable figuration for contemporary subjectivity “to redefine a transmobile materialist theory of feminist subjectivity that is committed to working within the parameters of the postmodern predicament, without romanticising it but also without nostalgia for an allegedly more wholesome past”. That this nomadism exists in this subculture at a time when “[t]he production of girlhood now comprises a constant stream of enticements to engage in a range of specified practices which are understood to be both progressive but also consummately and reassuringly feminine” (McRobbie, 2007: 721) suggests to me an internal tension that is worth investigation.

Another site of tension and another kind of watching in my chosen text is that of the representation of the role of the (almost exclusively) male coach in the gender identity of the player. Of particular interest is the father-figure particularly as both finalists in my case study are ‘coached’ by their father. This necessity to emphasise the omnipresent existence of a paternal control operates in a de-sexualising way highlighting both the youth and the potential and mitigating any realised agency in these women. That is, they can be seen to be performing the central narrative role of family breadwinner whilst negotiating the ‘doing’ of daughter without ‘undoing’ player or normative woman.

My research for this thesis began at a time (early 2007) when the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) was seriously considering allowing coaches on court during matches. By 2009 it was a reality. The coaches, almost exclusively male and, as already indicated, most often presented as father figures (if they are indeed not the athlete’s father) are already used in commentary to erase the agency of the athlete (see Chapter 3). This move to bring the father figure centre-stage endangers many hard-won gains regarding agency, autonomy and cultural credibility in women’s professional tennis since the Association’s beginning in the 1970s. These gains were strongly assisted by the contiguous influence of feminisms on the wider Eurocentric cultures in which the players operated. With the last of the Open or Grand Slam tournaments offering equal pay to male and female competitors in 2007 the possibility of the relinquishing of the ideological gains behind the economics for a return to subalternity is at best puzzling and at worst frightening in its retrograde implications if we accept that we can read implications for the cultures that surround a subculture from what is happening within it. Within the subculture, it indicates the dominant culture’s power to reassert the controlling, normatising, assumptive conflict between being female and being an athlete (see Blinde and Taub, 1992; Cahn, 1994; Hall, 1996; Hargreaves, 1994; Malcolm, 2003).  

 Theoretical Framework

 In creating a theoretical framework for this research, I have utilised theoretical approaches from queer and feminist theory, popular culture approaches to representation, and sport and media studies. By doing so I have developed a lens that has enabled me to clearly see the paths revealed by this research.

Image maintenance: narratives of self, tradition and progression

 In his paper on masculinities, sports and popular music, McLeod (2006) outlines how the American National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) “have associated themselves with various types and styles of music in order to forge a wider fan base, to establish a recognisable sonic identity, or merely to cash in on lucrative cross-marketing potential” (540). McLeod further suggests that “arguably the very experience of sports, with its suspension of real time and space…offers the transgressive release from oppressive reality” (535) and that the NBA recognises the commercial possibilities of this suspension “to expand the potential cultural and gender appeal of their product” (538) and has “even associated itself with artists with significant female and gay appeal” (537).

Richard Peterson’s Creating Country Music: Fabricating the Authentic was central to the positioning of my argument in my Masters thesis and my approach to popular cultures in general. There are many commonalities between country music and sport culture, often exploited commercially through cross-endorsements. Here and elsewhere, Peterson deconstructs an industry that has held fast to a structure that has maintained its power by insisting on its specific exclusivity and by responding with some anxiety to the contemporary influences of fluidity and pluralism. Significantly, Peterson approaches country music as an industry, denying its traditional and ‘natural’ folkloric status, in order to focus upon its industrial characteristics. Among these is, in a sense, the industrial production of authenticity.  

To be “believable” and “original” a performer must be proficient in the traditional signifiers of the genre so that on the one hand they are accepted and on the other hand their differences stand out in relief.  Peterson argues that, in the end, it is the audience, the consumers, who define authenticity.  This need to satisfy an ever-changing audience means that country music must, almost in spite of itself, recognize the need to find ways to accommodate the contemporary, the modern, and the fashionable, to manage identities. As a consequence, there has to be a way of redefining and continually updating the construction of authenticity; indeed, Petersen identifies authenticity as a fluid and dynamic concept central to the success of a performer.  Hughes also underlines the fluidity of authenticity, linking it with the emergence and transformation of meaning and identity rather than any essentialist categories (Hughes, 2000: 204).

It is inarguable that in the discourse of professional sport men are the ‘authentic’. This ‘authenticity’ is constructed of a hierarchy of competing codes of masculinity whose order changes depending on the spatial and contextual positioning of the hero narrative. “In one context, that of the broadcast of Wimbledon by the BBC for a British audience, middle-class, white English masculinity is preferred, excluding more troublesome masculinities from the possibility of occupying the narrative position of hero.” (Kennedy, 2007: 31)  

While tracing a history of women’s personae (Wical, 2009), I argued that, although country music narratives which define women must seemingly be modelled on the narratives of the dominant male culture, it is possible to challenge that model.  Further, I showed that it is also possible to nourish such a challenge under the guise of the model itself – until the subordinate, challenging narratives become a narrative tradition of their own. The ability to disguise, I argued, was aided by both a changing and willingly complicit audience and what has been called country music’s “dubious transparency”.

Dividing disguising personae into the two categories of the covert and the overt, I outlined the precarious position of women’s construction of authenticity in the genre and the importance of the intertwining of life facts and song narrative for conveying it. The dominant male country music culture reacts aggressively to perceptions of cultural feminisation. On the other hand, the culture also reacts aggressively to perceived masculinisation in its women performers. This follows Fiske’s theory (1989: 2) that the popular cultures within patriarchal, Eurocentric culture systems carry the interests of those systems, reinforce their power structures and “have lines of force” that “work in favour of the status quo”.  This prior thesis shows that a woman, simply by her continued public presence, can represent narratives that challenge the status quo and run contrary to the culture’s lines of force.

A Queer Feminist Perspective

 Jagose (2009: 172) concludes her articulations on the historically troubled relationship between queer and feminist theory, by asserting that “however different their projects feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.” Both of these approaches point to the flexibly constructed and non-essentialist characteristics of identity. I embrace these qualities of identity representation here, suggesting stakeholders in broadcasting women’s sport take an almost fictive approach to identity representation anchored in a few chosen life facts. In Female Masculinity Halberstam, after Butler, puts forward the idea that sex, sexuality and gender are all fluid and dynamic and cannot be contained and controlled by gendered polarities.   Halberstam (1998: 57-58) argues  that gender definitions not only change over time but with perspective, circumstance and geography. “[S]ome rural women may be considered masculine by urban standards, and their masculinity may simply have to do with the fact that they engage in more manual labor ... or live within a community with very different gender standards". On the other hand, she observes, the active cowgirl is an example of "the naturalness of female toughness" in a community where normative femininity is regarded as unnatural and unhealthy.  She adds to this the difficulty in holding masculinity in women apart from lesbianism. Following Jagose’s vocabulary (2009: 164) this project is underpinned by the capacity to think of “feminist theory and queer theory as braided together in ongoing relations”.  Pertinent here too are the counter arguments to postfeminism that caution against the ceding of perceived power before it is realised [Tasker and Negra (2007) and McRobbie (2004, 2007, with Garber 2007, 2009).

Methodology

 This project is an investigation of questions and themes highlighted by my theoretical and taxonomic literature review. I used the Reflexive Interpretation (RI) model (Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000) as my methodological foundation. This model is particularly powerful for work that seeks to identify and explore new avenues, potential, and plurality in situations where stakeholder narratives deny these things. Through a continuous dialogue between theory and data monitored in an open and self-reflexive way RI can tease out and reveal narratives that the investigator was not previously aware of, and seek alternative meanings outside the dominant narrative agendas.

Figure 3: RI as a balancing act (my interpretation from Alvesson and Skoldberg, 2000)

 Narratology is the theory of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles, events; cultural artifacts that ‘tell a story.’ (Bal: 3)

Data collection began with this project’s central text – the ‘live’ free-to-air Australian broadcast by Channel 7 of the championship match of the women’s draw of the Australian Open tennis tournament of 2007 held in Melbourne. The entire tournament broadcast was recorded to hard drive. Matches, interviews and promotional pieces involving women players were then transferred to DVD. Some print media reports concerning this match, the website content of the tournament and players’ websites provide secondary data. I analyse the identities of Serena Williams, the Australian Open champion and her opponent Maria Sharapova as drawn by broadcast and written mass media narratives.

I apply feminist and queer theory decodings to the presented identity narratives within the text with a particular interest in the gendered nature of representation, to see whether it is possible to extract from them less customary, more fluidic meanings. This follows Greg Philo’s conclusion in his paper on the work of the Glasgow University Media Group on discourse analysis and the media that “critical discourse analysis would be more powerful if it routinely included a developed account of alternatives” (2007: 186). Following Hollinger (1999: 23), I employ the double strategies of queering my perspective and working within the theoretical context of gender as performance. The outcome is expected to be helpful in the debate about women in sport, of which audience engagement via the quantity but not the content of broadcast is currently the main focus. Ideally, this project forms the framework for not only a rethinking of the approach to the mass mediation of women’s sport but suggests other avenues for the growth of women’s sport as an area strong in tradition that has separated itself from the male sporting traditions, and one that is available to women and girls both as pastime and profession. Here I diverge from Spender’s (1990: 164) view that there is “no way out” of “the principles that already exist…even if those principles are inadequate or false”.

Thesis Outline

 In Chapter 3 I have laid out the central arguments and theoretical approaches that underpin my argument. Chapter 4 seeks to situate this particular project within the arc of my own research.  I have elsewhere discussed the importance of the sustainability of chosen personae and resulting career longevity of women in the maintenance of a separate women’s tradition. With many yet in their infancy, these emergent traditions could undeniably be driven back underground by counter-resistant conservative forces, once more relegated to the “alternative” or non-mainstream and less pervasive performers. Chapter 5 sets out to discover what it is that my main text (the broadcast of the Australian Open 2007 Championship match, see Appendix 1: Transcript) yields in terms of the gender representation of the players. Approaching broadcast sport as a product that the players endorse, Chapter 6 addresses the stereotype of the female tennis player as imposed (and sometimes embraced) at an individual level. It considers changes to this stereotype that echo changes in wider culture awarenesses of newly understood relationships between bodies and genders and sexualities. In Chapter 7, I suggest how cultural change based on the renovation of identity representation may be facilitated viewing the re/presentation of the players’ community as a whole. Finally, Chapter 8 recommends ways forward in the re-narrativisation of sportswomen.  Appendices 1 and 2 consist of the transcript used to assist interrogation of the main text and Refracted Identity: Amelie Mauresmo and the Australian Press 1999-2006. The latter serves as counterpoint to the Chapter 7 section Gender, Sex and Sexuality Anxieties in the Contemporary Australian Context.

      Chapter 3: Literature Review

 Women in popular culture

 It has become a commonplace of writing on the situation of women (see for example, Doane, 1982) to argue that western cultures have a history of systemically containing the power of women. The role of popular culture in the systematic re-domestication of middleclass women after World War II is just one example of this. Taking up similar issues in relation to the central characters in popular movies, and the rarity of such characters being women,  Tasker (1993: 120) points out how difficult it has proved for women to challenge such a situation. Indeed, she argues that a pattern of challenge and submission by women attempting to change their narrative roles – attempting to not only become the object of attention but to gain some narrative power as well – is near to becoming a popular culture trope in which “feminism can be part of entertainment but cannot be seen to generate a meaningful politics”.  

This suggests that women redefining themselves, particularly with any degree of self-awareness and in a sustainable, consistent way, need to do so with care because of the obstacles placed in their way, and because of the likely punishment for those who fail. Hargreaves (1994: 254) and Hall (1996: 100) agree that “sportswomen generally have been resistant to taking an overtly political stance on women’s issues and on issues of discrimination”. The renovation of women’s tennis in the early 1970s is sometimes seen as a notable exception:

Billie Jean King and her group of eight other renegades were revolutionary by 1970s standards. A full two years ahead of the passage of Title IX in the United States, they envisioned a better future for women's tennis. In September 1970, the birth of women's professional tennis was launched when nine players signed $1 contracts with World Tennis publisher Gladys Heldman to compete in a new women's tour. The Original 9, as they were called, included Billie Jean King, Rosie Casals, Nancy Richey, Kerry Melville, Peaches Bartkowicz, Kristy Pigeon, Judy Dalton, Valerie Ziegenfuss and Julie Heldman. (WTA Tour)

Positioning the media

 Placing the role of the media in professional sport is crucial to my argument. The Routledge Handbook of Sports Sponsorship asserts that “the media are the audience amplifier. [T]he media do not construct the event, since in most cases they will ‘cover’ the event only if a sufficient number of ‘clients’ are interested” (Ferrand, Torrigiani and Camps, 2007: 6). Ellis Cashmore (2005) points out that this relationship between sponsors and the media is not new having begun in 1822 when it was realised that the inclusion of sports reports in Bell’s Life in London corresponded  with an increase in circulation (Ellis  Cashmore, 2005b: 323) while simultaneously, in “a clear symmetry of interests…priming further interest in sports”.  Bearing in mind that the World Federation of Advertisers forecast sponsorship investments of 49 billion USD for 2006 (up from 7.7 billion in 1990) (Ferrand, Torrigiani and Camps, 2007: 1), it is obvious that the sponsor is a powerful, traditional stakeholder in an event-driven system.

Elsewhere, it is obvious that the symbiotic relationship between the media and the other event stakeholders is breaking down. Are sports journalists covering these events doing any more than what David Martinson (qtd. in Little, 2006: 132) has called (referring to journalism in general) “the equivalent of an office stenographer for those in positions of power”? This is a matter of grave concern to the sports media community. Mick O’Regan, presenter of ABC Radio National’s Sports Factor, the longest running national, regular, critical and serious (i.e. not comedic) approach to sport in Australia, has observed (O'Regan, 2007) that promoters and sponsors “want to control everything from what photos may be snapped to what questions may be asked, and the scribblers are furious…The access journalists traditionally enjoy is starting to diminish…[even though]…the media plays a huge role in publicising and promoting sporting events”.

O’Regan goes on to categorise the media and event organisers as “adversaries”. English public relations consultant Andrew Moger who is co-ordinating a coalition of some 30 groups in protest of this trend, including the World Association of Newspapers, and the Newspaper Publishers Association, concurs that “we now have a situation where the relationship between sports journalists, the news aggregators and the sports world is under strain”. Claude Jeanrenaud and Stefan Késenne (2006) agree that what was symbiosis may have evolved into a mutually parasitic relationship:

 Sport and media are closely tied in with each other, with television rights being the main source of income for many sports and sport being a key factor in attracting television audiences.

Again according to the Handbook (Ferrand, Torrigiani and Camps, 2007: 14), “uncertainty of a sporting event is paramount” in engaging and maintaining the “interest and emotion” of the audience. A recent study of broadcaster and audience demand for football in England (Forrest, Simmons and Buraimo, 2006: 103) has suggested that broadcasters appear “to favour the characteristics traditionally emphasised in live attendance demand studies – high quality talent on show, significance of the match for League outcomes, ex ante uncertainty of match outcomes” but viewer data was less conclusive. This suggests to me that to powerful stakeholders it is the event, the contest, above all, that keeps an audience rather than, say, the transient presence, dominance or attractiveness of an individual player that may play a role in initially attracting audience awareness.

Thus the approaches of companies who sponsor individual players – and encourage celebrity journalism attention to them – when allied with uncritical sports journalism (see Rowe, 2007) to emphasise individuals or “stars” in the coverage of a sporting event may well be damaging to the attractiveness of the events as a whole to an audience. Certainly in a practical and temporal sense, this would be true as all players “age-out” of a competition that continues on without them. Reflexive of this, anecdotal evidence suggests that name recognition is higher for some long-retired elite players than for former world Number One Justine Henin.

This project reflects the tendency toward celebrity individuation in the mediation of women’s tennis to be damaging because of the application and imposition of rigid, dominant culture gender decodings on the subculturally encoded bodies of the players. Using alternate decodings leaves the ‘reader’ of the texts (performance, text and context) of sport with as little space for negotiating counter-hegemonic presentations as possible. The constriction of space in which to negotiate meaning is the foundation of the structural strength of the discourse. I see the vast cultural disjunct between reader and text as one of the causes of what Rowe (2004: 94) has categorised as the “not always impeccably ‘progressive’ outcomes” of “commodity logic and cultural politics interacting in new, intriguing ways”.

That core cultural values are gendered obviously has serious ramifications for women working in this field. This, to me, underscores the pervasiveness of the female as “other” and therefore lesser within sports culture. Rowe asserts that data indicates that sports journalism and academia are at odds, with the former pursuing a trajectory reaffirming sport as an insulated world “manifest as its own microcosm” whilst the latter “have constantly stressed that the social transcendence of sport is an illusion, and that sport is both a product of, and a key institution within, human societies at all levels” (Rowe, 2007: 391). This is an indication that there are at least two major, conflicting sports discourses re-presenting sporting identities out of their highly contextualised space.

This project identifies a third discourse and in doing so exposes the pluralistic nature of the gaze which, ironically, the hegemonic sports discourses suggest by their existence though deny by their intent. That is, whether by imposing or opposing dominant European Anglophone culture gender norms and heteronormativity in sports narratives both journalistic and scholarly approaches illustrate the possibility of a differently gendered alterity.  

Positioning the audience

 In her recent article that theorises masculinities in the context of mediated tennis, Kennedy (2007) searches for signs of masculinities in the mediation of male players at the Wimbledon Championships and finds that “it is necessary not simply to analyse the texts of media sport, but also to think about the positions from which these texts can be read” (24). One of these positions is, of course, the queer audience, an audience almost all sports stakeholders deny (Muller, 2007; Griffin, 1998: 140-141). Russell (2007), referring to Veri’s work (1999) on the heterosexual male gaze (commonly accepted as the dominant perspective of the watcher of sport) highlights the hegemonic centrality of this gaze to the acceptability of women’s sport:

[I]n sports traditionally reserved for women…the female athlete is still able to be objectified as a sexual object because she has not removed herself from what Veri calls ‘compulsory heterovisuality’. This supports the notion that when women do participate in activities which are more masculine…the gaze, which holds her as sex object and not athlete, is disrupted. (Russell, 2007: 117)

In this respect sport narratives lag behind other popular culture narratives. Clover in her work on gender in horror films Men, Women and Chain Saws (1992: 43, 159, 232), identifies the female self-avenging victim-hero as a way of presenting “the possibility of cross-gender identification” in that it presents a woman character with whom the woman viewer can identify without betraying their sex by “identifying with the male point of view”. Clover sees this as illustrative of  Butler’s ideas on the performativity of gender as the survivor’s sex does not change but she is effectively narratively regendered by circumstance – by what is done to her on one hand and on the other what she must do in response. This dynamism and fluidity of gender divorced from the sexed body and attached in a reactionary way to the narrative moment, makes the survivor capable of becoming the victim-hero and avenging herself.  In the films she analyses, Clover says, a “female victim-hero…squares off against, and finally blows away, without male help, a monstrous oppressor”.

A related trope has been noted across of a range of contemporary cinema genres, including high-profile features such as Alien, Silence of the Lambs, and Thelma and Louise. I do not mean to suggest for a moment that these representations of women were unproblematic, but that they certainly indicate the presence in popular culture of a shifting, more complex sense of what the relationship between the sexed body and narrative power might or could be. In films such as those mentioned, women began to overwrite traditionally masculine attributes with their biology, their femaleness, creating a series of protagonists who transgressed the boundaries of the normative feminine in both imagery and narrative.  

Tasker’s work on genre and gender in action cinema Spectacular Bodies (1993: 3) confronts the notion of action as a masculine narrative privilege.  She does so by introducing the term ‘musculinity’ as something like a new gender to address “the emergence of a muscular female heroine and the problems that these figures pose for binary conceptions of gendered identity”.  Tasker’s use – intentional or not – of the tautology “female heroine” is illustrative of the strength of the relationship between ‘muscular’ and ‘male’.

“Musculinity” indicates the extent to which a physical definition of masculinity in terms of a developed musculature is not limited to the male body in representation.

Along much the same train of thought, Hargreaves (2000: 150) explores the term “butch” in relation specifically to “lesbian sporting heroes” Martina Navratilova and Amelie Mauresmo. It seems probable that this term, appropriated from the terminology of the lesbian “community”, may prove a more helpful descriptor than “masculine”. This will be one avenue of pursuit following the suggestion (Johnson and Kivel, 2007: 104) that sport need be “queered” to “encourage us to act in ways that do more than create a ‘virtual equality’ by creating an equality that resonates in us through a celebration of our difference”.

 Twenty-first century audiences are accustomed to being positioned in narratives. Film encourages the audience to take queues from the reaction of the main protagonist, to share his or her world-view. Whatever the audience attachment to the main protagonist may be – admiration, for instance, or loathing – there must be an attachment for the audience to enter the space of the film and stay there. Creating this narrative attachment to and in sports broadcasts is the job of journalists and commentators respectively, one that in regard to women’s sports they sometimes seemingly will not or cannot fulfil. This attitude would seem to be counter-intuitive to the commercial imperative of television networks and other stakeholders.  

Gender Identity

 It bears insistent repetition that this thesis is theoretically underpinned by the ongoing feminist and queer theory gender performativity work of  Butler and Halberstam. My research embraces the definition of gender as put forward by feminist theory as a socio-cultural construct or, as Butler has it, a “fabrication” that supports the “fiction of heterosexual cohesion” (1990: 172). That is, my standpoint is that gender is something that is in the doing not in the being (Butler, 1993, 2004), that perceptions of gender identities are influenced by socio/economic and geographical perspectives and by the nature of one’s work (Halberstam, 1998), and that the identity narratives of young adults are more likely to have as their subjects moments of agentic power rather than those that promote a communion (Mansfield and McAdams, 1996). Jagose (2009: 160) has recently suggested that “thinking feminist and queer theory together can productively occasion a turn away from linear historical time with its implicit prioritization of the present and its reliance on heteronormative tropes of lineage, succession and generation” that points to the possibility of the construction of a new kind of tradition. I believe these theoretical threads, when interwoven, provide a framework within which to explore the gender identity mass media representations of a dynamic sporting community and of the young, strong, physically active, aggressive, ambitious women who are its members.

This project, moving on from stagnating concerns over Butler’s intent and anxieties about the premature pronouncements of the demise of queer and feminist theories, seeks to differentiate between performance and performativity whilst accepting that these two activities are not mutually exclusive. My position associates gender performativity with reiterations of the normative which are produced to be read “straight” with the audience specifically positioned and gender performance as a “sly”, counter-hegemonic presentation open to multiple meanings – a disguise in which some audience members are complicit. My theoretical progression attempting to move theoretical concerns on from Butler’s initial intent is a work in progress. In 1998 it was still possible for Halberstam to note in her study of transgressive femininities, Female Masculinity (1998: 268), that "[d]espite at least two decades of sustained feminist and queer attacks on the notion of natural gender, we still believe that masculinity in girls and women is abhorrent and pathological".  

Butler, Halberstam and McAdams’ theoretical bases seem to me not that far from Giddens’ structuration in which he suggests that “social structure is reproduced through repetition of acts by individual people (and therefore can change)” (qtd. in Gauntlett, 2002: 94). This suggests that not only individual identities but also communal identities are fluidic, an avenue which this project also pursues because of the difficulties that fluidity and pluralism present in the decoding of signs. Particularly of interest to this project is investigating what identity narratives are being told when they are mass mediated out of their very specific communal context into the wider community.  Giddens’ theories of self-construction and representation connect with the conventions of a sustained performance of a persona that inform my understanding and usage of Peterson also.  Stability of identity, Giddens posits (1991: 54), is to be found “in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going”, a narrative he sees as born of the discourse of Romantic love. Giddens continues:

The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others…cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self.

 My approach to understanding how decoding out of a subculture presents that subculture in (subordinate) relation to the normative and thus undermines subcultural capacity to impact the dominant controlling norms departs from most scholarly approaches. According to Johnson and Kivel (2007: 94, 103), “[m]ost of the research on sexual orientation in the leisure studies literature combines men and women together and does not consider the masculine/feminine binary and its perpetuation of heteronormativity”. It is by deconstructing these “natural” concepts of sex, gender and sexuality that queer theory, they argue, that can expose and disrupt the “legitimacy of heterogendered power” in sport.  

Gender, sexuality, sport

 It is of concern in the sense of balance and perspective, although not surprising, that so much scholarship on women in sport emanates from the United States. This reflects the impact of the Education Amendments Acts of 1972, commonly referred to as Title IX. Title IX states that:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance… (Mink, 1972)

 This legislation, reinforced by a test with specific reference to sports programmes in 1979, forced the powerful collegiate athletics system to include programmes of women’s sport. This perceived syphoning of money from men’s programmes created a hostile environment that proved catalytic to the rise of women’s participation in professional sports and sports journalism in the United States that has not occurred elsewhere. It also, uniquely (however reluctantly the keys were handed over), made the traditional structures and avenues for sporting success in the United States available to women in a way they are not elsewhere.

Sport history and culture studies concerning the relationship between women, sport and the media by feminist scholars Hargreaves (2000, 1994), Hall (1996) and Cahn (1994) contextualise, enhance and enrich the discursive analysis of the chosen texts. Common themes in the history of women’s sport are centred on the culturally perceived masculinity of sport and the culturally proscribed sole propriety by men of masculinity. In a biologist view masculinity and femininity are still often upheld as strictly embodied, mutually exclusive and oppositional concepts (Hargreaves, 1994: 146). Not much has changed since Mumford wrote in 1933 that “the sport hero represents the masculine virtues, the Mars complex” (qtd. in Cahn, 1994: 213) or since in the seminal text Ways of Seeing Berger wrote:  “Men act and women appear”.  Cahn goes on to posit that “journalists and sport promoters resolved the incongruity of a female Mars by positing an idealized image of the feminine athlete as beauty queen, mermaid or fashion model…Thus, the female athlete shed the characters of Mars and became Venus.” More recently, a masculine female – for example one displaying so-called “masculine traits” of aggression and competitiveness – is decoded as neither a woman nor a man. She is often, instead, read as doing lesbian and is thus completely disempowered and marginalised in cultures that structure themselves around an implicitly (but inaccurately) promoted stable core of heterosexuality and homophobia.

The on-going prevalence of homophobia in the wider Eurocentric cultures means that non-normative or culturally challenging relationships within this nexus cause real economic damage to the players and to the sporting community to which they belong. Players who have been “outed” or have presented openly as lesbian, for example, often lose the sponsorship of equipment and clothing companies. This avenue of income is by far the most lucrative for players and the most vulnerable to non-normative self-presentations.

…[B]y the early 1990s it had become well established that sport is homophobic. In women’s sport, this was manifest in the paradoxical conditions of both denying the lesbian presence in sport and placing pressure on women in sport to counteract lesbian stereotypes of women athletes through overt displays of femininity. (Theberge, 2005: 88)

Masculinity is only ever punished when women do it. Male-embodied masculinity as hegemonic force is resistant to cherry picking, a process that suggests by default that not everything about it is “good” and “right”, that it therefore may not be worthy of hierarchical dominance. Masculinity must be consumed as a whole to avoid anxiety; thus the difficulty of conceiving of a performance of masculinity that does not include the active sexual pursuit of women. So it follows that women who embrace the so-designated “masculine values” that sport teaches and supports, following hegemonic logic, must also be lesbian. Burroughs and Nauright (2000: 188) suggest anxiety runs particularly high when women engage in contact sports:

Many women who participate in these sports have had their sexuality questioned as the kinds of physicality embodied in contact sports are still viewed by many as an inappropriate use of the female body, and ultimately a threat to the gender order in society.

This is only an issue “because of the popular tendency to conflate gender nonconformity and sexual nonconformity” (Lenskyj, 1998: 20) and, more importantly in my view, the common acceptability of homophobia, that normatises a hostile reaction from its most mild to fatal forms. This reaction, or the fear of its impact on revenue, causes what media space is devoted to women’s sport to be taken up with apologetics for gender fluidity and denial of pluralistic sexualities. Cultural perceptions and proscriptions and the fortresses that protect them are built of words and maintained by the cultures’ power brokers (Butler, 1997; Wittig, 1992; Spender, 1990).

Further, if we accept that “the sex-gender system in the symbolic order” still “organises the structures of phallic oppression” then that which challenges the supporting system challenges the hegemonic structure it supports (Shaktini, 1990). In this light, women playing sport can be seen to be a threat to the prevailing order of the dominant culture. This may go a long way to explaining the cultural anxiety that sporting women raise, the lack of coverage of women’s sport by the media and the open hostility displayed in the media by some journalists and commentators towards women’s sport. In Strong Women, Deep Closets, Griffin exposes the raw crux of the situation thus:

Sport is more than games. As an institution, sport serves important social functions in supporting conventional social values. In particular, sport is a training ground where boys learn what it is to be men. Masculinity does not come naturally; it must be carefully taught…The importance of sport in socializing men into traditional gender roles also defines the sport experience for women. Because sport is identified with men and masculinity, women in sport become trespassers on male territory. (Griffin, 1998: 16; see also Michael A.  Messner and Sabo, 1990)

Sport, then, is, paradoxically, a hegemonic teaching tool despite the fact that its raison d’etre (to teach traditional masculinity) denies rigid biologistic gender structures, exposing the cultural control mechanism that encourages “the strong tendency to treat as natural everything that is customary” and by the implication that what is natural is unchangeable (Hargreaves, 1994: 146). That women and girls can be and are being taught to execute these values is a site of great cultural anxiety. This anxiety can be alleviated by degendering values, actions and traits or by excluding and punishing women for failing to read as heteronormative.  The latter has become the preferred practice. The inherent acceptance of the performance of homophobia in the wider culture sees “heterosexual women fear being labelled as lesbians and lesbian women…driven to ‘pass’ as straight for fear of victimization” (Hargreaves, 2000: 140).

In Coming on Strong (1994: 332), Cahn outlines the centrality of engaging with lesbian identity to theorising and historicising women’s sport.  Cahn found “poststructuralist concepts of fragmented, nonunified identities and multiple discourses helpful in understanding how women athletes often felt torn between personal and sub-cultural knowledges of sport as positive and the dominant cultural view of female athletes as sex/gender deviant”. Louise Allen (1997: 74-75) approaches lesbian masculinity as a faddishly successful consumer item of the 1990s. Her analysis of queer and mainstream press presentations of champion tennis player and lesbian Martina Navratilova reveal similar imageries. Navratilova’s body is variously “a machine-like powerful force reminiscent of androids or cyborgs”, “a fighting machine”, “incredibly strong but also monstrous and machine-like” and “hard”.  She signifies a “a particularly embodied masculinity” and “lesbianism as a threat to the heterosexual order through the redeployment of masculinity in a lesbian context”.

In women’s tennis the hyper femininity invested in the process of modelling for lucrative sportswear company endorsements exists alongside the masculine-identified aspects of a sporting career.

Modern sportswear…is manufactured specifically to promote a sexy image. This is one way in which sports have become inextricably linked to the commercialization of the female body and the commercialization of sexuality. Fashion seems to be increasingly taking its energy from sports, and sportswear and leisure-wear are not just practical, but sexy and modish. Sportswear makes statements about femaleness and enhances sexuality; it both reveals the body and conceals the body, promoting an awareness of the relationship between being dressed and being undressed. (Hargreaves, 1994: 159)

The hyper-feminised modelling persona of some players serves to mitigate the ‘masculinity’ of their core pursuit that is carried out by a contrasting muscular, active, aggressive persona. Serbian teenager Anna Ivanovic, interviewed by leering, middle-aged Australian Neil Kearney during the Australian Open, 2007, articulated discomfort with the role of model, contrasting this discomfort with her feeling of belonging on the tennis court illustrating an awareness of and unease at being a site of cultural dissonance.

 One of the determinants of the sportswoman’s modelling persona’s marketability is a trait referred to but rarely unpacked in scholarly works as ‘attractiveness’. Most often this descriptor is defined only by what it is not. In representations of a female sexed-body community – even from within the sporting community – it is held as oppositional to masculinity, aggression, toughness. Halberstam (1998: 57-58) argues that it is culturally common to read women’s gender as signified by the work that they do and the visible impact that work has on the ‘defeminising’ of their appearance.

Cohesion and credibility

 In conclusion of this section, I re-emphasise the two main logic streams of my approach. The first addresses the approach of the media coverage (match broadcasts and other selected media) of women’s matches in the 2007 Australian Open tournament. There has been a solid body of work developed regarding the differing vocabularies used in the mass-mediation of men and women’s sports. Using the context of women’s professional tennis considered through the lens Butler’s assertion (2004: 41) that gender is fluidic and doable, not a pair of hierarchically oppositional categories (masculine and feminine) tied to categorically sexed bodies, I test the Foucaultian theory that regulation not only changes an existing subject but also produces new subjects by the power of its operation.  Simultaneously, I will investigate whether or not the efforts in the past decade to modify and control the vocabulary used by sports journalists and broadcasters covering women’s tennis have created a space in which new identities outside the gender norms can exist, and whether or not the ways that professional women tennis players are represented “doing” gender has changed.

The second logic stream – which pursues the idea of communal cohesion in a contextual, almost taxonomic way – expands my investigation into the role of tradition in a female based culture (Wical, 2005, 2006b, a, 2009). I continue the argument that though women’s tradition seemingly cannot help but mimic the patriarchal model it must at some point depart from that schema. In the broadest possible sense my question was – and still is – how do women utilize narratives that define women? Spencer (1997: 365) contends it was “in the early 1970s [that] professional women’s tennis emerged as a distinctive subculture”. Indeed, one of the anomalous aspects of this subculture’s structure is that the most prominent of touchstones from this foundational era is champion Billie Jean King, a lesbian. Thus women’s professional tennis subculture has a “retrospective index” of “authenticity” (Brackett, 2000: 85) whose identity its presentation to the wider culture largely denies.

The lesbian body stands as a revolutionary signifier (See Shaktini, 1990 after Elaine Marks in 'Lesbian Intertexualities' and Monique Wittig, 'The Lesbian Body') that dislocates andocentric power systems. The lesbian body breaks the “heterosexual contract” (Wittig, 1992: 110) and metaphorically inhabits a no-man’s-land but one that is so because, it has been said (Wachs, 2006: 50), it is “the political minefield of a gendered language that already presumes female subordination”. Cahn’s assertion (1994: 332) that historically “[w]omen athletes drew on the cultural resources they found within sport and female athletic networks to search for and find a sense of authenticity and coherence” strongly suggests that an awareness of and anxiety about perceptions of their transgressive gender identities as it resonates in the wider culture is a strong element in the tradition of women athletes.

These two streams inform one another reflecting what Spencer (1997: 365) called the “dynamic interplay” between the fluid codifications of a subculture and the parent culture’s responses. My findings point toward a tradition ignored in favour of the individual and the contemporary. Popular culture is dynamically dependent on a symbiotic relationship between tradition and innovation. Sustainability of personae depends on intertwining narratives of the self into this relationship creating both a cultural continuum and individual credibility. Bissell (2006: 178-179) notes that press coverage of Steffi Graf concentrated almost entirely on her on-court performances because her “persona was her game and nothing else” and that in this respect she was “an exception to the rule”. The necessity to sustain two notionally contradictory – rather than complementary – personae whilst placating anxieties about dominant culture normativities sets up an internal cognitive dissonance. This dissonance cannot help but be read as (personal and communal) instability and is likely to be represented into the wider culture as reflexive of the subordinating, normatising instability of the feminine.

Another set of texts that lead me along my journey of understanding is the analysis of the 1990s Nike women’s brand campaign by Grow (Grow, 2006, 2008; Grow and Wolburg, 2006). This work suggests the possibility of successfully communicating a positive representation of professional sportswomen into the wider culture without hyper-feminisation. It also allows for a discussion of professional sport as a popular culture – that is as a business – amplifying its message by broadcast. Thirdly, Grow’s work suggests the importance of acknowledging the economic power of a female readership and the possibilities of constructing a community around the relationship between product and consumer.

What I am analysing is the difference between meanings. I argue that there is no “real” “truth” to uncover. Rather there are credible narratives. Therefore, interviews with participants sportswomen and journalists, though perhaps informative of the mechanics of the sporting and journalism communities privilege this notion of a truth that I argue against. In their "preliminary investigations" into female subcultures in 1993, McRobbie and Garber found that "girl culture" was "so well insulated as to operate to effectively exclude not only other undesirable girls – but also boys, adults, teachers and researchers" (McRobbie and Garber, 2007: 202). Further, because what is interesting to me is what is denied (sexualities), controlled (femininities) and erased (masculinities), it would be naïve to expect any sudden professions, releases or exposures from any of the major stakeholders. To suggest that invested parties could “show me up” or “prove” my approach “wrong” implies that disconnection can be measured when, surely, it can only be detected (or not) and described and that intent is privileged over affect, which is not the case here.

Broad (2001), writing in the Sociology of Sport Journal, outlines the damaging, persistent, yet logically flawed view of women in sport. Based on the culturally constructed premises that sport is masculine and that therefore women in sports are masculinised (queerly gendered) by doing it, this common argument concludes that women in sports are lesbians. This article helped me form some framing questions for my analysis. These interrogations for the backgrounding of my to major research questions:

Is women’s tennis (i.e. the game) presented as gendered by sports journalists and other communications specialists?

 If gendered masculine, is this mitigated by countering hyper-feminine apologias?

 If gendered feminine are the narrative structures of war and heroism used?

 Are women tennis players ever overtly presented as performing masculinity? If so, is this mitigated by countering hyper-feminine apologias?

 If the game and the player are differently gendered in the discourse is there a perceivable dissonance?

 How do celebrity discourses culturally (re)position the player?

           Chapter 4: Findings: Stereotype and the Authentic

 While preceding chapters position my own scholarship in relation to that of others, this chapter situates this particular project within the arc of my own research.  I have elsewhere (Wical, 2005, 2006b, a) discussed the importance of the sustainability of chosen personae and resulting career longevity of women in the maintenance of a separate women’s tradition. I have argued that in American country music this could well depend on those whose careers began in the 1990s: that if they can contribute in numbers in an active and meaningful way, through subsequent “generations”, the tradition will remain active and meaningful. Tradition is used here not in the classical sense as a repository for the unchanging but in the more fluid, discursively active sense of a past “continually reinterpreted to fit the changing needs of the present” (Peterson and Anand, 2004: 326). This thesis moves that research forward in the direction of the consideration of the mass media’s role as a “mechanism of counter-resistance” (Kane and Lenskyj, 1998: 187) in the representation of the genders of female sports figures concentrating specifically on elite professional tennis players. Nonetheless, the background theory employed in those analyses forms the theoretical approach. Due to the centrality of “the authentic” in hegemonic sporting discourses (Smart, 2005: 194) I begin with the work on the role of authenticity in country music – a popular culture that shares some cultural hegemonic features with sports.

The Performer and the Authentic

 The expectation, even requirement, that country musicians should simultaneously perform within and add to their genre is no different to that which obtains in any genre of popular culture. As Peterson (1997: 220) points out in his groundbreaking work Creating Country Music: Fabricating the Authentic:

In popular culture, where experts and authorities do not control the particulars of the word's [authenticity's] meaning, the definition centers on being believable relative to a more or less explicit model, and at the same time being original, that is not being an imitation of the model.

Peterson’s work is central to the positioning of my argument.  With this statement, by placing country music as a popular culture, he breaks with the tradition of accepting country music as a folk tradition that is “real” as opposed to manufactured. Peterson deconstructs an industry that has held fast to a structure that has maintained its power by insisting on its specific exclusivity and by responding (with some anxiety) to the contemporary influences of fluidity and pluralism.

Significantly, Peterson approaches country music as an industry, denying its traditional and “natural” folkloric status, in order to focus upon its industrial characteristics. Among these is the industrial production of authenticity.  To be believable and original a performer must be proficient in the traditional signifiers of the genre so that on the one hand they are accepted and on the other hand their differences stand out in relief.  Peterson argues that, in the end, the authentic is defined by the consumer.  As a consequence, there has to be a way of redefining and continually updating the construction of authenticity; indeed, Petersen identifies authenticity as a fluid and dynamic concept central to the success of a performer.  Latter day performers in particular, Peterson (1997: 225) points out, benefit from signifiers made available by decades of “codification of country music heritage,” affirming country music tradition’s “authenticity by showing that they know and respect the tradition and want to carry it on”. Although the “[m]usic and [the] performance are vital to the audience”, he adds (Peterson, 1997: 218-219), “signifiers are also vital. The boots, the hat, the outfit, a soft, rural, Southern accent, as well as the sound and the subjects of the songs all help…[B]eing able to show a family heritage in country music is perhaps the strongest asset amongst authenticity claims”.  It is also significant to my continuing scholarship how implicitly, normatisingly gendered and andocentric these authenticating criteria are, reflecting as they do an unquestioned link between gender signifiers and the sexed body.

Adapting and Applying Petersen’s Authentic – Problems and Possibilities

 Of course, one cannot simply apply either the codification or the scholarship of one [popular] culture straight onto another. Country music and sport do, however, share enough cultural commonalities (McLeod, 2006) to make application of Petersen’s work to professional tennis a fruitful exercise from which meaning can be made. The most important differentiating and contextualising aspect to bear in mind is that women’s professional tennis is, even in popular culture terms, an extremely young subculture, still struggling to establish a tradition for itself separate from the men’s tour. Celebrating only the 35th anniversary of its “revolutionary beginnings behind locked doors at a London hotel in the 1970s” ("Tour Celebrates 35th Anniversary in New York," 2008) in the latter stages of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the women’s tour is at least two generations behind other popular cultures in terms of identity stability. (As this thesis concerns itself with community as well as individual identity and posits the potential benefits of adopting the popular culture formula of a mixture of tradition and progress to both individual and communal identities, I will accept this particular established origin mythology.) This temporal shortfall means that the familial authentication that holds in the country music community, for example, has little place in women’s tennis narratives although siblings are not uncommon. An example of this cultural immaturity is that prior to 2008 the WTA website featured only the details and statistics ofcurrent players, effectively making their own history invisible. Cultural immaturity and discontinuity may also go part way to explaining the lack of identity cohesion in women’s tennis narratives, the arising anxiety signified ("2008: Highlights of the Season in Review... Part 1," 2008) by the implementation of a USD15 million three-year “Superhero” advertising campaign involving thirty WTA players.  The stated aim ("Tour Launches Largest Ad Campaign in Its History," 2008) of the first phase of the campaign “is to both elevate the star power of the Tour's athletes and to drive awareness of the Tour's end-of-season Sony Ericsson Championships, in Doha, Qatar”. This focus on the individual or “star” rather than on communion has been identified by Mansfield and McAdams (1996) as a characteristic (or symptom) of youth. Although their work centres on the increasingly generative actions of individuals as they age, I adapt it here to consider the actions of a youthful culture and, certainly, a culture that is largely comprised of young women. The problem remains that as athletes they are inauthentic women and as women they are inauthentic athletes. In 1994 one feminist sports scholar (Cahn, 1994: 213) framed one common resolution to this dilemma: “Journalists and sport promoters resolved the incongruity of a female Mars by positing an idealized image of the feminine athlete as beauty queen, mermaid or fashion model…Thus, the female athlete shed the characters of Mars and became Venus.” This invocation of highly gendered gods of Roman mythology illustrates how gendered cultural boundaries are portrayed as ancient and categorical.  

 Connections to the Authentic

 If the authentic player is masculine (indicating male-ness) and masculinity is erased from women’s Tour discourses, this points to there being no authenticating narrative pathways for female players as athletes. They are, however, able to access discursive apparatus authenticating them as women – modelling clothes, for example – but this discourse also erases their athleticism and muscularity. This dichotomisation of authentic woman and authentic athlete impacts dramatically on their presentation by mass media. As I show elsewhere, the players’ connections to men are amplified particularly in game broadcasts so that they become, as it were, authentic by association. The presence of fathers and coaches (sometimes they are the same person), boyfriends and husbands is referred to repetitively both visually and in commentary. Thus, on court, players are at least part-way authenticated as women by the presence of the controlling male gaze and as players by the defining space they occupy. But these gazes and spaces also control and constrict the players’ power and, most importantly, diminish it.

Tennis is a gladiatorial sport. Two opponents face each other across a net, exchanging strategic and tactical blows until a winner emerges. There are no ties or draws in tennis as there are in other sports. Tennis also differs from many sports in that (until the WTA changed the rules in 2008) coaches were prohibited from coaching during matches. This enforced individuation encourages a reading of players as self-powered loners, physically and mentally agile and resilient. Long-time champion Martina Navratilova (Navratilova and Carillo, 1984: 34) is one of many who emphasises the necessity to train for the physical and mental aspects of the game because “at the highest level of the game the outcome is often decided by willpower and endurance”. A study of women in outdoor education careers (Allin, 2000: 65) suggests the women saw their physical qualities as “a source of agency in negotiating a male environment” rather than an indicator of masculinity but that they were aware “they were not typical women”. Within their own culture, then, muscularity (or physicality) was seen as a tool. Measured against the wider culture “typical woman” they recognised it could be read as a gender signifier. Further underlying what I see as the difference between this subculture and the wider culture accommodation of female muscularity, Allin found that “while they generally accepted and accommodated to male structures they also used their relationships with their physical selves to challenge the traditional expectations of women’s capabilities”.  

This surface tension between the authentic subculture and wider culture readings and meanings of physicality (that is the tension between the tool and the gender signifier) in elite women’s sport is amplified by mass mediation and raises stakeholder anxieties over sexualities and image.  One way to release this tension would be to eradicate homophobia. Another would be to declare all female athletes – no matter their actual sexual orientation – as lesbian. Realistically, though, it may be more practical to attempt to relax the wider culture stereotype into a shape closer to its subcultural meaning, thus freeing the representation of female athletes from constraints which can only serve to make broadcast commentary dull. That is, can the implications of the muscular woman stereotype be adapted or evolved into a more useful and accurate picture of the increasingly common high-profile female athlete separate from her preferred gender performativity and sexuality. Can a stereotype be built that embraces new meaning?

The Player and Stereotype

 What accounts for the staying power of a stereotype that is so extreme it should be laughable except that so many people believe it to be accurate?  (Griffin, 1992: 252)

 After Amossy (1984: 693), I regard a stereotype as a “harmony of fixed traits reunited in a stable pattern” and anything disturbing to this harmony as “remnants” which the reader of the text (“reader” and “text” applied here by me in their broadest sense) either ignores or “confers on them the stature of details destined to particularize, to individualize a familiar figure”. That is, reflecting the popular culture imperative articulated by the Peterson quote earlier in this chapter, to be “believable relative to a more or less explicit model, and at the same time being original, that is not being an imitation of the model”. My work returns again and again to themes of the knowing construction and acceptance, of codified engagement between audience and performer, to which the personae presented is central. Imageries based on a stereotype or accredited models are complicit in “authentication” claims made via problematic “truths” and “realities” in the construction of these personae. In this they continue the tradition of re/presentation that holds within its meaning anxieties about integrating identity into a postmodern world made more aware of encodings and structures. This approach runs counter to the common perception and even the approach of some media/sport scholars (see Davis and Harris, 1998: 157) which suggest that a stereotype is simply negative and/or misleading.

In a sense, the audience members determine for themselves the relationship between the player and the stereotype. However, the data and signifiers used in this evaluation are supplied by a third party – the mass media – and their representation is influenced in turn by stakeholders (for example associations and sponsors) in the players and the broadcast events. This work takes as one of its foundations Fiske and Hartley’s (1978: 144-145) assertion that “television does not merely bring raw sport into our home, it uses sport as a code to converse with us about aspects of our individual/cultural values”. Further, from their study of the English television programme Match of the Day, I adapt their assertion that television sport differs from sport itself, for instance labelling “as ‘unsportsmanlike’ the more physical manifestations of competitive conflict”. This is just one way, they argue, “for televised sport to propose a preferred meaning for its subject”. That is, I argue, a meaning that coincides with the values of the dominant culture rather than that of the sporting subculture it is re-presenting.

Fiske and Hartley (1978: 146) characterise the relationship of viewer  to player conflict as an evaluative and judgmental one (see Figure 4). The viewer – a “by proxy” participant – is guided in this by both the commentary and the choice of visual representation. Fiske and Hartley represent this relationship diagrammatically thus:

Figure 4 Fiske and    Hartley position players in conflict with audience as judge

 In this model, the player versus player conflict is controlled by a set of rules (in the case of the WTA, set out in a book that is over 400 pages long) within which the narrative of the game unfolds, leading to an outcome. This categorical win/loss outcome is especially pertinent in tennis where there are no draws or ties.  This is clearly a different cultural system from that of most television viewers. “Everyday” conflicts are rarely governed by any written rule nor is the outcome certain to be as clear as a win or a loss. The viewer of a tennis match, then, is “knowing” in a way that they cannot be in situations in which they are directly involved. Broadcaster Bruce McAvaney frames it this way in his introduction to the 2007 Australian Open Women’s Final: “One has to give today. Who will it be?”

The Stereotype/Authentic Connection

 This argument can never stray far from the social and economic tensions between the need to be believable as an elite athlete, that is to be seen to be connected to what is traditionally accepted as an elite athlete, and the need to be an original (though not too original). If the stereotypical elite athlete is a hyper-masculine man and the “authentic” can be seen as a stereotype the audience is prepared to live with, to accept then the female body becomes an insurmountable obstacle in the search for sporting authenticity. Because to re-embody sporting masculinity is more than just adding a few individualising remnants, it is re-subscribing the base model. Elsewhere (Wical, 2006b) I have argued that it is possible in a popular culture to move away from a dominating and proscribing male authentic and create a new tradition with new signifiers and emergent accredited models. In elite professional tennis this authenticating work is more difficult due to the youth of both the subculture and of its members and the very limited mass-audience exposure they receive, particularly in Australia.

Elite broadcast sport is subject to the double codings of sports and sports journalism discourses. For the most part sports journalism narratives serve simply to amplify sports narratives. It is thus that these broadcast narratives authenticate themselves by a referential and reverential approach to their subject. This is often done by including at least one former player on the commentary team. Often having a biased and highly sentimentalised attachment to the game as they knew it, these former players provide a direct channel for audience attachment to the current players but their presence also authenticates the broadcast narrative. As investigations of my case study show, this “knowing” presence can disrupt the trajectory of a broadcast and cast doubt on the credibility, superiority, and thus the authenticity of this “knowing”.

In the terms of Fiske’s diagram the player-turned-commentator moves out of the field of conflict and into the field of evaluation, their role changing from a competitive to a judgemental one. Their allegiances turn from the playing community to the broadcaster not only depriving the community of players of its elders but placing those elders in the position of an opposing stakeholder or at least a stakeholder with a differing agenda. The authenticating power of a former player on the women’s circuit, however, must be brought into question because of the slippery nature of the authentic female player. The weakness of their position is reflected in Channel 7’s broadcasts of Australian Open women’s championship games where Tracy Austin is relieved halfway through matches (usually to honour other commentary commitments) – latterly by younger, Australian, retired WTA players. This creates a discontinuity in the commentary and highlights the scarcity of women commentators. The co-commentator is an Australian male sports journalist. His questions and comments guide the narrative trajectory of the commentary with uneven success.

The Narrative Power of Authenticity and Stereotype

 The closely entwined subcultures or subgenres of sport and sports journalism have a long tradition of their own as a twinned pair: Cashmore (2005a: 323) found that newspapers have been using sport to sell papers while simultaneously “priming interest in sports” since 1822 when London’s Bell’s Life first did it. By the end of the 1880s the language of sports reporting in Melbourne was so highly masculinised it made women’s or girl’s competition results difficult to unravel  as there was “no hint of athletic glory and sporting honour” due to “gestures of modesty and propriety in keeping with the expectations of women in the best of society” (Crawford, 1987: 191). Blashak (2005) chronicles the conscious masculinisation (or defeminisation) of tennis in Australia in the early twentieth century so that it might be seen as a legitimate spectator sport.                                                                

Since the beginning of this symbiotic relationship between sport and journalism they have functioned as supporting narratives of the dominant society’s patriarchal hegemony. According to Storey (2003: 104) Barthes understood activities such as these as myth-building, the cohesive narrative assemblage of “a body of ideas and practices which defend and actively promote the values and interests of dominant groups in society”. That is, these narratives have combined to erase “athletic glory and sporting honour” – arguably the core tenets of men’s sporting narratives – from women’s sport discourse thus eliminating any hint of the counter-hegemonic. The deeply systemic tension between women’s sport and sports journalism is thus apparent. Sports narratives are masculine narratives. They support patriarchal structures in the wider culture by underlining the “natural” connection between power, play, risk and gain and maleness. In a society that still privileges maleness over femaleness in a controlled hierarchical, categorical way, allowing women access to these narratives is a threatening proposition. Hall (1996: 26) outlined the situation thus in her work Feminism and Sporting Bodies:

Privileged groups in society are able – seemingly by consent – to establish their own cultural practices as the most valued and legitimate, whereas subordinate groups ... must struggle and fight against having their alternative practices and activities incorporated into the dominant sporting culture. Important to hegemony are resistance and struggle; it is an ongoing process because alternative cultural forms and practices always pose a threat to dominant ones.

Celebrity and Authenticity

 Authenticity…takes work, just as it did in earlier eras, but the job has changed because the times have changed, and so too have the signifiers of authenticity. (Peterson, 1997: 223)

It is vital to this thesis to bear in mind that the main text under examination here is a commercial, popular culture narrative presented to the viewer by the broadcast provider (in this case 7Sport). That provider’s job is to engender an interest in the outcome that will keep the viewer watching, thus ensuring value for investment from advertisers and sponsors. That is, the viewer must be kept watching because viewer numbers generate advertising income which determines the bidding capacity of a television network to gain the rights to broadcast a sporting event. Money from television networks in the 2006/2007 financial year constituted 21% of Tennis Australia’s income (total revenue $96,229,348) behind ticket sales (38%) and sponsorship (26%) (Tennis Australia, 2007: 92, 98). Further, Tennis Australia’s “revenue increased by $12.1m due to growth in broadcast rights, additional sponsorship funds and record public and corporate ticket sales for the Australian Open”.  Additionally, each player has her own economic agenda where winning and public recognition are stepping stones to the very real cash cow of sporting goods and apparel sponsorship. Whilst Sharapova, for instance, won $9m in prize money in her first four years on the tour by the third year she was bringing in some $20m per annum in sponsorship money.

People whose job is to perform within a popular culture are adept at the strategic deployment of the celebrity meta-narrative into a chosen identity: actors take on characters; sporting competitors have their “game face”; singers place a version of themselves within their song’s narrative and so on. Many have a team of agents, managers and other advisors to assist in maintaining the appropriateness of these constructions within the arc of the performer’s career. A considered and considerable component of this deployment involves the negotiation of femininities and masculinities and how the performer’s body both enacts and interacts with these. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the conflation and confusion of signifiers of genders, sexed bodies and sexualities in women’s sport and the resultant release of an almost unchallenged and certainly unpunished heterosexist response makes the stereotype of female athletes as masculine a threat to their popularity and, thus, their income. Giardina (Giardina, 2001: 202, 212) credits former tennis champion Martina Hingis’ successful pursuit of “the most lucrative narrative”, for instance, on her ability to be a “flexibly global celebrity capable of adapting her identity to meet the ever-changing climate of global capitalism”. He also stresses that this adaptable identity is based on the foundations of, initially, her ability to play tennis at the highest order which is enhanced by “her flexible citizenship and heteronormative exterior”. As one Australian journalist (Swanton, 2009) put it more bluntly, “Nearly unfathomable riches are on offer for the greatest female player on the planet if her victories come with a bit of va-va-voom.”

 Amplification of Uncertainty

 Three competing, uneven and frequently discontinuous discourses currently define and control women’s bodies: i) heteronormative ideals of femininity; ii) private life as a point of commodification for the sport; and iii) the strong female body as a challenge to conventions of womanhood. (Miller, McKay and Martin, 1999: 212)

 Emphasis for the representation of female athletes is still mostly focussed on the aesthetic of their femaleness rather than their athleticism. “The face of an angel and the heart of a lion” is how Bruce McAvaney, 7Sport’s senior commentator, described the highly commodified Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice in the 2008 Olympic broadcast. This goes to anxieties surrounding access to sporting authenticity for women and the need to conform to the dominant patriarchal aesthetic; the need to heteronormatise as you advertise. The “authentic” could perhaps be seen as a stereotype stakeholders wager the audience is prepared to live with, to accept.

One example of such a wager is the Women’s Tennis Association’s (WTA’s) “Superhero” promotional campaign concept that suggests a misunderstanding on the part of the WTA about how best to present their players. WTA CEO Larry Scott has said that the “campaign in many ways crystallizes how far we have come as a sport over the past five years, and everything we mean when we speak about the star power of our athletes and the excitement of women's professional tennis”. We can, therefore, with all its shortfalls and faults, read this campaign as a snapshot of the WTA’s current explicit player model and analyse it as such. The 60-second video component of the campaign (freely available online on YouTube and at the WTA website) includes scenes of elite players across the world sightseeing and shopping, enjoying the cafe lifestyle and donating to worthy charities – enjoying a highly privileged lifestyle – under the title “Looking For a Hero?”. Each of their phones ring and they are galvanised into action. Following the familiar superhero motif, their clothes change from high-fashion casual to high-fashion tennis attire as they run. A montage of on-court footage is then followed by a representation of the court at Doha where the 2008 end-of-year championships were held. Narrated by a man with an English accent this representation of players includes a wide range of body types, ethnic backgrounds and popularly perceived personae although they are all similarly presented, spatially situated and groomed. There is no question that presenting young women as heroes is an advance in destabilising a highly gendered field of representation. However, not unlike Charlie’s Angels, these women await a call to be ordered into action or for permission to act. Indeed, commercial director Matthieu Mantovani (qtd. in "Tour Launches Largest Ad Campaign in Its History," 2008), highlighting this appropriation of the (mostly masculine) action genre cultural presence, has said that “stylistically, elements of Charlie's Angels, Ocean's 11 and Mission Impossible are reflected in this campaign". It bears remarking that these three films are all male-dominated narratives: three women guided by a disembodied, unknowable male as mediated by another male; an ensemble “buddy” caper and the Tom Cruise saviour trope.

 Any advance in gender representations offered by the video presentations is completely undercut by the print campaign. Highly stylised to the point of not being recognisable, players’ musculature has been erased and their bodies elongated to conform to the “accredited model”. This concept of the “accredited model” (Amossy, 1984: 689) is explored in more depth later in the following section when Amossy’s articulations on stereotype are investigated. In this case I use it to refer to Maria Sharapova. Tall, slim, blonde and blue-eyed Sharapova’s representations do nothing to challenge a long-idealised white European aesthetic. Sharapova is rarely pictured with her musculature on display – in contrast to Serena Williams, say, of whom pictures with a pumping fist and prominent arm muscles are common. Despite the common sight of Williams’ cut physique the poster in the “Superhero” print campaign features Williams with a body more like that of her sister Venus. In the peripheries the stocky body of Svetlana Kuznetsova has also been streamlined and the large, hard body and even the face of Dinara Safina have been softened and distorted. This poster seems to deny and diminish individuality and identity on many levels whilst purporting to enhance it.

The Model/Player

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the problems with building a sporting tradition has been the ascendency of the individuated celebrity (Smart, 2005: 196). The money Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova – the protagonists of my core text – make through sponsorship far outstrips what they earn from taking part in tournaments, for instance. Smart (2005: 195) holds that sports stars maintain their authenticity through “the quality of their playing performances, from their records of success in competition”. Smart goes on to suggest that this authenticity contributes to the “charisma” of the sports star. This dependency on the necessity to perform (to win), makes this charisma “unstable, fragile and vulnerable”. To be a bankable brand representative, stability of charisma, then, is necessary to maintain a prominent public presence as an object of desire. It follows, then, that, following Smart’s model, diminution of the game leads to diminution of authenticity which in turn diminishes an individual’s charisma thus diminishing their value as an object of desire.  Those with an eye to patriarchal conspiracies might point out then that to diminish the women’s game leaves more sponsorship money for male tennis players.

A Problem Like Maria

 When asked who she wanted to win the 2007 Australian Open women’s final, a young woman articulates her attachment to Maria Sharapova: “She’s so beautiful. I love her!” Liz Smylie, Tournament Director of the Australian Women’s Hardcourts for many years until its demise in 2008 and the winner of the tournament in 1981, explains the impact of Sharapova’s presence at the 2006 Mondial Australian Women’s Hardcourts:

Having Maria on the courts this year is a coup from a number of perspectives. Her presence goes a long way in maintaining the tournament’s credibility among the players themselves. Maria is also a true celebrity. This is important to us because her profile will bring the Hardcourts to the attention of both tennis fans and to the general public. After all, if the crowds are there to enjoy both the quality of tennis and the gorgeous players, who am I to complain? (Smylie 2006 Queensland Events Interview)

In her paper Cruel Optimism, Berlant (2006) says “When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and to make possible for us.” Thinking about desire in this way, she suggests, allows us to “encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things the object promises” (Berlant’s italics). For tournament director Smylie, Sharapova is fan bait. That is, Sharapova carries, for Smylie, a very real and tangible cluster of promises – the attraction of more media attention, more top-line players and more spectators – that point to an economically successful tournament. To the fan quoted above, for example, Sharapova signifies a cluster of things. The fan’s proximity to and investment in this cluster of things manifests itself as an emotional attachment to the cluster’s signifier, to the object of her desire embodied and signified by Sharapova. She is “in love”, if you will, with the idea of being proximate to what Sharapova might make possible.

Sharapova’s status as the sanctioned, accredited model is made obvious by the frequency with which her image is used on the WTA website and (as Smylie articulated) in tournament promotion.

Maria Sharapova has always been more than a tennis player. Walking around Melbourne Park, it's hard to miss all the advertisements that feature her name and image. She is the face of women's tennis. The fact she is also the world No.1, a two-time Grand Slam champion at 19, sometimes seems secondary to the Maria-brand that has grown into one of sport's biggest. It's not hard to see why. Tall, slim, blonde, she is the poster girl for a generation. Many of them are not even tennis fans. (O'Brien, 2007)

 Underlining Sharapova’s position is the existence of a group of tall, blonde, smoothly muscled players who have emerged in her wake. Fellow “glamazon” (Michie, 2008) Serbian Ana Ivanovic is  also used in a similar way as Sharapova (that is, used promotionally more for her aesthetic appeal and heteronormative exterior), although I would also argue that she is used as a counterpoint to Sharapova. Ivanovic is dark-haired, more compact, Adidas sponsored and with a tendency to smile persistently – not unlike Hingis with a ‘warmer’ public persona  (Holzmann, 2008).  From a part of the world that the West perceives as “characterized by violence, savagery, primitiveness, bloodshed, uncontrolled passion and even terrorism” (Volcic, 2005: 159-160), Ivanovic provides an alternate object of desire; a counterpoint to Nike-backed Sharapova’s transplanted, controlled ice princess.

 Perhaps the ultimate affirmation of Sharapova’s position, and one that perhaps retrospectively sheds a light on the central conflict in the main text under examination in this thesis (Williams v Sharapova, Australian Open Championship 2007) is this report (Kaplan, 2009) on their sponsorship deals:

Serena Williams, whose contract with Nike expired last month [December 2008], is still talking with the company. Nike has plowed substantial resources in tennis into Maria Sharapova, so where Williams fits into the mix is unclear.

  This lack of clarity seems to dog many aspects of Williams’ career, including her representation. Where Ivanovic arguably benefits from Sharapova’s successes by being cast as her alternative, Williams does not. As Sharapova’s opposite or, at least, antagonist, Williams is cast as the enemy of the promises Sharapova carries with her. Repeatedly cast as the villain at the 2007 Australian Open ("Foul Called on Serena's Crew," 2007; McDonald, 2007a, b; Walsh, 2007), it was also implied from her arrival in the country that she was fat and lazy (Smith, 2007). As O’Brien articulates in the quote above it is “not hard to see why” Sharapova is a powerful brand because she is “tall, slim and blonde”. Sharapova is 13cm (5 inches) taller than Williams. She is varying estimates of kilograms lighter (their WTA website player profiles suggests 9). Last, but certainly not least, Sharapova is blonde (raced coding for white; heteronormative coding for desirable). “She is the poster girl” the proto-normative object of the desiring gaze.

 The Trouble With Serena

 Sharapova’s representation is shaped to fit a very specific European stereotype of white feminine heteronormative aesthetics. Obviously this is not an accessible touchstone for Williams except antithetically. Spencer (2001: 92-93) suggests that the evocation of “ghetto tropes” by her father/coach in an attempt to present some protection for his young daughters at the beginning of their careers has left both their personae defined by “the notion of threat”. This was so, Spencer adds, even when they “injected hope into a game perceived to be in crisis”. Mr Williams would later add (qtd. in Wertheim, 2001: 73) that Serena was as athletic as her older sister but “meaner”. A 2002 literature review (Jones, Hanton and Connaughton, 2002: 206) revealed that “high levels of optimism, confidence, self-belief and self esteem” and “virtually any desirable positive psychological characteristic associated with sporting success has been labelled mental toughness at one time or another”. Mental toughness is Williams’ most often referenced attribute – sometimes in a complimentary way, sometimes not. This attention to the mind may well be to avoid having to reference body.

 In the predominantly white European subculture of professional women’s tennis it is her body that makes African-American Williams signify difference and even defiance – not just the colour of her skin but also her muscularity. McKay and Johnson in their analysis of the negative coverage of Serena Williams and her older sister Venus (2008: 492) trace a taxonomy of the media applying “recuperative strategies” to hyper-muscular women. They suggest further that “when the chunkiness of hyper-muscularity is linked to the twenty-first century intersection of obesity with race and class it takes on greater significance as a disparaging stereotype” (as I have suggested above). This kind of racial stereotyping runs counter to Williams’ life facts of many years spent in a life of privilege and is also counter-intuitive when any investigation of her performances reveals her repeated exhibitions of supreme athleticism at the highest level that have often ended in success.

 What narrative forces then are in operation here? Firstly, Williams in body and personae falls so far outside the accredited model for female professional tennis players (as embodied by the Sharapova typology) that the stereotype cannot (or will not) stretch to accommodate her. She presents so differently to Sharapova as to be constituted of remnants (traits outside the stereotype). That is: made entirely of individuating characteristics without a stereotypical core. As Amossy implies, this type of identity structure is read as being without a stable core for the audience to use as a touchstone. This instability and the racialised trope of a reiterated ghetto origin myth that constitutes a narrative around the notion of threat are amplified by Williams’ aggressive and muscular playing style. Myth works, according to Barthes (Barthes, 1997: 129), by turning signifiers into instruments of meaning that supplement the “literal” meaning of a concept or image with an "eternal reference" to something else. This process becomes more problematic, however, at the level of the reception of myths, such as Williams.  This is where we encounter the "very principle of myth" that "transforms history into nature". This non- or even anti-normativity remains unmitigated by recourse to subjugating sexualising narratives. Carty (2005: 133) notes that “characteristics that are deemed ‘appropriately feminine’ are different for white and non-white athletes” and that “the sexuality of black females is often marginalized in mainstream media”. It seems more likely in the light of her first statement that mainstream (white male dominated (Rowe, 2004: 44)) sports media cannot read different codings of gender and sexuality and this results in a seeming marginalisation whereas it may be an omission signifying inadequacy of understanding. This would all seem to point to Williams as signifier being a “difficult read” in terms of a woman in the spotlight of a normatising popular culture.

Straight Sets : Heterosexual Cohesion

 Following Foucault, sexuality has come to be recognised as a technology of the self, a significant component of identity performance. Although many studies have shown the assumptive connection between female muscularity and lesbianism, few have discussed the assumptive connection between femininity and a subordinate heterosexual gender performance. That is, to allude to an example from my main text, what makes Sharapova heteronormative beyond question? Femme-inists such as Dahl (Dahl and Volcano, 2008) call this notion to task through the lens of queer femininities. They question the traditional queer transmogrification of the wide culture normative male/female hierarchy into a butch/femme dichotomy which carries the same value loadings and enculturated gender roles. This issue goes to the very centre of the argument in favour of the tradition of erasure of sexualities other than heterosexualities in high-profile professional sports. Although hetero-normative relationships between female professional tennis players and men receive particular attention there is not the imperative, it seems, as in other popular cultures, to, as Turner (2004: 13) argues, display a capacity to sustain interest in one’s private life.

This celebrity profile perhaps reflects the strength of the controlling forces exercised on young, nomadic lives. The youth of this community brings into play the idea of generativity (Mansfield and McAdams, 1996) that suggests in some communities a tendency away from the self towards communal concerns comes about as the individual enters their thirties. Immaturity and lack of normative relational stability are common factors in the lives of elite athletes. Coupled with the pressures of the game at the elite level (to consistently and constantly deliver remarkable performances) this identity issue presents outwardly, I would argue, as an insular community made up of inward looking individuals. This encourages the gaze to stop at skin level, of the watchers’ (audience, spectators, commentators and journalists) interest to be in watching rather than knowing. Without the involvement of the dynamics of emotional connection to an individual or to the community, the onus to attract attention is on “the game”. My final chapter investigates avenues to decrease the necessity for every match played to be a blockbuster, and for every player to be not only a model but a model citizen.

Role Models

 Submissions emphasised the need to promote sportswomen as role models to inspire and motivate girls and young women to pursue sporting careers. The absence of female sporting role models is a major contributing factor to the low participation rates of girls in sport and recreation activities. (Australia. Parliament. Senate Environment Communications Information Technology and the Arts References Committee and Bartlett, 2006.: 69)

 As this quote from the Australian Senate report About Time! : Women in Sport and Recreation in Australia shows, the expectation for sportswomen to perform a societal function as role models exists at the highest level. The report continues, placing the media in a central position in this process:

Submissions and other evidence suggested that increased media coverage of women’s sport is essential in creating positive role models. Increased media coverage would:

•  lead to recognition for sportswomen and their achievements and a sense of equity in the media so that people are aware of what these women have achieved.

•  attract more sponsorship and other funding and to lift the profile of women’s sporting teams, events and programs. Without media coverage, the sponsorship and funding is difficult to obtain because the necessary “profile” is not there and it is hard to convince people to support women’s sport.

•  provide fit and healthy role models for young women and girls

 In an Australian context, then, according to this report, the general health and well-being of young females, ultimately, is seen to lie in the hands of sports broadcasters. However, individual submissions seem less conclusive. The Women in Sport Media Group argued, for example, that if there was greater coverage of women’s sport, “it is likely that girls will choose some role models out of those people who they are widely exposed to” (my italics) (Australia. Parliament. Senate Environment Communications Information Technology and the Arts References Committee and Bartlett, 2006.: 70). Though this is encouraging in that it acknowledges the wide variety of women who play sport, it seems a naïve suggestion that broadcasters would outlay the necessary expenditure without more reassurance that a “likelihood” of success or at least of establishing ongoing interest. It also seems naïve to think that quantitatively measured exposure is a productive way to progress when it is the cultural place and meaning of sporting displays of female “masculinity” that lies at the heart of the unease it causes.

 Conclusion

 Although there may still be some who are comfortable with uncritically embracing sport as a noble undertaking that rightly echoes and emphasizes dominant cultural narratives, the broadcast of it can surely only be seen as a commercial enterprise. The national broadcaster (on ABC-1 and ABC-2) sparely covers the Australian Women’s National Basketball League and the fledgling soccer competition. Fox Sports carries the ANZ Bank sponsored trans-Tasman netball (a more traditionally heteronormative sport) tournament begun in 2008 and the additional investment shows in the broadcast.  Cross-promotion – managed with varying degrees of sincerity – during Australian Football League broadcasts and analytical panel shows, reinforced by some shared training facilities and club colours between AFL and netball teams, and the participation by Luke Darcy, a former AFL player now a commentator, are designed to lend it legitimacy. This policy can be said to follow the path I traced in American country music where I argued (Wical, 2006b: 91) that while narratives which define women must seemingly be modelled on the narratives of the dominant male culture, it is possible to challenge that model.  Further, it was shown that it is also possible to nourish such a challenge under the guise of the model itself – until the subordinate, challenging narratives become a narrative tradition of their own. I pursue this in the last two chapters.

 Whilst commentating during the 7Sport broadcast of the 2009 Australian Open, recently retired Australian player Alicia Molik said she considered it “an enormous privilege” to have played in the same era as Serena Williams and her sister because they had brought the playing of the game “to a totally new level”. As Debra Gimlin argues in her study Body Work (Gimlin, 2001: 5) : “Cultural rules and trends are revealed through the body; they also shape the ways in which the body performs and appears”. In sport the body is on the one hand the main tool (or weapon) and on the other hand the authenticating signifier. In an elite professional context, especially the body’s high level functionality – movement, accuracy, power, speed, capacity for replication – is what makes an athlete. What does it mean then, when a sporting community’s governing stakeholders deny the muscular reality of the bodies that form its industrial base? As long as authentic women’s bodies and authentic athletes’ bodies are perceived and presented as mutually exclusive concepts, applying action narratives to women will remain a dissonant exercise. The continuing cultural unease surrounding the application of (so-called masculine) narratives of strength, stamina and public ambition to women is at the centre of what is perpetuated as the “problem” with women’s sports.

This chapter has positioned this project within the arc of my own research trajectory. I have outlined concepts that I will continue to use such as personae and stereotype. I have placed the audience, the performers and the mediation of women’s tennis within the boundaries of broadcast sport as a popular culture. In the following chapter I consider the text or data that is the 7Sport Australian broadcast of the 2007 Australian Open Championship match between Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova in the light of these concepts.

           Chapter 5: Discussion: Chosen Narratives: Wasters, Low Stakes and Divas

 The audio portion of the sports telecast tends to provide the spectators with much more than restatement of what they just saw (or would have seen had they been at the game). The role of the contemporary sports commentator has expanded to include the responsibility of dramatizing the event, of creating suspense, sustaining tension, and enabling the viewers to feel that they have participated in an important and fiercely contested event the fate of which was determined only in the climactic closing seconds of play. (Cominsky, Bryant and Zillman, 1977: 150-151)

  This chapter sets out to discover what it is that my main text (the broadcast of the Australian Open 2007 Championship match) yields in terms of the gender representation of the players. In light of previous research on sports commentary it asks questions of the narrative framework and trajectory chosen for the broadcast. It interrogates the assumed hierarchies on which the narrative hangs. Ultimately, this chapter exposes the deep-seated cultural paradoxes that bedevil women’s sport as they are amplified and reinforced by broadcast. Using the data and theoretical and historical approaches to sport I have outlined to identify vocabularies of exclusion, apologia and mitigation attached to public exhibitions of power by women, I explore the dissonance between sports journalism and notions of the passive object of desire, “female masculinity” and “feminine muscularity”.

Some Prevalent Concerns: Race,  Power,  Ease

 Central to all of these concerns, anxieties and paradoxes and certainly central to any sporting endeavour and the discourses that surround it is the representation of the female body. Over a decade ago, Heywood tried to explain the difference between what she called pornographic and athletic eroticism and suggested a way forward in the sport of body-building:

Sports are not only about sex, at least not directly. If you want to be taken seriously as an athlete at this particular cultural moment, much better to sell your sport to the public through subtlety, through indirection, through putting emphasis on the multi-faceted nature of athleticism, of which sexuality is just one component. (Heywood, 1998: 126)

Race

 Although my main concern is gender, inter-twining narratives of sexuality, race and class are considered in the light of the overall representational narratives. The transcript of the broadcast reveals an avoidance of overt reference to race – along with body type the most visually obvious of differences between Williams and Sharapova – flagging it with silence  as a site of interest. McKay and Johnson in their analysis of the negative coverage of Venus and Serena Williams (2008: 492) trace a taxonomy of the media applying “recuperative strategies” to hyper-muscular women. They suggest that “when the chunkiness of hyper-muscularity is linked to the twenty-first century intersection of obesity with race and class it takes on greater significance as a disparaging stereotype”. Paradoxically, they further suggest that hyper-muscularity – while going a long way towards silencing denigrating portrayals of sportswomen “as objects of ridicule, weakness, inferiority, decoration, passivity, and as erotically desirable yet transgressive” – has also sent sports narratives “searching for new ways to disparage the powerful and therefore ‘uppity’ African American sportswomen”. Elsewhere I have discussed Tasker’s introduction of the concept of the unsexed gender “musculinity” to accommodate discussions of action film characters and the actors who portray them. Unfortunately, as McKay and Johnson’s work outlines this is not a concept that has caught on, underscoring the tenacity and power of the hierarchical cultural linkage of body and gender. Grogan and her colleagues suggest (Grogan, Evans, Wright and Hunter, 2004: 49) after Bordo and citing numerous surveys: “In Western societies, slimness is a valued attribute for women, and is associated with attractiveness, self-control, social skill, occupational success, and youth … Muscularity is generally seen as inappropriate for women”. McKay and Johnson’s investigations suggest that this may be a particularly ‘white-skewed’ viewpoint.

Power

Foucault introduced the possession and public display of power as a testing ground for the gendered nature of cultural structures and it is a recurring theme in sports research (Aitchison, 2007; Allen, 1997; Armstrong, 1996; Blashak, 2005; Broad, 2001; Cahn, 1993, 1994; Connell, 1995; Guttmann, 1989; Heywood, 2000.; Lenskyj, 1990).  Introduced in August of 2007, the power index seeks to “recognize the hardest-hitting, most powerful players on tour” (Binder, 2007). This indicates a recognition and importance of power within the players’ subculture. Interestingly, the banner at the head of this web page features a prominent, fourth-ranked Sharapova following through on a double-handed backhand, Williams ranked sixth (under a green wash) with arm and facial muscles tensed about to hit a forehand and unranked but decorative Ana Ivanovic. Also interesting, given the emphasis on power, four of these players ended the year 2008 ranked outside the top 50 while only three were in the top 10 ranked players. This may indicate that although power is seen as a desirable aspect it is not a recipe for success, nor does it sit well with ideas of the normative feminine. Illustrative of this, the top ranked player in the world, the relatively diminutive Henin, retired and reinforced the woman/athlete dichotomy by stating that her “life as a woman starts from now” (Clarke, 2008). One article (Culpepper, 2008) includes descriptions of her as “opaque”, “unusual and eccentric”, a suspected cheat, “a ruthless pipsqueak” but concludes: “She leaves behind a game of tall people pounding balls like clockwork from baselines, and her departure robs the sport of some of the strategic contrast for which it aches.”

Much is made in the broadcast of the similarities between Williams’ and Sharapova’s muscular power (see Figure 5). Indeed, some statistics bear this similarity out (Figure 2) (Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, 2008).

  Power

Speed

Strength

Celebrity

Ease

Total

9

7

1

5

1

MS

2

1

1

1

1

SW

4

2

01

0Both

3

3

03

0 

      Figure 5:  From the transcript: Direct references to power (including hard hitting), strength and speed as applied to Sharapova (MS), Williams (SW) or both of them at once.

   Rank

Player

Rating

1

Lindsay Davenport (USA)

94.07 MPH

2

Angela Haynes (USA)

94.02 MPH

3

Marta Domachowska (POL)

93.54 MPH

4

Maria Sharapova (RUS)

93.15 MPH

5

Justine Henin (BEL)

93.03 MPH

6

Serena Williams (USA)

92.48 MPH

7

Sabine Lisicki (GER)

92.40 MPH

8

Li Na (CHN)

91.79 MPH

9

Svetlana Kuznetsova (RUS)

91.73 MPH

10

Anastasia Pivovarova (RUS)

91.45 MPH

Figure 6: Sony Ericsson WTA Tour Power Index Leaders – Cumulative after four events 2009 : The Power Index is the average maximum hitting speed of any player judged by maximum: a) 1st Serve Speed; b) 2nd Serve Speed; c) Forehand; d) Backhand; e) 1st Serve Return; f) 2nd Serve Return; and g) Smash.

In the broadcast, power in this context is referenced nine times whilst only mentioning physical strength directly once (Figure 5). Williams lacks “conditioning” and “fitness” while “Maria has actually improved that in the last year: gotten a little stronger, a little bit quicker”. So, although it would seem that the gendered attribute of strength is attributed to Sharapova she is not actually described as strong just “a little stronger” than previously. Here we see evidence of Williams’ circumstantial masculinity mitigated by the trope of survival, some stereotypical ideas about women of colour, and, at one point in the commentary, her “grace”. Ease (Figure 5) reflects power under control and only Sharapova is presented as at ease. “She just seems very settled to me – very at ease and kind of ready for the next few years to just to keep adding to her game,” Austin says.

There is no logical sense in choosing to promote Sharapova as the winner. Even statements on the subject by the admittedly pro-Sharapova Austin seem to logically point to Williams as, at the very least, just as likely to prevail.

When you look at the stats it’s absolutely incredible how similar they are. Although Serena does have 57 aces and Sharapova has 32. (Austin, pre-match)

Austin was responding to Roberts’ statistical revelations about the similarities of time on court (Williams had been on court in total 11 minutes longer than Sharapova) and sets played (Sharapova 13 at 12-1 and Williams 14 at 12-2). As Austin repeats throughout both of these players play the “sheer power” game in which the serve is vital. Sharapova would logically have been attempting to serve aces as often as Williams was. That she only served two thirds as many is a telling statistic. It must be borne in mind that most often we are not being drawn to think about who will win but of who will lose. Commentary speculation is less that Sharapova will (and deserves to) win, than that Williams cannot win and does not deserve to.

Ease

 Ease is only mentioned once in the broadcast and then in connection with the besieged Sharapova whose unease is apparent in the way she turns her back to the camera and her evident frustration. Williams, on the other hand, seems entirely comfortable. A study of gendered language in televised sports (Michael A. Messner, Carlisle Duncan and Jensen, 1993: 130) found that “women were also more likely to be framed as failures due to some combination of nervousness, lack of confidence, lack of being “comfortable”, lack of aggression, and lack of stamina”. Later in this chapter I discuss some of the other frames of feminine failure. Here I’m addressing the issue of comfort or ease. As Sharapova becomes less comfortable, less at ease as Williams’ dominance mounts, the tone of the commentary in regard to her “rhythm” reflects this dissolution.

I think she really picked up her game there. It was hard hitting, and, kind of, Maria got her rhythm. (Austin, pre-match studio intro, on Sharapova v Zvonerava in the fourth round)

She hit a lot of serves yesterday here on Rod Laver Arena during practice trying to get that rhythm. (Austin as Sharapova double faults in her first service game)

Well she might have practiced a lot yesterday Tracy but she certainly hasn’t fixed the rhythm in her serve. In fact the frustration surrounding her first serve, I believe, is getting to her. (Roberts as Sharapova prepares to serve with Williams leading 6-1, 2-0)

There’ve been very few long points, Sandy. Sharapova has really gotten out of her rhythm… She’s been overwhelmed so far in this match. (Austin at 6-1, 3-0)

At this point, the broadcast begins to reflect unease in a different way, with the commentators moving from what seemed a slightly disjointed but effective enough combination to outright disagreement. These two exchanges occur quite close to each other with the match at 6-0, 3-0.

SR: I’m sure many of you will remember the name Chris O’Neill. She’s the first and only unseeded player to win here in the open era. That was back in 1978. Is Serena going to join her?

TA: Chris O’Neill was a hundred and eleven in the world at the time but a very different time then. For about five years the Australian Open most of the top players didn’t play. They played World Team Tennis in the States. The money was bigger …

SR: But it could be an elite club of just two.

TA: Yes.

Then a moment later:

SR: Well, it’s only gone 47 minutes and we’re three games from the end.

TA: Possibly.

SR: Possibly.

 It is common in Australian tennis commentary to evoke the glorious past. Most obviously, this is because there hasn’t been an Australian player who has dominated for many decades. Roberts had already invoked the spectre of Daphne Ackhurst after whom the championship trophy was named and lavished eloquent praise on Margaret Court (present in the crowd). Now he produces Chris O’Neill the last Australian to win the Australian Open title. When Austin tries to contextualise both O’Neill’s standing and the Australian Open’s status at that time Roberts breaks in, placing her in the position to agree or continue in a way that would demean not only O’Neill but the host event and Australian tennis. Austin concedes. Moments later she corrects him again, knowing he must concede. In stating “Well, it’s only gone 47 minutes and we’re three games from the end”, Roberts simultaneously invokes the arguments that diminish women’s tennis because the matches are (usually) shorter whilst closing the narrative before the final resolution. Not surprising that this would cause Austin to react.

Same-ing the Players?

 This section strongly suggests that from the first moment of the introduction the broadcast of the Australian Open 2007 gendered Williams and Sharapova differently, for the most part allowing Williams’ masculine attributes that are mitigated by her assumptive, stereotypical heterosexuality as a woman of colour whilst hyper-feminising and heterosexualising Sharapova by the use and withholding of narratives of desire, combat, corporeality and journeying. I indicate the narratives of approval for Sharapova’s femininity and of disapproval of Williams’ gender performance. I have argued elsewhere that female masculinity is the only form of masculinity rendered undesirable and presented in the negative by a patriarchal hegemony. This chapter highlights the difficulties in continuing to use the traditional masculine discourses of sport when commenting or commentating on women’s sport. It is an investigation of a microcosmic example of the threat to hegemonic patriarchy posed by women who operate aggressively, ambitiously and successfully in the public sphere (and in mass mediated public view)  and of how two of the hegemonic discourses – sport and journalism – operate together to deny this threat. Mean and Kassing (2008: 127) argue that the “substantial growth in media coverage over the last 15-20 years has amplified the figurability of sport and its idealogical prominence” and, further, that “consequently, the gendered forms of athleticism re/presented in the media become inextricably linked with the performance of actual athletic identities” (128). That is, they have identified aspects of the athletes’ performances of self that are impacted by the gender roles proscribed by the media. Amongst issues addressed here are the interactions of gender with popular music, race, the mind/body dichotomy, identity narratives, power and noise.

Research suggests (Bryant, Brown, Cominsky and Zillman, 1982; Bryant, Cominsky and Zillman, 1977; Cominsky, Bryant and Zillman, 1977) that contrast or even antipathy between players engages the audience, however much effort is made in this text to overtly emphasise the similarities between Sharapova and Williams (see Figure 5, 7). Indeed, the broadcast begins with the words: “For all their differences, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova have trod similar paths.” This overt same-ing, I argue, belies a covert or subtextual construction of the players as opposites. That is, rather than being a dominant narrative to heighten drama, “amity...enmity...[and] rivalry” are either elided or alluded to in a historical or statistical rather than an emotional way. Although the final statement of this narration by Neil Kearney (“the comeback queen against the queen of grunt”) seems on the surface to further bond them in a regal state, there seems to be a clear subtext that ends that segment on a note of ridicule and amusement.

Speaker

Time

Context

Keywords

NK

(00:14)

For  all their differences, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova have trod similar  paths.

Trod similar  paths.

NK

(00:21)  

She’s  [Williams] noisy, has attitude, enormous self belief, and she has a tennis  dad. So does Sharapova.

So  does Sharapova

NK

(01:09)

Today  two larger-than-life women in a final that will break the sound barrier. The  comeback queen against the queen of grunt.

two  larger-than-life women; queen

BM

(01:55)

Hello  everybody. I think Neil Kearney has said it so well hasn’t he? With Serena  Williams up against Maria Sharapova today as we welcome you to Day 13 of the  Australian Open. It’s the final for the women. Two great stars, both already  rich and famous. Both with the heart of a champion. One has to give today.  Who will it be?

Two  great stars, both already rich and famous. Both with the heart of a champion.

TA

17:13

I  think [the way they start] is important for both players.

important  for both

TA

19:55

Serena is way  ahead but their serves are both huge, ground strokes so big. I think Serena  in the end is a better athlete, moves a little bit better, but not in full  condition now and Maria has actually improved that in the last year: gotten a  little stronger, a little bit quicker. And mental toughness! I mean they’re  both literally off the charts.

their serves,  ground strokes; not in full condition now and Maria has actually improved

BM

25:12

Shortly it’ll be the  players: Serena, Maria – divas in their own right to take centre stage.

divas in their own  right

BM

30:08

Well as you’d expect  they both look pretty relaxed and why not? What a record they take into this  final as they’re about to now come out onto Rod Laver Arena.

they both look; they  take; they’re about to

BM

31:39

So the two stars,  arguably the two biggest stars in the women’s game make their way onto Rod  Laver Arena. Both getting a – a big round of applause.

two stars; two  biggest stars; make their way; Both getting

BM

32:08

Serena was able to  beat her 8-6 in the third and then went on to win. Both phenomenal players.  Sharapova still just 19 years of age hoping to become the first player today  to have won consecutive Grand Slam titles since Henin did it – Justine Henin  – three years ago…

Both phenomenal  players.

TA

34:01

I  think they’ll both be able to control their nerves. You know they’ve both  been in this situation enough

both be able; both  been in this situation

TA

39:04

There’s gonna be no surprises out there today Sandy. They’ve got  the big serves, they’ve got the huge ground strokes, a lot of power. Very  different from the match that we saw here last year here with Mauresmo and  Justine Henin where they both have so much versatility… and I think they  [Williams and Sharapova] both know that they have a two and two record, their  matches have been such uh slug-fests.

no surprises;  They’ve got; [contrasted with] versatility;  both know; a two and two record

TA

40:58

They both really pounce on anything that uh is a little bit short.  They’re not just going to get the ball in play and they both have talked  about the fact.

They both;  They’re not; and they both

TA

41:33

They both have talked about that there’s any short balls, or any  opportunities in the match in the points that they’re going to have to  capitalize.

They both;  they’re going

SR

41:44

I  think the crowd have been pretty evenly divided too. They’ve both provided some  wonderful entertainment over the years here.

evenly divided;  They’ve both

TA

44:16

They both hit so hard and so accurate.

They both

TA

48:03

That first strike is gonna be so crucial for both players.

Crucial for  both

Figure 7: Same-ing the combatants: Neal Kearney (NK); Bruce MacAvaney (BM; Tracy Austen (TA); Sandy Roberts (SR)

 The introductory narration points out that they both have “tennis dads”, are “larger-than-life women” and loud (“a final that will break the sound barrier”). This theme of similarity continues throughout the studio introduction and game commentary. The studio host, Bruce McAvaney, opens with “Hello everybody. I think Neil Kearney has said it so well, hasn’t he?” This serves both the purposes of narrative cohesion and audience inclusivity or interactivity with the broadcast. By welcoming “everybody” McAvaney begins the televised sport narrative of “connecting people who have never met and do not expect to do so” (Rowe, McKay and Miller, 1998: 125). He then re-individuates the audience and creates a direct linkage between himself and the viewer by asking a direct question to camera. His tone implies that the answer to the question is self-evident (yes). He then characterises the match as Williams “up against” Sharapova but immediately mitigates any confrontational imagery by reverting to the same-ing process instigated in the narrated opening sequence by referring to the players as “Two great stars, both already rich and famous. Both with the heart of a champion.”

This is the beginning of McAvaney’s divafication of the players and as he later refers to both players as “divas in their own right” I’ll take a moment to outline divafication. Although Lister’s popular music divafication model (2001: 1-2) does not fit perfectly onto women’s tennis it is applicable in its basic structures. The three categories of diva, for instance: the Prima Divas whose talent (however utilised) is undisputed; the late twentieth century innovators; and the third group who “instead of simply being celebrated for their...beauty are also revered for their...introspection and imagination” (Lister, 2001: 2) – that is, this latter group are creative rather than interpretive, productive rather than reproductive. Lister (2001: 2) suggests that this form of diva “exhibits  the most positive prospects for women in pop music”. Apart from a few examples (Bartoli and Henin to name two – both labelled eccentric) the response to the Power Era has been formulaic and modelled on Sharapova. As this match exposes, power games depend entirely on the serve.

Lister’s study provokes illuminating questions and I use them, in part, as the framework for the following section.

Divafication: What’s ethnicity got to do with it?

 Lister’s first group of pop Prima Divas seems the preserve of non-”white” Americans (Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey) and a Francophone Canadian (Celine Dion). Houston and Carey have been accused of “wasting” their natural and undisputed talent (Lister, 2001: 2-3). Dion’s status as a non-Anglo is blamed “in part” for a “distinct uniformity and lack of subtlety” although her efforts are not doubted. With African-American Williams and Russian-born Sharapova as the main objects of this text this may be a model worth considering.

Prima Divas: Waste and Work

 Wasted talent is an identified thread in sports narratives about African-American athletes and female athletes.  When McAvaney asks Austin what part of Williams’ game has to work for her to win Austin replies: “I think her serve. You know such a huge weapon, even when she leaves the game for a long time or comes back and forth in and out of the circuit you know the serve is so technically sound that it always comes back and it is such a weapon.” Later in the match this exchange about Williams occurs between Austin and Sandy Roberts:

SR: And it’s very obvious, Tracy, that she has really stepped up. Even from the semi-final.

TA: So far. Her serve is something that she can always count on.

Austin is expecting Williams’ perceived lack of fitness to impact on the result. Previously Austin had pointed out that Williams “only played 16 matches in 2006” and that “she didn’t look as well conditioned and she still doesn’t look as well conditioned as when she won two years ago” but has won “somehow”. Again, later, Austin says:

She’s not at her potentially best right now. And we see that there’s this improvement that she can make if  she gets fitter and plays on a more consistent basis – thirteen, fourteen weeks a year – she could dominate the game again.

Austin again: “I think Serena in the end is a better athlete, moves a little bit better, but not in full condition now” and “You know when you’ve got the talent it’s just a matter of getting back on track and playing on a consistent basis.”  

Williams is quick to point out in the packaged interview that forms part of the introduction to the match broadcast: “I think what got me to the final was just my mental strength. And also running down a lot of balls (laughs) and just fighting and that pays off. And hard work.” In the packaged interview Pratt voices the question to Williams: “People have said ‘Serena could be the best ever but she’s wasting time, time that she’ll never get back’. How do you respond to that?”  

Later, Austin momentarily concedes that Williams has had a terrible year:

We’ve got to remember she’s dealt with the murder of her half-sister, the divorce of her parents, all of these injuries. So she has dealt with a lot. But sometimes she just doesn’t open up and so that … you know … people don’t understand what she’s going through.

McAvaney, who as host guides the narrative, does not pursue this highly dramatic offering but rather ignores it, responding: “Mmm. Look there’s no doubting her will to win”. Austin follows his lead returning to the magically ever-present serve and the fighter motif that began near the beginning of the narrated sequence (she “clawed her way to stardom”): “no matter how far behind in a match she is she’s always going to have that big serve, that’s always there, and she always has that fighter’s mentality”. This pugilistic reference is underscored with shots throughout of Williams pumping her fist displaying not only a non-normative feminine public display of aggression but also of a dissonant musculature.

Unlike in the case of Williams, there is no mystery about how Sharapova won her previous matches. Austin explains that in the last three rounds “it was hard hitting, and, kind of, Maria got her rhythm”. Next it “was mental toughness that got her through”. Finally, against Kim Clijsters “once Maria Sharapova got that first set under her belt, let those shoulders relax and started serving better, driving those ground strokes much better and a great win for her to win in straight sets”. “Maria has improved in the last year... she’s on a roll... Maria’s only lost once in about the last seven months.” “Maria has actually improved that [her fitness] in the last year: gotten a little stronger, a little bit quicker.” Later, as Sharapova prepares to start her first service game, emphasising what is being characterised as Sharapova’s superior work ethic:

Maria, in stark contrast to Serena who had only four tournaments last year, coming off a sensational year. 59 wins and just nine losses.  

Once Williams was leading by a set and four games Austin had this to say:

One thing that has always separated them is the athletic ability, the movement. Serena’s always been better at that. I think that Williams is moving the best she has so far this tournament.

Again, athletic ability is something Williams “has always been better at” – a talent given not gained by effort. Austin refers to plays as “smart” twice – both plays by Sharapova.

Sharapova, in this narrative, was transplanted into the sunshine of Florida, taken from mother and Mother Russia and deposited into the male dominated environment of Nick Bollettieri’s Florida Tennis Academy. Sharapova’s father is mentioned by his first name six times. Reinforcing Sharapova’s emotional control, he is coded as a projection of her emotions first in an exchange between Austin and Roberts:

SR: Mind you, if you look at her father, Yuri, you’ve got [Austin laughs] more of an idea what the score is.

TA: If we could just keep track of his blood pressure we would know.

Later Pratt and Roberts:

SR: Poor old Yuri at the moment looks as though he’s gone through the wringer for two or three hours.

KP: Well he’s feeling it for his daughter out there because Serena, she’s been deadly.

This is in contrast to Williams’ mother Oracene Price who is mentioned by name four times – twice in an identifying, introductory way. This exchange is between Roberts and Austin:

SR: I love the way Oracene’s so calm as well.

TA: She’s a pretty easy-going lady. It’s – uh – I’m sure Serena’s happy to have her around.

Later, Pratt says: “Not too much emotion from Oracene Price, Serena’s mum.”

Price is “easy going”, western. Sharapov is volatile, emotionally obvious, Eastern European – not Americanised like his daughter.

Origin mythologies

 Commentary presents Williams as aggressive and Sharapova as passive: Williams “clawed” her way out of the “slums of Los Angeles” to “stardom”. Sharapova “was seven when father Yuri took her to Nick Bollettieri’s Florida tennis academy separating the child from her mother for two years.” The vision that accompanies this statement is file footage of Sharapova about age 10 hitting balls on a court followed by an extreme close-up of her father, watching. There’s a picture of the Academy then back to young Sharapova on court. This then cuts to a grown-up Sharapova arms raised in V above head, looking towards her father in the stand. Then over celebrity shots of Sharapova modelling, being interviewed on talk shows and a picture of a picture-postcard idyllic village under snow:

Now she’s the world’s highest paid female athlete with endorsements bringing in over $40 million a year. Siberian born but she’s an American success story.

In fact Nyagan, which the WTA website lists as Sharapova’s birth place is not an ancient village dominated by the church spire (as shown in the broadcast introduction) but was established in 1965 as a forestry centre but is now principally a centre of the petroleum and gas industries. It is dominated by concrete high-rises.

At any rate, the family moved when she was two years old to a Black Sea resort city where temperatures rarely fall far below freezing. The Siberian reference then can be taken as myth-building: a “hot girl” (see section of this chapter ‘Theme Songs’) from a cold place; the ice princess?

Innovators

 I mean we both know the weapons of both of these women. They’ve got the big serves, they’ve got the huge ground strokes, a lot of power. Very different from the match that we saw here last year here with Mauresmo and Justine Henin where they both have so much versatility and have that traditional volley to finish points off with; the soft little touch volleys and the drop shots. This is just gonna be sheer power, hitting great depth, mixing in some angles, serving big, trying to capitalise on any second serves they get a look at and handling the pressure... – Tracy Austin, pre-match commentary.

It is widely held that the presence of Serena and Venus Williams has changed women’s tennis. They are the next generation on from the overt muscularity that began with Navratilova. Players have had to become more powerful to beat Venus and Serena Williams – or even contest with them in a meaningful way. Self-generated power is a masculinised force. Therefore, unlike Navratilova, the next generation of players mostly exhibit public displays of power whilst simultaneously or contiguously performing some kind of counter-masculinising mitigation work. The consumption of photographs of Navratilova, argues Allen in her work on lesbian masculinity (1997: 64 - Allen's italics), “challenges the heterosexist connection of femininity to woman, and instead, proposes an alternative connection of masculinity to woman as both ideal and ordinary”. The non-acceptance or outright rejection of the “connection of masculinity to woman as both ideal and ordinary” held potential benefits for this community. As it stands players are still in the position of having to perform both a covert masculinity and an overt femininity.

It is this change, this innovation, this requirement for power that has partially removed women tennis players from a position regarded as privileged by sports scholars to a less comfortable place. “Female tennis players have traditionally been stereotyped in more conventionally feminine ways than other female athletes.” (Michael A. Messner, Carlisle Duncan and Jensen, 1993: 129) Williams then, more fittingly belongs to this innovative category of diva. Just as Navratilova’s lesbianism presented a stereotype that encompassed masculine attributes, so Williams being a woman of colour presents a stereotype of unassailable heterosexuality. The strengths of these two stereotypes allows for the gender-queer moment. In the case of Navratilova (and, contemporaneously, the only “out” lesbian player Mauresmo) masculinity is an element of the stereotype. For Williams, the strength of the stereotype of women of colour as heterosexual (objects of desire for men) means that masculine traits of strength, self-belief and power are simply what Amossy called “remnants” to be ignored or regarded as part of an individuating “character trait”. The “white” players find muscularity/masculinity much harder to mitigate without running counter to heterosexism.

Thus, the minute-long replay of a post-match exchange between former player and now commentator American Jim Courier and Sharapova.

       JC:  Now your fashion tips here. What’s goin’ on with this dress? What do we have  here? What’s all this all about?

   MS:  (laughs): We’re talking fashion with Jim Courier. This is a  once-in-a-lifetime opportunity you guys, so (crowd laughs) so make sure you  listen, you know. Um … I don’t know. Uh, Nike and I we tend to pay attention  to the detail so you’ve got a little embroidery here of my favourite flowers  and my name is embroidered in here and you know, little bit of this, little  bit of that and, uh, here it is.

   JC:  It looks good, looks good. How about men’s tennis fashion these days? Because  in my day – I got in a little trouble yesterday, someone was accusing me of  wearing short shorts and kinda tight shirts. The question I have for you is,  you walk down the hall and you see all the pictures of the champions wearing  the short shorts and then you see the guys today wearing the longer shorts.  Which do you prefer?

   MS:  Short? Really? Eww.

   JC: Last question here. I  know you don’t like to talk about your personal life, so of course we will.

   MS:  Let’s not.

   JC:  So. I’m not going to ask you anything personal. Just tell me what what you  look for in a guy.

   MS:  Are you kidding me? (Crowd laughs) Well he doesn’t have red hair. (Crowd  laughs)

   JC: I  already knew that. (Crowd whistles and cheers, applauds) I’m sensing a trend  here in Australia about that. What else?

   MS:  (embarrassed, nervous or angry laughter): Uh. That’s, that’s about it. I’m  not going to give too much away. I mean they have to work for it, you know?  They gotta keep me guessing, you know. I like variety.

Here’s Bruce McAvaney’s segue from Williams to Sharapova, followed by a montage of Sharapova under the INXS song Hot Girls into the advertisement break that preceded this “interview” replay:

Well, Maria Sharapova’s done nothing wrong either. She’s had a bit of a tough task to the final particularly in the first round. But she’s the world number 1 whatever happens today. We’ll be looking at Maria right after this ….

Here McAvaney alludes to a number of issues making this short sequence of sentences dense with meaning. First, Sharapova is blameless, has “done nothing wrong” counters the common knowledge that she was fined for cheating (being coached during play) earlier in the tournament. Her first round “tough task” refers to a match played in 40C heat that went to three sets. After re-writing history, then eliciting sympathy, he then underlines her unassailable position as number 1 and takes away some meaning from the competition about to take place by saying “no matter what happens today”. He then chooses to say “We’ll be looking at Maria right after this”. In this sentence he uses the inclusive “we”, establishes a (hierarchical) relationship with Sharapova by using her first name and uses the word “looking” emphasising Sharapova as object of the male gaze.

After the advertisement break she is the object of Courier’s gaze. He is not only looking at her but is pointing toward her thigh. He engages her firstly on the field of fashion: “What’s goin on with this dress? What do we have here? What’s all this all about?” he asks pointing to a pattern on her skirt. Emphasising the femininity of the question, Sharapova mocks him but then moves into sponsorship mode with: “Nike and I we tend to pay attention to the detail”. Courier stays in the genital area moving the topic from Sharapova’s skirt to men’s shorts. Then Courier moves onto the overt heterosexualisation of Sharapova. First he establishes his dominant position as interviewer: “I know you don’t like to talk about your personal life, so of course we will.” Ignoring Sharapova’s “Let’s not” he continues:

So. I’m not going to ask you anything personal. Just tell me what you look for in a guy.

When she retorts that it isn’t red hair she’s looking for (Courier is a redhead) he does not let her finish on a winning note but presses her: “What else?” Sharapova now seems ill-at-ease although it’s impossible to know if she is embarrassed, nervous or angry. She ends with:

Uh. That’s, that’s about it. I’m not going to give too much away. I mean they have to work for it, you know? They gotta keep me guessing, you know. I like variety.

Her repeated use of the word “they” (here, the heteronormative assumptive position would be, meaning to convey ‘more than one’ rather than as a masking agent for homo- or bi-sexual attachments) and the final statement “I like variety” suggests availability.

The action cuts immediately back to McAvaney and Austin laughing, watching (or pretending to watch) on their monitor. They continue the heterosexualisation of Sharapova (and, incidentally, of Courier and in Austin’s case, herself):

BM: Well, Tracy I think if, uh, Maria plays as well today as she did (Austin: Ooooh!) against Jim, she’ll win.

TA: Nobody backs Courier up against the wall like Maria and those are so fun because Jim gets their personality out. It’s just terrific. But I gotta say the question about the long shorts or the short shorts? Hate to say it, Maria but the short shorts much better.  

BM: OK. You’ve heard it from another champion, Maria. Tracy, where’s where’s the pressure today? Is it, is it more with Maria?

Note that throughout this exchange Sharapova is referred to repeatedly by her first name. McAvaney has Sharapova playing “against Jim”, Austin gives us the image of Sharapova backing “Courier up against a wall”. Austin also praises Courier because he “gets their personality out” in his interviews. What he actually does in this case is inscribe Sharapova with a particular kind of femininity and heteronormativity.

Noise and Silence

 It is plain from Sharapova’s introduction that she is here to be watched. And she is a good investment. The camera lingers on her longer, slimmer body as she serves, the camera angle changing to a full-court view measurably later than during Williams’ serve. Everything about Sharapova is presented as contained, controlled. Her earrings are slim, gold drops; her hair is gathered tightly in a pony tail; her body language is less extravagant; her clothes less vibrant; her Nike swooshes omnipresent but not intrusive. Thus her habit of “shrieking and grunting” as she plays seems all the more noticeable, a dissonant outburst, out of character perhaps if she presented a stable, cohesive enough persona to tell.

Noise (and silence) is another important factor in the playing of the game of tennis and hence in its broadcast. In contrast with many sports, the crowd is silent during play, shouts of encouragement reserved for changes of end or between points. Reasons for this are two-fold. On the one hand, it is feared that noise will break a player’s concentration. On the other hand, it may stop players from hearing the sound of the ball leaving the racquet. Much is made of the “shrieks” of the women players as they serve, many suggesting that it is not an expression of effort but an attempt to mask the sound of the strike and thus deceive the receiver. This soundscape helps create the rhythm of a match for the viewer complementing the repeated flow of camera angles. In the introductory narrative, Kearney predicts that the final “will break the sound barrier”. It is, he says, “the comeback queen against the queen of grunt”. This is echoed by Bruce McAvaney and Tracy Austin in the studio introduction:

McAvaney: It’s going to be a loud final, that’s for sure.

(Both laugh.)

Austin: The shrieking and the grunting.

 This prediction is as awry as their nomination of Sharapova as favourite to win. In fact it isn’t until the last game of the match that commentator Sandy Roberts notes that “it’s taken to this stage to finally bring out the grunts in the girls”.

Pratt, relieving Austin in commentary, is greeted by Roberts : “I’m joined by Kerryn Pratt who’s been watching courtside…and you’ve come in a little shell-shocked. This is a battle.”

Pratt responds:

Well, I don’t think anyone is as shell-shocked as Maria Sharapova is out there. It’s been quite eerie listening from the start. So silent out there without the Sharapova grunt at first but she’s warming up a little with the shriek.

Indeed for the first minute of the match there is no commentary, only the court sounds of shoes, ball bounce and strike, polite applause and the calls of the officials. The exhalation of the server is even audible.

Theme Songs : Singing The Survivor and the Object of Desire

 The relationship between sports and popular music forms an important, although little understood nexus of cultural production. (McLeod, 2006: 531)

Race impacts the differing portrayals of sexuality and gender. Carty (2005: 133) notes that “characteristics that are deemed ‘appropriately feminine’ are different for white and non-white athletes” and that “the sexuality of black females is often marginalized in mainstream media”. The songs chosen to play over the introductory montage of each player reflect this with, as I will show later, Williams portrayed as a survivor or fighter and Sharapova as an object of desire. These songs also reflect the prioritising of the celebrity player over the match, the event, and the Tour.

The song chosen to cover a montage of Williams – Williams’ theme song, if you will –  is I’m a Survivor, an anthem of defiance and as the title indicates, survival, by female, African American trio Destiny’s Child lead by Beyonce Knowles. The first two lines are “I’m a survivor/ I’m not gonna give up” whilst Sharapova’s theme by white, male, rock band INXS Hot Girls begins: “Hot girls they can break me, break me/ Hot girls, you know what you’re doing”. Rowe (1995a: 10) notes that rock music and sport could only form an alliance when sport had become more commercialised and rock music had become more closely related to pop music. Later, after she has won, the song associated with Williams is Australian sister pop duo The Veronicas’ Revolution. This begins “Close your eyes/ I’ll blow your mind/ I’m a revolution”.  The montage of Williams begins with a very quick left-to-right pan of the Rod Laver Arena sign followed by a super close right profile shot of Williams’ head as she sways back and forth as she awaits her opponent’s serve. The very next shot is of a male photographer looking through his camera, finger poised. This is followed by Williams’ Nike shod feet leaving the ground as they go through her service action. In Greek religion and mythology, Nike is the goddess of victory. She presided over all contests, athletic as well as military. Also included are a pan of the word Melbourne painted on the court, three forehands and a backhand and two upper-body shots of Williams clenching her fist emphasising the musculature of her upper arm, urging herself on.

The survivor persona is one that Clover (1992) investigated in her work on women and horror films. She called the survivor the victim/hero. Clover (1992: 43-44) identifies the self-avenging victim-hero as a way of presenting “the possibility of cross-gender identification” in that it presents a female character with whom the female viewer can identify without betraying their sex by “identifying with the male point of view”. She also speculates that the female victim-hero is a site that challenges the dominance of the male gaze by causing male audience members to “betray their sex” by identifying with them rather than objectifying them. Thus the whole audience identifies in a positive way with the woman and against the man. Further, she argues (Clover, 1992: 35-37, 158-159), the survivor begins as the pursued, feminised victim of a male oppressor but in her ultimate triumph occupies the position of the traditional masculine avenger. That is, she saves herself. Clover sees this as illustrative of Butler’s ideas on the performativity of gender as the survivor’s sex does not change but she is effectively narratively regendered by circumstance – by what is done to her on one hand and on the other what she must do in response.  This dynamism and fluidity of gender divorced from the sexed body and attached in a reactionary way to the narrative moment, makes the survivor capable of becoming the victim-hero and avenging herself. The victim-hero, then, is one position around which it is acceptable to construct narratives about women with non-normative, gendered reactions such as aggression and even violence. So Williams, or perhaps her fight and determination, is admirable rather than desirable.

Sharapova, on the other hand, is celebrated as a highly successful marketed commodity and thus is constructed as an object of desire. Sharapova’s theme Hot Girls is a song of heterosexual desire. The difference in the representations of these two protagonists is clear. Sharapova is I would like to submit, a consumer society cyborg. That is, the product she is used to attract the desiring gaze to is so closely melded with her persona as to be almost indistinguishable. In fact the montage that plays under Hot Girls begins with a super close-up of the heels of Sharapova’s Nike shoes which bear both the Nike swoosh and her first name followed by another super close-up of the head of her Prince tennis racquet. Only then do we see Sharapova’s back as she serves, her now familiar grunt coinciding with the strike of racquet on ball. The male gaze is also included in this montage as it is in Williams’ (with the cameraman): a ball boy’s face as he watches, his sunglasses reflecting the court.  

The third song extracted in the broadcast is Gia Farrell’s Hit Me Up, a song of a confident young woman challenging a young man to be courageous enough to “hit her up”. Farrell is an American of Italian descent almost the same age as Sharapova. It is played as the outro to advertisements just before Williams and Sharapova take the court. A refrain of “Come hit me up” is repeated twice between each of the following:

Say hey! What's it gonna be tonight?

Say hey! Party with me tonight.

Say hey! We been running all night.

I know you feel it cause you checking me right

The outro concludes with:

Baby baby, just a little bit/ baby Baby, just a little more Baby baby, let me see ya

 This extract plays over an alternating montage of both players. The montage begins and ends with images of Sharapova and the images of the players alternate so that we see four pieces of footage of Sharapova and three of Williams continuing the Sharapova-as-winner trajectory of the broadcast introductory narrative. This song may have been chosen because of the presence of the phrase “hit me up”. Austin and McAvaney have both stressed the powerful hitting that will be involved. Austin points out that neither player is as versatile or traditional as the previous year’s opponents Amelie Mauresmo and Justine Henin. “This is just gonna be sheer power, hitting great depth, mixing in some angles, serving big”, Austin predicts. But the implication that this song represents the relationship between Sharapova and Williams could be read to suggest a homoerotically charged subtext under the text of challenge.

 Feminised Uber Narrative

 This broadcast contains many characteristics that run counter to the commonly accepted aspects that render a narrative attractive to consumers. It also contains flaws specific to successful (male) sporting narrative practice. I have already discussed the “same-ing” of the players rather than posing them as somehow opposite or opposed. Another flaw is the erasure of stakes. A study of gendered language in televised sports (Michael A. Messner, Carlisle Duncan and Jensen, 1993: 130) yielded these characteristics exposing the approach long identified by feminists that defines women (people without penises) as lacking:

Women also appeared to succeed through talent, enterprise, hard work, and intelligence. But commonly cited along with these attributes were emotion, luck, togetherness and family. Women were also more likely to be framed as failures due to some combination of nervousness, lack of confidence, lack of being “comfortable,” lack of aggression, and lack of stamina.

The idea is introduced early that Williams’ Australian Open story has already concluded. Williams has “nothing to lose”, “has already proven the doubters wrong”, “It has been one of the great runs of all time, Serena Williams here”. Interviews shown with fans favour Sharapova as does the general introductory narrative. McAvaney says “as well as Sharapova will play today”, “Maria Sharapova’s done nothing wrong either... But she’s the world number 1 whatever happens today”. By implying that Williams has already come as far as she can (or deserves to) and that both she and Sharapova have nothing extra riding on the outcome, robs the broadcast of a wider contextual field from which to weave any parallel dramatic threads. This means that the structures that allow live sporting broadcasts to become discursive focal points for the generation of proto-cultural meanings are not there. That is, it becomes “just a game”. McAvaney underscores the lack of focus on who may win by stating near the very beginning of the broadcast that “One has to give today. Who will it be?” This emphasis on losing in women’s sport is a marked phenomena (Michael A. Messner, Carlisle Duncan and Jensen, 1993: 130), one of the traditional hallmarks of sexist sports journalism that frames “women as reactive objects”.

The first question Roberts poses to Austin in the commentary box is “Is one going to be more nervous than the other?” Austin replies that they will both be able to control their nerves because “they’ve both been in this situation enough. They’ll have the butterflies though but that’s good. You need those.” In the early 1990s Messner, Carlisle Duncan and Jensen concluded that nervousness helped fit the female athlete in the frame of failure. Austin differentiates between harmful nervousness and the nervousness one needs (butterflies). Harmful, destructive, emotional, feminine nervousness (which is what Austin assumes Roberts is asking about) must be controlled, Austin tells us, and can be controlled but only through experiential learning. Butterflies – an attractive if infantilising metaphor perhaps echoing the giddiness of romantic love – on the other hand must be harnessed. Here again we can think of the sporting body as a conversion engine turning butterflies into kinetic energy. Female nervousness seems, to put it colloquially, “not all bad”.

Confidence is used throughout the broadcast. On six instances it is in reference to Sharapova, once in reference to Williams.

Last year she (Sharapova) got so much more confidence when she beat Kim Clijsters in San Diego in the summer – lead-up tournament to the US Open. It was the first time that she had ever beaten Clijsters. Then at the US Open gets her second Grand Slam taking out Mauresmo in the semi-finals. The very next day takes out Justine Henin in straight sets and I think back-to-back days like that beating top players it gave her a lot of confidence. (Austin, studio introduction)

Congratulations on reaching another Grand Slam final. You’ve looked so confident here. (Dittmar to Sharapova just before she enters the court)

Maria, in stark contrast to Serena who had only four tournaments last year, coming off a sensational year. 59 wins and just nine losses. A new-found confidence with victory at the United States Open. (Roberts during the call at 1-0 to Williams in the first set)

She’s (Sharapova) lost some confidence in that serve and it’s seeping into the rest of her game. (Austin, with the match at 6-0, 2-0 to Williams)

Tell her (Sharapova’s) lack of confidence her shakiness on that second serve. She decelerated as she went after the ball, didn’t accelerate like you need to. (Austin with the match at 6-1, 4-1 to Williams)

Sharapova’s lack of confidence is translating into failure. Her reaction to her poor serving performance is “seeping” like a purulent wound into the rest of her game. Or her failure is translating into lack of confidence perhaps – as seen in the first quote above – we learn that she gains confidence by winning (or “taking out”) the “top players”. It seems possible that a “top player” beating her could inspire a lack of confidence. Our attention is drawn to “her shakiness”, which in addition to lack of confidence has unsettled her technique. This again in contrast to Williams’ serve which is “so technically sound that it always comes back”. By contrast – with   the match at almost the same position – Austin comments:

Big   serve from Sharapova and she (Williams) has enough time to take a full swing on the return. That’s how confident she’s feeling right now. (third game of the second set)

Williams’ confidence sees her win the point, Austin tells us, despite the “big serve” of Sharapova. Not her training, experience, or knowledge of Sharapova’s limited strategies but her confidence.

Newspaper reports had been drawing Williams as “fat” and “unfit” (as in lacking fitness but, arguably, with a scent of the other meaning of unworthy or undeserving) since she arrived for the pre-Open tournament in Hobart. This is another example of the anxiety about muscular “chunkiness” (McKay and Johnson, 2008: 492) of women discussed earlier in this chapter. This narrative persisted even as she defeated one tall, slim woman after another. Austin and then Roberts articulated it this way towards the end of the match:

You’re Sharapova in this situation you just hang in ... Look for the opportunity to play offence and hope that Serena goes off a bit.

And that is going to be the key to the match, isn’t it? If she can maintain this extraordinary level that she’s been playing at.

Whilst Roberts and Austin wait (or hope, for the sake of their chosen narrative tangent) for Williams to “go off” relief commentator Pratt, who has been watching the match in the stadium, comments:

Serena, she’s been deadly. And the scary thing is she’s playing with such controlled aggression you feel like she could explode even more into this match.

Here, Pratt presents the prospect of Williams as a winner and someone who, quite the opposite of imploding or self-destructing, will “explode even more”. She appropriates some colourful and dramatic language to convey what it is that Sharapova has to overcome and an alternate view to what the viewer has been watching. Williams, all in one breath, is “deadly”, “scary”, “aggressive”, “explosive”. Later in her short stint at the end of the first set Pratt describes Williams as “extremely intimidating”.  This kind of talk from Pratt is perhaps prompted by the incident at the end of the first set.

The Incident at the End of the First Set

 In highlighting this incident I hope to clarify a couple of issues. Firstly, the differences in watching between stadium and television: in this incident the viewer at home sees the broadcast change the impression the spectators had of the incident. Using the emphasis of repetition, close-up and slow motion the spectators are invited to reconsider something they have just “seen”. Secondly, this incident provoked commentary that is illustrative of the issue of differing identity and behavioural boundaries for the two players. Thirdly it exposes the emergence of a degree of unease between the commentators.

Here’s what happens:  It’s the beginning of the sixth game of the first set. Williams leads 5-0. It’s Sharapova’s serve. In the commentary box, Pratt replaces Austin. The broadcast returns from an advertisement break.

Visual

External  Audio

Commentary

Margaret Court in the crowd. Changes to shot of stadium  including whole court from SW end. Graphic showing score and time played.  Whole court shot through point (which ends  with an overhead smash into the body of SW).

Individual calls from the crowd using both players’ first  names.

   Cheers, applause

SR: There’s one of the great names in Australian tennis,  Margaret Court who was honoured in the Australia Day Honours list and so well  deserved. What a player. But at the moment we’re watching a stunning  performance by Serena Williams. I’m joined by Kerryn Pratt who’s been  watching courtside…and you’ve come in a little shell-shocked. This is a  battle!

Slow motion replay of point  starts.

 KP: Well, I don’t think anyone is as shell-shocked as  Maria Sharapova is out there. It’s been quite eerie listening from the start.  So silent out there without the Sharapova grunt at first but she’s warming up  a little with the shriek.

Overhead smash into the body of SW.

 SR: And watch this.

Waist up shot MS.

 KP: And the play. (SR:Yeah! chuckles) Straight at the  body. That’s one way to stop Serena.

Waist up shot SW looking angrily towards MS and possibly  swearing.

SPECTATORS: Oooh!

  Later, when Austin returns she offers this:

SR: And the big question is Tracy how is that set going to affect the next for Maria Sharapova? Out she comes. She still remains composed. Serving to start the second…

TA: Wow! Sharapova will never let an opponent know that losing that first set in 26 minutes is going to bother her. I was gone for those two games Sandy. How about when Sharapova tried to tag Serena Williams? (SR chuckles right through following) If looks could kill after that. Really, Sharapova had the whole court.

Here we have two different views of the same incident. In the first, “live” view the spectators and commentators react to exciting play. Then the play is broken down and attention drawn to Williams’ reaction to being hit. Williams is painted as a reactive aggressor. Unusually for tennis where it is commonplace for at least some appearance of apology for hitting an opponent, Sharapova has no reaction, seemingly, but Williams appears to at least be remarking something under her breath while looking in Sharapova’s direction. Austin, however, sees things differently. Certainly she acknowledges Williams’ look: “If looks could kill” but tellingly finishes that sentence with “after that”.  She has already brought Sharapova’s actions into play by asking, seemingly delightedly, “How about when Sharapova tried to tag Serena Williams?” Immediately, Roberts starts to chuckle, to diffuse suggestions of aggressive confrontation by both parties (that is, women are amusing not violent). But Austin pushes on with “If looks could kill after that.” And then immediately, to leave no doubt about who she views as the aggressor: “Really, Sharapova had the whole court.”

Quickly, Roberts moves again stopping readings of intent of harm on Sharapova’s behalf:

We said it was going to be a contest…But maybe that double fault tells us something about her feelings after that first set.

With Austin and Pratt both prepared to begin using fighting, violent narratives, Roberts shifts the discussion from confrontation to contestation and then quickly returns us to the internal, to the emotions, an action that “tells us something about her feelings”. This is a brutal or at least clumsy attempt at the erasure of Sharapova’s transgression. Whereas it was amusing and possibly exciting to see Williams angry, the possibility of Sharapova acting in a volatile and aggressive manner puts her outside the boundaries of the hyper-feminine, controlled daughter and creates a direct, visceral attachment between her and her opponent. This is another queer moment. Although the narrative may try desperately to same them, the underlying fear is that they are the same, that they have much more in common with each other than with almost anyone else watching. Another thing that it exposes is that even with all the controlling rules and hierarchies (event managements, agents, Associations and Federations) and despite the fact that they are being watched these women are not acting in the way that they should. Roberts’ anxiety is as audible as Austin and Pratt’s excitement. When Austin says “Really, Sharapova had the whole court” what she is saying is that Sharapova could have hit the ball anywhere but she hit it at Williams. She meant for it to hit her. She wanted it to hit her. Such premeditation and intent is plainly unsettling for Roberts.

 Conclusion

 In the world of physics power is mathematically calculated by a relational juxtaposition of work and time. Kinetic energy is calculated based on the relationship between mass and speed (Nave, 2009). The value of work is the result of a force causing displacement at a particular angle. Potential energy is dependent on mass, height and the force of gravity. Height, mass, potential, angles, force, work, speed, kinetics, time and power as applied to and by female bodies are all common narrative themes in the discourse of women’s tennis. Culturally, most of these concepts are highly gendered and not female embodied. This chapter uses these themes as a guide to the consideration of the representation and place of feminisms, genders and sexualities within the discourses. These discourses of sport, femininities, gender, hegemony, heterosexuality and social construction are far from discrete, cross-contaminated as they are by the transference of “cultural dirt” back and forth across boundaries (Wenner, 2007: 113). Wenner goes on to specifically suggest the power of the roles of “active, implied and idealised sports dirt” in eliding oxymoronic tendencies in commodity narratives.

Placed by the narrative control of the broadcast, millions of television viewers around the world are sold the same seat. Unlike the attending spectators a television audience member’s gaze is not static but is shifted constantly. Close-ups emphasise, long shots contextualise, slow motion replays and computer projected and generated animations suggest the pursuit of truth, crowd shots encourage like reaction – technology controls the drama and those who control the technology control the drama’s narrative (Morris and Nydahl, 1985) although not, hopefully, its conclusion. But to an extent the outcome of any tennis match is proscribed. There are no draws or ties in tennis. Tennis matches present narratives with a point of closure. Fulton (2005: 102) defines this point as “that moment in a narrative when the story can end only in one way, when other possibilities are closed off”. Someone will win, someone will lose. Because of the narrative predicated on the assumption of a Sharapova win, what the audience ends up watching is Sharapova losing not Williams winning. The narrative undesirability of the outcome and the narrative trajectory of a worthily triumphant Sharapova that comes to a halt long before the match is over makes for dissonant viewing.

  Chapter 6: Conclusions: Towards a Sustainable Female Sporting Stereotype

 This thesis suggests that broadcasting of “women’s” sports as a common practice will not come about without cultural change at three levels of involvement: the player subculture, the sports broadcasting subculture and the wider culture of which the audience is a part. That is, what identities are presented, how they are mediated (or represented) and how they are read. This chapter and the next suggest how this cultural change based on the renovation of identity representation may be facilitated, particularly in the Australian context presented in the data. Approaching broadcast sport as a product that the players endorse, this chapter addresses the stereotype of the female tennis player as imposed (and sometimes embraced) at an individual level. It considers changes to this stereotype that echo changes in wider culture awarenesses of newly understood relationships between bodies and genders and sexualities. The following chapter addresses the re/presentation of the players’ community as a whole.

Kirby (2009: 38) makes the centrality of identity representation to product endorsements clear when she identifies the object of public relations campaigns as one that compels publics to “notice, admire, emulate”. Regarding the theory underpinning this approach, Kirby explicates further citing the social learning theory of psychologist Albert Bandura:

The use of celebrities by organisations to endorse products is a prime example of social learning theory...The theory posits that identification with a model increases learning...The concepts of social learning extend to others who are not accessible on a personal level, but whose behaviour people admire, such as celebrities, spokespeople and movie stars.

In their work on the production of celebrity in Australia, Turner, Bonner and Marshall (2000: 57-59) use the example of the image change wrought on the football code of rugby league by its attachment to both Tina Turner (on a wide scale) and admired player Wayne Pearce (at a grass-roots level). They argue, particularly, that this promotional effort was not aimed at existing fans but “instead it addressed a mass audience in order to present rugby league as spectacular entertainment”. Guided in the macro by these two approaches – on the one hand deep-rooted theory and on the other hand successful practice – this chapter offers some avenues by which the representation of female athletes can move forward beyond the control of gendered behavioural boundaries.

 The Model/Player Dichotomy

 Anxiety surrounding sexuality, sport and the body particularly where women are concerned exists at the Federal level of politics in Australia.

 Sexploitation applies to forms of marketing, promotion or attempts to gain media coverage which focus attention on the sexual attributes of female athletes, especially the visibility of their bodies. In a context of sexploitation, the value of the female athlete is judged primarily in terms of her body type and attractiveness, rather than for the qualities that define her as an athlete. This creates an ironic situation for elite athletes. In order to attract media and sponsor interest, many female athletes resort to marketing themselves or their sport for their “voyeuristic potential”. However, if this approach is successful, the increased interest is not on their performances and successes, but on their sex appeal. (Australian Sports Commission, 2009)

 Elsewhere I have placed Maria Sharapova as the current accredited model of the professional female tennis player stereotype. Further, I have suggested that, in different ways, representations of her colleagues Ana Ivanovic and Serena Williams are defined against her as some sort of community standard in interesting and contrasting ways. I have proposed that Ivanovic is presented as Sharapova’s alternate whilst Williams is drawn as Sharapova’s antagonist. In this section I deploy these identities and the relationships between them to expose exploitable commonalities and differences. This section also includes a content analysis of the Internet home pages of these three players.

In an interview with reporter Neil Kearney during the 2007 Australian Open 7Sport broadcast that features a perusal of modelling photographs of Ivanovic, she insists that she sees herself first as a player: “Modelling is not something I enjoy like I enjoy playing tennis.” When Kearney expresses surprise she clarifies: “Tennis is definitely my first choice and I enjoy being on the court and doing what I love.” This echoes the findings discussed earlier (Smart, 2005) regarding the importance for continuing credibility and authenticity of sustaining a high performance and success level in their chosen field. “I bet the photographer liked it,” says Kearney’s voice over a black-and-white head shot posed to make it seem Ivanovic is in the shower, erasing her self-definition as agentic athlete. Ivanovic’s home page (http://www.anaivanovic.com/) bears out her intention to be seen as a player who models (see figure 8). This April 2009 version of Ivanovic’s home page shows her chosen logo silhouette and the prominent link to her playing schedule and the photograph of training (modelling Adidas sportswear). This clearly identifies her as a player even as the hyper-feminised “glamour shot” down the sidebar mitigates any masculinity implied by her successful athleticism even though the photograph itself is tempered with the caption “Roland Garros Champion 2008”. This indicates an attempt to balance the presentation of these two culturally acceptable identities as contiguous rather than dichotomous. The rolling banner for a sports drink which is the product of her long-time sponsor and manager is the most overt promotion visible that is not directly related to tennis. This reflects Ivanovic’s position as a rising rather than established star.

Both Williams’ (Figure 9) and Sharapova’s (Figure 10) home pages, as one would expect from established celebrities, feature much more movement and, in Williams’ case, music. Williams, like Ivanovic is featured in a “glamour shot”. Sharapova models Nike tennis wear. This is unusual and was changed to a hyper-feminine image (Figure 11) in line with the others. These images offer the chance to illustrate the acceptability of Ivanovic and Sharapova’s body type and musculature and the anxieties raised by the dissonance between glamour and muscularity by Williams’ body. Note the bare arms and shoulders displayed in the images of Sharapova and Ivanovic. Contrast this with the same areas covered in the images of Williams and the erasure of her hips.

These home pages are illustrative of a postfeminist-influenced culture. Postfeminist normativities are articulated by Tasker and Negra (2007: 2-3) as “assumptive full economic freedom for women, white and middle-class by default, anchored in consumption as a strategy (and leisure as a site) for the production of the self”. In the sense that Ivanovic, Sharapova and Williams are quite literally the poster-girls for both their WTA community and their sponsors, their public personae could be said to embody these consumer-based sensibilities. That is, on the one hand, they exist in the public sphere as representative models of a community that depends on the consumption of sport as a leisure activity for its existence, and on the other hand they enhance their personal fortune. I suggest that their public personae or representations are also exemplary models of postfeminism’s failure of relevance outside the narrow confines of its neo-liberal base.

           Figure 8:  http://www.anaivanovic.com/ sighted 6 April 2009

Figure 9:  http://www.serenawilliams.com/ sighted 6 April 2009

Figure 10: http://www.mariasharapova.com/defaultflash.sps sighted 6 April 2009

 Figure 11: http://www.mariasharapova.com/defaultflash.sps sighted 14 April 2009

   A Cluster of Promises

 Introducing her paper Cruel Optimism, Berlant (2006: 20) says “When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and to make possible for us.�� Thinking about desire in this way, she suggests, allows us to “encounter what is incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality, but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things the object promises” (Berlant’s italics).

What do these tennis players offer in their promise clusters? Firstly, that they may be seen as objects of desire, they offer “themselves” – that is, some form of self, some personae groomed to appeal. Secondly, they offer signifiers of pieces of this self for sale by endorsing products. On 8 April, 2009 there was a tennis dress in the window of the University of Queensland Tennis Club shop exactly like the one Ivanovic had just worn in a tournament in Miami. On her home page Sharapova offers proximity via Sony, Nike and Cole Haan products. At 17 April 2009 her homepage URL led to the advertisement for Tag Hauer (Leonardo DiCapprio and Tiger Woods are their other representatives) seen in Figure 12. Williams’ home page has a Sponsors link that leads to a no-frills list of her sponsors with a paragraph description and links to their webpages. The bottom of her homepage, which on my PC requires a scroll down, announces her upcoming affiliation with HSN (the Home Selling Network) and one of the items on the bottom lock bar is Serena Williams Lip Balm.

Ivanovic’s sponsor and manager Dan Holzman suggests (Halloran, 2009) that Williams and Sharapova are unstable and unfinished; they are immodest, changed for the worse by their privileged circumstance; unnatural; and thus needing to be constantly in pursuit of more love and respect from their fans:

Selling Ivanovic requires little effort. Her image is faultless and she has remained an unchanged “modest girl”. “She’s not Little Miss Perfect but the nice thing about Ana is she is very natural. She is very different to, say, Jelena Jankovic, the Williams sisters. You look at Maria Sharapova, these people, they are thinking: ‘What can I do to be loved, to be more respected by my fans today?’” (Halloran, 2009)

After relaying the information that Ivanovic has the most visited website of any sportswoman in the world and tops polls based on pleasing body aesthetics, Halloran adds “Oh yes, let’s not forget she can play”. The reason for her appearance in the public vision – a sport played very well at an elite level – is thus reduced almost to a footnote with her body and image as main text. Here lies danger, because it has been noted (Smart, 2005: 195) that sports stars maintain their authenticity through “the quality of their playing performances, from their records of success in competition”  and authenticity is a more reliable and long-term, bankable asset than charisma.

 Figure 12: mariasharapova.com 17 April 2009

 Winning, itself attractive, is a pathway to celebrity – that is, recognition outside the sports fan-base – and thus endorsements. Endorsements as well as more income, provide more visibility for the player. By the nature of advertising it is her attachment to the endorsed product that is emphasised rather than a connection to success in the sport. The immense volume of print and electronic texts (Smart, 2005) on former player Anna Kournikova who won no WTA Tour singles titles but was in a highly successful doubles team with Martina Hingis at the height of Hingis’ career, reflects this snowballing effect which is ignited by desire and given momentum by public sphere normative aesthetic reiteration. It is not a question of deserving celebrity as surviving it. The brevity of Kournikova’s playing career (1995-2003) also shows the physical vulnerability of a sports-based career and the high stakes involved when the act of playing means risking injury that may prevent you from playing or end your career. Wertheim (2008) refers to Kournikova as a “one-woman international conglomerate that damn near hijacked women's tennis” and as “the tennis mercenary who allegedly made $50 million in off-court income before the age of 18”. On the other hand, the same article quotes current Top 10 player Svetlana Kusnetzova as saying that “Anna showed there was possibility through tennis" and that “Nathalie Tauziat, a higher-ranked but less publicized WTA player at the time, called Kournikova, ‘a blonde windfall’." One of the changes that Anna Kournikova’s ground-breaking and successful bartering of the self brought about was the dependence on sex and particularly on an individual player as the object of desire du jour to draw people to the game. Illustrative of this is the following quote from the Financial Times during Wimbledon 2004 – a tournament often referenced when Williams and Sharapova play each other:

The future of women's tennis arrived yesterday, in the nick of time, to rescue a Wimbledon fortnight in danger of collapsing from exhaustion, predictability and (from the British point of view) post- traumatic stress… Suddenly, along came Maria Sharapova of Russia, barely 17 years old, and earmarked by male tennis-watchers from the start of the tournament as one to watch, for reasons that had nothing to do with her tennis… With her long blonde hair, long legs and slit skirt, Sharapova was an obvious poster girl to succeed Anna Kournikova even before it became clear that she could play a bit. And, by jiminy, tennis needs her. (Engel, 2004)

It is not Sharapova that will save women’s tennis, this piece implies, but the male gaze. In this sense this writer denies agency to all women. Firstly, he denies the worth of the game, the product if you will, of the female players. Then he denies the power and even presence of a female audience. Again there is the supremacy of being a deserving heteronoarmative object of desire over being able to “play a bit”.

 Constrictions to the Search for a Cohesive Identity

 These contesting identities exemplify, to my mind, the postfeminist “double entanglements” that McRobbie (2004: 254-255) finds “manifest in popular and political culture”. The first of these double entanglements is “the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life … with the processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations”. The second “encompasses the co-existence of feminism as at some level transformed into a form of Gramscian common sense, while also fiercely repudiated, indeed almost hated”. As I have argued (Wical, 2006b: 92) women in popular cultures must avoid being “static relics or icons” and instead ensure that “they are active sites of the tensions between tradition and progress driving all popular cultures”. Tradition and progress must be present in audience-determined amounts. This reflects Amossy’s stereotype with “remnants” model where the remnants individuate without detracting from the hold of the stereotype in the cultural cognisance.

McRobbie’s entanglements present a tandem set of unsustainable paradoxes particularly in the case of women in popular culture, dependent as it is on a respectful approach to origin mythologies allied to an energetic investment in progress. The contradictory or combative nature of the twinned concepts of conservative values in- and a liberal practice of- domesticity, sexuality and family has destructive side effects such as a reductive approach to feminism. This we see reflected in the second pair of entanglements. Here the signifiers of feminism constructed by those with a vested interest in its erasure are read uncritically by a generation luxuriating in its achievements. These are not mutually sustaining pairs with a potential to form a driving progressive force. Instead, they hold a destructive, immobilising potential. Instead of celebrating an origin mythology on which a tradition can be built using narratives of respect, sportswomen are often viewed (Sabo, 2007: 62), through the lens of “adrocentric assumptions and their resultant biases”.  This is exacerbated for the television audience because of the mediation; because the television audience is watching the broadcast rather than the game as does a spectator in the stadium. That is, the television audience isn’t watching as much as they are being shown. Interactivity such as the view and audio functions offered by Fox Sports in some broadcasts when assessed from this viewpoint can be seen as an allowance rather than choice. Similarly, in a cultural sense, gender allowances need to be recognised and approached as boundary markers instead of freedoms. Necessary athletic traits such as competitiveness, speed, power and ambition would be some masculine-marked yet mitigable allowances. Exploited correctly, I argue that these markers can become strategic points on the gender performance boundary: gateways to new avenues of identity presentation. The reconstitution of these boundaries as porous is an important step in building a strong, sustainable, yet flexible stereotype.

Gender, Sex and Sexuality Anxieties in the Contemporary Australian Context

 Elite sport in the early twenty-first century is a Foucaldian nightmare of discipline and surveillance. Communities of people mostly under the age of 35 go about their work under the super-panoptic scrutiny of the mass media (and thereby the mass audience), their coaches, event management, their sponsors, Associations or Leagues. Everything from weight, height, age and performances to personal habits are recorded and stored. Shogun (1999: 18-19) points out that elite athletes are not just objects but also products of technologies of discipline. “These technologies are ��constraints on action’ that, by circumscribing space, time and modality of movement, produce skilled athletes who exercise power when performing these skills.” Many sport spaces – especially the tennis court which is central to this paper – reflect this highly constrained and disciplined nature. Pointedly, perhaps, transgression of the tennis court boundaries is acknowledged with shouts of “Out!” and/or “Fault!”. Women who play at elite level on the Sony Ericcson Women’s Tennis Association Tour are, additionally, guided in matters as diverse as what constitutes a woman to questions allowable at press conferences and off-court behaviour. The Sony Ericcson WTA Tour 2008 Official Rulebook is just under 400 pages long (the 2009 edition is 446 pages) outlining rules, exemptions, and penalties. It is hardly surprising that when something unexpected happens in sites of such constraint that it is highly visible.

 It’s worth taking a moment to discuss the contemporary relationship between women’s sport and the Australian media using an incident from the 2008 ANZ Championship Netball season as a test case. Although it is something of a segue I believe it to be illustrative of mass media attention drawn by a (potentially) queer moment. Here, the assumptive heteronormativity of the two protagonists guides the narrative away from discussions of sexuality and into a discussion of tactics and sporting rivalry. It is informative to contrast the media reaction to this kiss to that of the reaction to Amelie Mauresmo kissing her girlfriend in 1999 at the Australian Open (see Appendix 2 and Miller, McKay and Martin, 1999).

As background to the incident, Netball Australia (2008: 8) claims 1.2 million participants in 5000 clubs and 8000 schools nationally with 318,241 being registered members. The Australian national team is the World Champion. 2008 was the first year of the trans-Tasman ANZ Championship. The protagonists of this story are prominent players in both of these arenas. Sharelle McMahon is the current Australian captain and co-captain of her club side the Melbourne Vixens. Netball Australia (Netball Australia, 2008: 4) regards McMahon as a “revered goal shooter”. Blonde, quick, and composed, McMahon is arguably the stereotypical Australian netballer. Mo’onia Gerrard is a defender. She acted as Australian captain in 2008 when McMahon was injured, also winning the inaugural Liz Ellis Diamond (Australia’s highest individual netball honour) in that year. She plays for the Adelaide Thunderbirds. A Tongan Australian, Gerrard is generally presented as volatile (Keller, 2009; Pearce, 2007; Scott, 2008) – as “intensely aggressive”, “the most ferociously athletic defender in Australian netball” and “fiery”.

 At the beginning of a netball game players jockey for position with their direct opponents in preparation to receive or block access to the pass from the Centre that starts each passage of play. In round three of the inaugural ANZ Championship season the Vixens and Thunderbirds met and McMahon and Gerrard lined up in direct opposition to each other. Footage of the incident (Channel 10, 2008) shows that Gerrard placed her body between McMahon and the centre of the court and was pressing McMahon toward the sideline. McMahon kissed Gerrard’s cheek causing Gerrard to pull away. McMahon seems immediately amused. Gerrard appears surprised then smiles while backing away as McMahon doubles over laughing. Is this a queer moment? Is it, in Cauldwell’s definition (Caudwell, 2006: 145),  a momentary “disruption of normative sexuality and a dislocation of the regime of heteronormativity that can be understood as queer”?

 A month later when the teams met again McMahon, when questioned (Peart, 2008b), described what happened thus:

We often muck around together, but the way she attacks the centre pass, she doesn’t give you any space. She was doing that and the game hadn’t even started. I don’t know why I thought (giving her a kiss) was the way to go about it. She was up in my face and rather than push her out of the way, I thought I’d give her a kiss on the cheek. Mo’on just laughed but it did make her walk to the other side of the court ... and then she proceeded to get best on court. So, no, it probably wasn’t the way to go.

 In the same article, Gerrard presents her perspective: “I was trying to get into her face a little before the start and she just threw it back at me with that kiss. I just laughed because she got me. She looked worse doing it than me receiving it.” Her attitude towards the incident seems in a constant state of evolution. On the day Gerrard is quoted (AAP, 2008) as saying “I’m not into the kiss. I hope she doesn’t do it again.”  At interview later in the year (Scott, 2008), Gerrard had the following response. (I’ve included the questions and answers exactly as published. Scott’s questions are in bold, Gerrard’s answers in plain text.)

In round three of the ANZ Championship, you’re in Sharelle McMahon’s face and she plants a kiss on your cheek mid-game. What was going on there? Everyone’s favourite, eh! I have no idea where that came from because she’s not the kind of person who’s … out there. So to pull that out, it took me by surprise. But it was good. At least she had a laugh about it.

Obviously backfired on her – Adelaide won the game and you were voted best on court. Yeah, there was something going on with that kiss … Hopefully she’ll give me another one next year. Closer to the mouth, with a bit of lippy on … (laughs).

Gerrard seems here (in the heteronormative male oriented Inside Sport) more than happy to play up the queer moment aspects of the situation and also to anticipate the next kiss. This is contrary to her first two responses (AAP, 2008; Peart, 2008b) where she was initially distancing herself from the incident, then concerned with the tactical and perceptual connotations of the kiss (and worried about how it may have looked). Scott takes care to situate Gerrard firmly in the male gaze and under familial male influence at the beginning of the article: “She brims with ’tude and smokes in a cocktail dress. Her brother Mark is a Wallaby [a member of the Australian national rugby union team], her cousin Wycliff Palu is a Wallaby, her Dad owns a brewery in Tonga.” Also of note Scott’s incorrect assertion that the incident came “in the middle of the game” removing the kiss from its (tactical) context.

Of interest here is the portrayal of an intense, physical rivalry between athletic young women who are presented as two very different, distinct and complex entities with a close but nuanced relationship. AAP (AAP, 2008) reported that

Australian team-mates and fierce state rivals Sharelle McMahon and Mo’onia Gerrard gave the most exciting match-up of the game. What started with a playful kiss, exploded into a fierce, physical battle in which Adelaide’s Gerrard came out on top.

The language in this summary emphasises the intense physicality of elite netball, a game that, although nominally non-contact, demands that opponents spend a large percentage of court time well within each others’ personal space. Additionally, I don’t think it’s overstating the case to suggest that the language used here is at least somewhat sexually charged (a “playful kiss” “exploded” and “Gerrard came out on top”). The usually highly gendered nature of the use of the war motif is also swept aside with the application of the phrase “fierce physical battle”.

Netball is a sport that (when it does resonate) exists in the Australian consciousness as a sport played by heteronormative women. For instance the research report commissioned by Netball Australia Motivations and Barriers to Women Participating in Sport and Netball (AC Neilsen, 2007: 28) divides players into three life stages: children, teenagers and mothers. According to this report (AC Neilsen, 2007: 20) teenagers become more self-conscious “as an awareness and an interest in the opposite sex develops”. This unthinking heteronormatising would seem to run counter to the stated Netball Australia policy as reported by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. In their survey of cultural diversity and racism in Australian sport (Oliver, 2006: 119)  Netball Australia submitted that “The organisation makes decisions based on ‘principles of equity so that individuals are not affected negatively by ability, body shape, disability, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, geographical location and socioeconomic status’.” Further, in an example of the popular culture imagining of netball, the Australian film Two Girls and a Baby (Simpson, 1998) has Cath (who is about to begin the artificial insemination process) explaining to her partner Liz why she has begun to wish Liz’s chosen sport was netball not cricket:

 I have a theory. Straight girls play netball because it only takes an hour and a half to play and that’s as long as their husbands will look after the kids at any one time. Cricket takes six hours ...

Eng (2006: 56) points to the ability of heterosexual discourses to overwrite any others – even within the “homosocial arenas with a great deal of body intimacy” provided by sex segregated team sport culture – as a measure of heteronormativity’s enormous cultural power. In the ‘netball kiss’ scenario this heteronormative overwriting with its attendant gender strictures supplies avenues for on the one hand mitigation as tactical diversion (Peart, 2008b)  and on the other hand titillation (Scott, 2008) in sports journalism narratives.

As an action/reaction scenario between two individuals this incident is in and of itself a contained entity belonging to a very specific temporal and spatial context. Rebroadcasting the kiss in repeated slow motion (Network Ten, 2008) as the highlight of the (hotly contested) game on a sporting roundup show indicates its special nature. The incident is also referred to as part of commentators’ building of the rival relationship between Gerrard and McMahon as the core of the rivalry between their teams (although this is a disputed claim). This relationship is built on the notion of opposites made easy by their direct opposition to each other on the court and the unspoken white/non-white dynamic. McMahon is presented (Peart, 2008a, c) as a highly regarded, controlled, responsible, driven young woman; Gerrard as (Keller, 2009; Pearce, 2007) “fiery”, “a free spirit” and “a weirdo”. Pearce reports further that:

Gerrard acknowledges she is different from a “normal netballer”, whatever that may be, yet struggles for a specific self-analysis. “I don't know what you'd call me … definitely not corporate … maybe more urban," she laughs, before heading off to work as a "tan technician" at the salon she co-owns in Bondi.

 Working as an antithetical pair, the energy generated by Gerrard and McMahon’s presented relationship as fiercely competitive rivals becomes part of the power driving this sport’s perception in the wider culture.  McMahon, elder and national team captain, is arguably the hyper-normative netballer, the stereotype as I have suggested. The strength of her identification to the core product mitigates such remnant transgressions as, as one journalist called it (Murdoch, 2008), “the infamous kiss”. Gerrard’s stated distance from this core whilst actually being a prominent member of the community marks her as a signifier of inclusivity. Her participation in the Fox Sports promotion (Fox Sports, 2008) for their coverage of the inaugural ANZ Championship season under the slogan “The game has changed” implicates her as an agent of that change. It also indicates that the game is the focal point of the broadcast. Both Gerrard and McMahon are most commonly referred to as elite players and supreme athletes and it is within this sphere that their relationship takes on a particular clarity. Former Australian captain and most-capped Australian netballer Liz Ellis has said (Network Ten, 2009) that Gerrard uses her performance against McMahon as a yardstick to measure her own form. Representation of the relationship between these two exploits a proximity built on fierce intent and mutual respect and a distance underlined by race, known life facts and personality traits. The space is thus created between these opposites for a range of identities amongst their colleagues, also united by the game they play. Indications are that from within a social context traditionally perceived as heternormative, netballers may, in close physical proximity and without cultural penalty, display opposition, aggression, ambition, determination, and affection.

Gendered Space

 In the remainder of this chapter I discuss the possibility of identity representation adaptation from the netball community into the world of elite tennis. Obvious differences can be illuminating. Questions arise regarding spatiality, race, economy, individuality, nation and community. Overarching all emerges the manifest folly of approaching women’s sport as a single entity – whether from a sporting association, academic or media perspective.

Space

 The geometry tells us that tennis courts (23.77m x 8.23m) are around 139 square metres smaller than netball courts (30.5m x 15.25m). In a singles tennis match each player has 97.8 square metres to manoeuvre the ball into. A net separates the players, physical contact occurring only in the customary salutations at the beginning and end of matches. Mathematically, netball courts allow 7 square metres per capita. However, the rules dictate that no player is allowed access to the whole court. On a netball court a player has six people to help them win and one direct, positional opponent. In tennis the single object of each player present is to see that they win. Professional sport is played to be watched. The playing surface is a restricted area of activity and becomes the focal point for both the spectators in the ranked and raked seating and the television cameras.

A netball match begins with a centre pass. The Centre of one team holds the ball while standing in a small circle drawn in the centre of the court. Around her (but outside the centre third of the court until the whistle blows) the other players jostle aggressively for prime position to accept or intercept her pass. Two referees (most usually women) stand at the sidelines in the centre third. The spectators offer encouragement.

In contrast to this court full of colour and movement, the tennis court (see Figure 13) is empty and still at the beginning of a match. Both players stand outside the baseline – the server must, according to the rules.

Figure 13: First serve, Australian Open Championship match 2007, 7Sport Broadcast

The court is surrounded by officials, one at each end of each of the lines (except the service line, now monitored by machine) and a team of young adults and children who retrieve and supply the balls. All are presided over by the chair umpire seated high above the court. The chair umpire demands silence should convention not still the spectators. This use of space further directs the attention to the players with the ball as do the television cameras. In the case of team sports the camera view is wider to encompass the action of the other players with the ball holder only momentarily of single interest. In tennis the server is the focus of many views as she prepares to serve. Her body is fragmented by extreme close-ups. In the snapshot of the shot transition from close up to long shot in Figure 14 we can see that Williams’ close-up is terminated before she enters the playing space. As Sharapova rises to begin her first service game she is captured in close up from the moment she rounds the Umpire’s chair (Figure 15) until she turns from receiving the ball to approach the base line (Figure 12). In commentary, Roberts reads Sharapova as confident almost implying that a close up makes the viewer privy to her thoughts.

This kind of fragmentation of women, Allen argues (1997: 72-73), carries in it possibilities of a perfect whole  that does not challenge “mainstream” and heteronormative boundaries. The long shot which diminishes size (as in Figure 16) and the close up both make it impossible for the viewer to determine the players’ size. The view from high above enhances the diminution. Whether they are tiny figures surrounded by watching crowds or whether their features loom large on the screen courtesy of zoom lenses one can never ignore the fact that these women stand alone under intense, probably oppressive scrutiny. The rules, the space and the television coverage are all discourses that separate these women from each other, from their supporters in the crowd and from their colleagues who have fallen by the wayside in the preceding weeks.

Figure 14: Williams to serve, first game, Australian Open Championship match 2007, 7Sport Broadcast

Figure 15: Sharapova approaches the court, second game, Australian Open Championship match 2007, 7Sport Broadcast

Figure 16: Sharapova turns to serve, second game, Australian Open Championship match 2007, 7Sport Broadcast

 Individuation

 As the repeated occurrence of sporting superstars who attract their own fans and sponsorships suggests, heightened individuation is not necessarily anathema to community success at either club or league level. Aesthetics and charisma function as enhancements to a perception of authenticity assigned to the endorsing athlete. Authenticity as a sports star comes from performing at a high level in your sport. This seems to run counter to celebrity culture that subordinates performance capability and capacity to charisma and aesthetics. Turner, Bonner and Marshall (2000: 164-165) suggest that, increasingly, “celebrities are called on (and do) carry meaning in situations far beyond what might reasonably be seen to be their professional expertise” and that, further, cultural anxiety arises out of the opacity of the process that places them in that position. Tennis broadcasts often feature pictures of a player’s “entourage” or, as commentator Roberts has it Williams’ “camp” signifying clearly the existence of a complex, militaristic network whilst rendering it no less opaque (See Figure 17). This shot prompts the following dialogue between commentators Austin and Roberts:

Roberts: There is Serena’s camp lead by her Mum Oracene.

Austin: Oracene Price is in the red cap. The sponsor in the middle. And then her agent – the blonde. Jill Smuller a former player (Roberts grunts in acknowledgement) is there as well.

This in stark contrast to Sharapova’s father alone in her player’s box (Figure 18). Figure 17: Snapshot, Channel 7 broadcastFigure 18: Snapshot, Channel 7 broadcast

This shot of Sharapova’s father (Figure 18), shown just moments after showing Williams’ player box prompts this exchange:

           Austin: There’s Yuri Sharapov, Maria’s dad. And coach.

           Roberts: (laughs) Looking calm as usual.

           Austin:  Yes. The match hasn’t started yet

          (They both laugh)

If Turner et al. are close to the mark then which of these pictures (and commentaries) raises less anxiety?   As I have said, in the case of Williams’ “camp” the viewer is made aware of the machinery of cultural production as represented by the two white women sitting side by side in contrast with the mother, the means of reproduction. The tone of the commentators indicates all named have serious purpose. It leaves one to question who the rest of the people are (although astute viewers would have recognised the young man in the sunglasses as the one involved in the watch/cheating controversy earlier in the tournament). Sharapov, on the other hand, seems an object of amusement. He is the only part of the Sharapova apparatus that is exposed.  

At the beginning of the broadcast, tournament attendees are asked “who they like”. This question is multi-textured. It could refer to which woman they think likely to win or which they prefer in a more general sense. This line of questioning reflects the high proportion of sport broadcasting of team sports. That is, especially in Melbourne and on Channel 7, it is reflective of the tribal following of AFL football teams where loyalty and a sense of belonging to a club and love of the game are often difficult concepts to separate. Sports played in Australia that do not involve Australian players attract less spectators and viewers. Most of the advertising that exposes Williams and Sharapova to the wider culture in the United States and Europe is not prevalent in Australia. Neither of them are particularly adroit media performers. All of these factors point towards the wisdom of promoting the contest in this case rather than the individuals involved.

Individuation can also serve to break up the appearance of a same-sex community thus eliding old and deep seated anxieties about women-only environments. Beccalossi (Beccalossi, 2009: 116) gives some insight into the history of this anxiety:  

From the second half of the 1890s the Italian scientific community turned its attention equally to female homosexuality in “normal” environments such as schools. This turn was not entirely unprecedented. Even before sexual science had taken shape, a few Catholic writers had paid serious attention to the evils fostered by women-only environments and intense female friendships.

In the WTA community there is a case to argue that the use of the doubles team of the Bonderenko sisters (ranked 42 and 43) over higher ranked teams in the WTA’s Superhero promotion could speak as much to the comfort of the familial as to normative aesthetics. Doubles teams by definition de-individuate players so that sometimes subversive behaviours are allowed or slip through. For example, elite singles player Svetlana Kuznetsova speaking, it’s safe to assume, with quite a good deal of irony, was quoted on the WTA website ("Kusnetsova, Mauresmo Win Doubles in Miami," 2009) after winning a tournament with out lesbian Amelie Mauresmo (both of whom had been in a singles “slump”): "We want to become doubles stars, specialists. And mixed too. Somebody will become a man and we will play mixed, because we don't want to play with other partners. We have too much fun."

Kuznetsova is not an out lesbian. To borrow from Plymire and Forman’s (2001: 1-2) article on fan’s perceptions about the identity of American basketball coach and broadcaster Cheryl Miller, whether Kuznetsova is a lesbian “is not a question asked or answered here”. Again, to borrow from Plymire and Forman, the point to be made is that Kuznetsova’s “public persona allows lesbian fans an opportunity to weave her into a discourse about lesbian identity”.  Kuznetsova seems to be not only queering her identity as a player but also playing with wide culture markers of gender and sexuality. There is a reflection of the play and risk dynamic of sport that is reflected in this statement that is worth exploring because it is this connection and cohesiveness between off and on-court personae that I believe to be essential towards a more widespread reception of sportswomen.

Firstly, Kuznetsova toys with the notion of the primacy of the image and far more lucrative position of singles players. “We want to become doubles stars, specialists.” This would also seem to address media speculation that both their singles careers may have plateaued – a faux admission of defeat in that arena.  It is next that she enters uncharted waters: “And mixed too” she adds, meaning they’ll play mixed doubles.  “Somebody will become a man”, she goes on to explain. This is a particularly daring direction considering Mauresmo’s very early career encounters with elite players Martina Hingis and Lindsay Davenport (Hinds, 1999; Hogan, 1999) who referred to playing her as like playing a man. Kuznetsova mines further into this queer moment by explaining that this change would be necessary because “we don’t want to play with other partners” (in this case men). Kuznetsova is an experienced media performer from a family of professional athletes. Although only 24 when she made this statement in early 2009, Kuznetsova had turned pro in 2000. Her early doubles partners included Mauresmo, Australian player Alicia Molik and celebrated veterans Martina Navratilova and Aranxta Sanchez Vacario. Between 2004 and 2009 she spent very little time ranked outside the top ten and much of it inside the top five. Neither is she shy. Australian doubles player and commentator Todd Woodbridge has described her as “one player who always has time for a chat”. One can surmise with some certainty that she had a level of awareness of what she was saying. Such overt playfulness with gender and sexuality is rarely represented by sports media and especially when covering women-only communities. Here Kuznetsova plays with the concept of fluidity between not just femininities and masculinities but also between male and female. This sort of sophisticated play with the community’s flaws and proclivities should be encouraged. Over this narrative there also hangs the tension between playing for love of the game (for fun) and playing to win (for money). The common perception of an authentic player is that the former leads to the latter. This equation also fits with the idea (Smart, 2005: 194) of the industry of the sporting celebrity authentic being contingent on reiterable “miraculous” sporting performance. Echoes of the heightened value of consistent excellence run throughout my main text serving on the one hand as part of the Sharapova victory narrative arc and on the other hand as evidence that Williams had come as far as she “deserved”.

Economy and Culture

 Products that are distasteful or embarrassing to WTA Tour members including but not limited to, tobacco, firearms, pornographic materials or similar items shall be prohibited as a Player sponsor, without prior approval of the WTA. (Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, 2009: 100)

 This almost carte blanche approach to sponsorship by the Association reflects the hyper acquisitional, capitalist nature of popular cultures. When Justine Henin, the number one ranked player in the world, retired in 2008 she said (Ford, 2008) “I have more money than I can use in three lifetimes”. She was 25 years old. She turned professional at the beginning of 1999. Just by her winnings she had earned almost USD19.5 million. This points to elite players leading from the front on issues of identity representation. Whilst some would say they have the most to lose, there is an argument that these are the players most able to afford a drop in income.  Smart suggests (2005: 182) that Henin, for example, was used by adidas to distance itself from Kournikova as perception of her authenticity as a player waned. Again, here is an example of the hyper-feminised and the athlete being seen as opposites in a not dissimilar way to Sharapova and Williams. Logically, between these two positions there should exist a broad band of identity choices. But despite the perception of Henin as an elite athlete and as strong minded, she was unremarkedly heteronormatised. That is, her heteronormativity was just as assumptive as Kournikova’s although almost completely erased whilst Kournikova’s was assumptively presented in a soft-pornographic opacity. A queer theory approach would therefore suggest that in terms of identity presentation Henin and Kournikova sit closer together than their common representation as opposites would have the wider culture believe. This is revelatory in that it explains why the vast plain of identity difference between presented opposites is not exploited – because the distance is a fabrication. This is just one way in which cultural economy working as gatekeeper impacts negatively on the player community making them seem lacking in “personality”. That is, making them seem either simply copies of the stereotype with no individuating remnants or all individuation with no cohesion to a central binding core.  

Race

 Go Back To The Cotten [sic] Plantation Nigger. (Banner in the stands when Althea Gibson walked on court to defend her US Open title in 1958)

 That’s the way to do it! Hit the net like any Negro would! (Racist male heckling Serena Williams before she served at the 2007 Sony Ericsson Championships in Miami)  (McKay and Johnson, 2008)

 McKay and Johnson begin their paper on representations of African American sportswomen with these two quotes separated temporally by 50 years but in sentiment distressingly proximate. Race, of course, impacts on gender performance and on the readings of gender signifiers. In the previous chapter I discussed the lengths taken in the broadcast to “same” Sharapova and Williams – a slim white blonde Russian and a (relatively) short, muscular, African American respectively. As is often the case with race and non-heterosexualities the impact of race can be measured by the strength of the silence that surrounds it and the use of signifiers of non-white cultural stereotypes. McKay and Johnson (2008: 491) state their ambitions in writing their paper:

In this paper we use sport to encourage “white” people to deconstruct the privileged lens through which they construct and view “black” people. More specifically, we analyse how sections of the media have framed tennis champions Serena and Venus Williams as threats to sport’s racist and sexist regime.

In the previous chapter I also discussed differences drawn by the commentators using ingrained perceptions and racial stereotyping even in the face of evidence to the contrary – Williams the ghetto pugilist and Sharapova the trained ice maiden, for instance.  I also postulated that it is Williams’ race that allows her to be read as assumptive heteronormative – with the same “certainty” as Sharapova and Ivanovic – despite her muscular, non-heteronormative exterior. This allows her an amount of “gender leeway” that in muscular “white” players may be mitigated only by heightened presentations of normative femininities. Neither Williams’ powerful muscularity nor her aggression make any impact on her assumptive (hetero)sexuality.  This may indicate that the less “white” tennis becomes both in player and spectator and viewer aspects, the more identity narratives may open to it.

Nation

 Nation plays perhaps a surprisingly large part in a player’s identity presentation considering the nomadic nature of the career. Riordan and Kruger’s collection of overviews of sport in western European countries (Riordan and Kruger, 2003) strongly suggests that sport takes on a national, representative flavour tinged with variant degrees of political and cultural nuance. In the United States, nation has impacted on women’s sport through the imposition of Title IX, a federal tax law that stipulates equal opportunities for men and women in tertiary institutions.  Many players emerge from this collegiate system. In Australia there is no such collegiate system. Additionally, national identity and culture are slippery concepts for which, Bruce and Hallinan (2001: 259) suggest “popular culture symbols” are used as “markers”. In this context, global sporting success provides a transitory semblance of unity and stability. This is perhaps most evident by successive Prime Ministerial attendances at national cricket team matches. In a nation that has produced many Grand Slam champions but not many lately, nation does affect television audiences. An article in the Australian Financial Review (Clout, 2007) laid the blame for “slumping ratings for Seven Network’s coverage of the Australian Open tennis” on the fact that there were “no Australians plus no fairytales”. It is probably valid to question why Williams’ effort to return from time off due to injury and the violent death of her sister to win the championship failed to generate any media momentum as a “fairytale” but that is an investigation for another time. Here, our concerns are that Williams is an American and Sharapova is a Russian – even though she is introduced in the broadcast as “an American success story”. This is another narrative that Williams’ mythology plainly qualifies her for but from which she is barred while her Russian-born opponent is not.

The nationality of players is displayed after the players’ names on scoreboards and television graphics. Sharapova’s name is followed by the designation “(RUS)” but her national belonging has been hotly disputed territory. Her compatriots on the Tour, particularly took exception to her sudden interest in being part of the Russian Federation Cup team so as to qualify for the Olympic team. The BBC (Slater, 2005) was just one amongst many outlets who reported Svetlana Kuznetsova saying of Sharapova at the time: "She is more American than Russian. She speaks Russian with a coarse accent."  This murky or indeterminate citizenship is very different from the flexible citizenship Giardina (2001) outlines as such a vital part of Martina Hingis’ highly successful self presentation. This lack of belonging carries over into the WTA community – for both Sharapova and Williams. In the global context in which they operate Giardina has identified being able to belong to many places as advantageous. Belonging to the huge capitalist consumer organism that is the United States is Williams’ advantage in regard to endorsements. That she is not of the American WASP middle-class is arguably not (McKay and Johnson, 2008; Schultz, 2005).

Class

 Players have many similarities in their mythologies – particularly amongst the elite players: an early epiphany of a love for and/or aptitude to the game; childhoods spent practising and competing; high level parental investment; habitual privilege; sudden wealth. Williams and Sharapova’s origin mythologies are exemplifiers of common enough tales of sacrifice, family disruption and aspiration. But neither are players uncommon who come from the middle-classes. Class draws people together and sets them apart from the other players. Arguably, all elite players are part of the highly privileged celebrity class. Class has played a defining role in tennis tradition. Prior to what is referred to as the “Open Era” of tennis (before 1968), there were two circuits – amateur and professional. Amateur tennis was regarded as the sport of the social elite (Spencer, 1997: 367). Amateurs played the Grand Slam events, were ranked and represented their country and, at least officially, received only remuneration for expenses. Professionals played for money. (This division is still visible today in the discourses that surround playing for one’s country and playing for ones’ self and also in accusations of “cherry-picking” tournaments to play in.) Once these amateurs and professionals merged and payments were transparent disparities between pay for male and female players became visible. Spencer (Spencer, 1997: 368) regards this as the pivotal moment in the formation of the women’s tour:

It is not surprising that the top-ranked women threatened to boycott the 1970 Pacific Southwest Championships in response to the disparity in prize monies when the women’s purse constituted a mere one tenth of the men’s projected earnings. That boycott provided the impetus for top female stars to establish the inaugural women’s tour in what would become a distinctive subculture of professional women’s tennis.                                                      

Conclusion

 All these influences I have discussed have an impact on gender identity and representation. The thing that binds this community together – indeed the reason there is a community – is that they are all extremely talented tennis players. This means that they operate in an arena dominated by narratives of competition, individuality, muscularity, movement, strength, power, ambition and, increasingly, celebrity. That these narratives are in the wider community regarded as masculine (and as part of privileged male discourses) is part of what Halberstam (1998: 7) calls “the tyranny of language – a structure that fixes people and things in place artificially but securely”. The question that needs to be asked is: Can this tyrannic power be harnessed in the quest for change? Can language be re/used, that is, to fix people and things (in this case players and the game) in a more desirable position? This project argues for that possibility if gender fluidity can achieve any sort of traction in the wider community.

This chapter has outlined the exacerbation of troubled gender arising out of the active individuation of players for individual recognition and fiscal gain, and concerns for nation, race and class. All of these things seek to individualise players off-court. The players come together under the gaze of the wider community on the court where moments of confrontation take place within a culturally masculinised discourse. In contrast, the competition for endorsement monies is fierce with success leading to hyper-feminisation of the player. Players serve as the site for a very public contestation of femininities. This creates a communal representation that suffers from a lack of cohesion: it is the game that brings players together yet this is their most public field of both congregation and contestation.   This community thus often projects as one at war with itself. The next chapter investigates pathways forward based on and inclusive of a broader spectrum of gender performance.

Chapter 7:

Cohesion, Community, Difference: Setting Other Imageries

 Despite their successes in the battle to participate in the culture of sport, particularly competitive sport, women have nevertheless been unable to set another imagery against the prevailing one [of male dominance]. The question arises as to whether women actually have a chance of developing resistance to their prescribed feminine role in the “macho world of sport”, and if so, how these forms of resistance could be realised. (Palzkill, 1990: 221)

Organisational identities emerge from members’ collective values and experience, and help to provide the organisation and its members with a deeper, broader reason for being. (Harquail, 2007: 136)

You can buy my life on radio/ And order me by mail/ Not everything about me is for sale. ('For Sale', Chambers, 2004)

Narrative organisation hierarchizes the different aesthetic and idealogical discourses to produce a unifying, authoritative voice or viewpoint. Since in this argument narrative organization is patriarchal, the spectator constructed by the text is a male. (Gledhill, 1988: 65)

 In another culture (perhaps) this thesis could have been about three cohesive narratives from three interdependent, sublimated communities (women’s sport, sport media and women’s sports fans) that intertwine to make a strong discursive tradition.  I have argued in the preceding chapters that this is not the case here. That it is not is testament to the power of the dominant maleness of sport’s narratives and signs and the part they play in supporting dominant patriarchal discourses. Fragmented by the individuation of celebrity cultures, the continued dominance of normative aesthetics over athleticism, and cultural anxieties raised by women-only spaces, women’s sport narratives and signifiers fail to survive intact across community boundaries. Stereotypes, potentially quite ductile constructs, are used to constrain and normatise. In  a culturally conceived stereotype, space within the self-construct lies between “the calm comfort of realistic illusion”, the “naturalised model” where the observer “confuses the stereotyped forms with reality as he sees it” and the “irritation caused by the stereotype” which the same observer “denounces as excessive codification and distortion of reality” (Amossy, 1984: 689-690). This argues for an unexpected power and flexibility or freedom within a stereotype because within it there is room to accommodate difference and fluidity.  In this chapter I approach the main text studied in this project as more or less an advertisement for women’s tennis. Grow’s extensive study (Grow, 2006, 2008; Grow and Wolburg, 2006) of the advertising campaigns for Nike’s women’s brand during the 1990s while considering stigmas arising from signification transference of non-normative gender performance onto those watching, I investigate the possibilities of engagement with a female audience.

Same-ing

 Analysis of the introductory portion of the main text strongly points towards a ‘same-ing’ narrative process being   adopted.  The highlighted sections of the table indicate proximate comparison of the players that promotes expectation of and anticipation for a close-fought match. That is, these sections seek to engage the audience with the match rather than with the players using the proximity of their skills and fitness as indicators. The same-ing narrative that concentrates on the players cuts across the designations of survivor (Williams) and object of male desire (Sharapova) set in the music montages and visual evidence that these two women are strikingly different. Williams and Sharapova are presented as being noisy, having similar childhoods, attitude, enormous self belief, and a tennis dad. They are (both equally) larger than life; stars, queens, divas; phenomenal; experienced; predictable. Running underneath this same-ing is the strong narrative thrust of Sharapova (as likely winner) rising and Williams declining.

This lack of narrative cohesion closes down intertextual possibilities. The emphasis on viewing them as “stars”, “queens” and “divas” sets them apart. Such representational dissonance runs counter to the idea (Grow, 2006: [13]) that “weaving words and images into a cohesive series of signs that becomes a culturally resonant ad is crucial to the success of any advertising campaign”. Thus, she follows Barthes assertion (qtd. in Grow, 2006; Barthes, 1977) that: “In advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional; the signified of the advertising message is formed a priori by certain attributes of the product and the signified has to be transmitted as clearly as possible.”

The Importance of Being Earnest

 The aim of this thesis has been to identify impediments and suggest ways forward that may open up avenues of opportunity for the broadcast of women’s sport. It takes direction for the communal approach to identity construction partly from Lemke’s assertion  (2008: 20) that “projected identities are not solely the product of normalizing forces” and, further, that “our identities are the product of life in a community”. These two statements open up possibilities for intertextuality between the representations of the individual on the one hand and community identity on the other hand. Inherent in them is the acknowledgement and utilisation of difference rather than the erasure of it being an identifying aspect of community life. At the end of her article on the subculture of professional women’s tennis, Spencer (1997: 376) suggests that: “Although the performance of feminine behaviours facilitates the acceptance of the female sporting subculture, these performative behaviours and practices also lessen the resistant potential of that subculture.” In conclusion she asks “what becomes of a subculture that has been incorporated into the mainstream?” Preceding chapters of my thesis have pointed to weak, inconsistent and non-cohesive individual and community identity as being part of the result of this incorporation. This chapter rounds out the investigation of the use of tradition and stereotype to strengthen and progress community identity and reconstitute traits such as resistance and female masculinity as desirable components of community identity.

It has been noted (Tasker and Negra, 2007: 2-3) that postfeminism is a “dominating discursive system” across medias and “in many ways antithetical to the notion of an open society in which all members are valued in accordance with their distinct identities”. In her chapter ‘A Rough Guide to Butches on Film’ Halberstam (1998: 193) sights the disappearance of the tomboy film as a distinct genre as a symptom of cultural anxieties they raised:

It seems reasonable to suppose that the tomboy movie threatened an unresolved gender crisis and projected or predicted butch adulthoods...Girls in films tend to fight each other...They do not bond, they do not rebel, they do not learn, they do not like themselves, and perhaps most importantly, they do not like each other.

It is in this toxic atmosphere for female communities that this generation of professional tennis players has grown up. I propose here that the way forward may first start with a backward step beyond this period to unearth a tradition. I use tradition here in the more fluid, discursively dynamic sense of a popular culture past “continually reinterpreted to fit the changing needs of the present” (Peterson and Anand, 2004: 326). While the tradition operates as a gatekeeper, it also provides a repertoire that necessarily accrues options. That is, the longer the tradition stands, the more authenticities players should have to choose from. It is through choices from among these repertoires that players can construct their public personae.  This implies a self-aware, strategic choice on the behalf of the player as well as some complicity or at least acceptance on the part of the knowing viewer, a willingness to suspend disbelief, to play along if you will, to consume the constructed disguise as “real”. To that end I engage in what Sedgwick (1990: 23) called “nonce taxonomy” which she defined as “the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world”.

This project uses as its central case study a narrative in which others are embedded. My particular interest lies in the embedded identity narratives of the players. It also considers these identity narratives in terms of their community representational role. Additionally, all narratives are constructed as texts to be read, as products for consumption. Broadly, these narratives fall into at least one of the following categories of sporting narratives: Journalism; Celebrity; Promotion and Sponsorship. Because this thesis’s focus is gender identity, and the players who are the central subjects of my case study are women there is an inbuilt dissonance between subjects and narrative. Women’s professional tennis today is the end product of a community uncertain of how to brand itself, fragmented by the individualistic nature of the game they play and the conflicting agendas that plague all popular cultures. Grow (Grow, 2008, 2006; Grow and Wolburg, 2006) in her work on the relationship between gender and branding, articulates the dissonance that arises when the narratives of a sub-brand (in Grow’s work this is the Nike women’s sub-brand) run counter to the hegemonic narratives of the parent brand. In the previous chapter I underlined the function that product endorsement serves in refeminising the female athlete thus mitigating their “masculine” signifiers such as independence, mobility, and muscularity. I suggest the efficacy of a popular culture approach; that is, an emphasis on a rich and vital past on one hand and on the other hand a progression that is dependent on and indebted to these very traits.

A Clear and Present Legacy

 Much of the current off-court identity representation work of elite women tennis players is as the proximate, aesthetically pleasing object of desire for a brand – the “bait”, if you will, to draw the watcher’s eye to a product. These representations, I have further argued, are performed well within the boundaries of normative wider culture discourses of gender, sex and sexuality and are based on the exploitation of heteronormative body aesthetics seeming to run counter to their performances of athleticism. This kind of exposure leads to a celebrity identity only tenuously linked to tennis and runs the risk of implying that their tennis persona is somehow subjugated by its non-normativity. One only has to consider the massive body of soft-porn academia on Anna Kournikova. It has been said (Turner, Bonner and Marshall, 2000: 11-12) that “the celebrity is a combination of the commercial interests of a cultural industry and the shifting desires of an audience”. Turner, Bonner and Marshall further assert that “the celebrity is at their most active and significant when they mark a point of convergence” between a culture industry seeking to connect with a “fragmented mass audience” and an audience struggling to comprehend what to them likely seems a “fragmented and confusing culture”. In the Australian Open broadcast, Williams and Sharapova are both clearly linked by the prominence of the Nike Swoosh to the sports clothing company (and to each other in that context). Neither wear any sign of their affiliation with the WTA.

In his work on performing sporting culture and identity, Giardina (2005: 68-69) discusses the introduction of Martina Hingis as a popular culture presence through the narratives of  “the ‘mapping’ onto Chris Evert and the rise of ‘Girl Power’”. Hingis was, Giardina continues, “most notably mapped onto the legacy and media representations of Evert ... Being mapped onto Evert [instead of Hingis’ namesake Navratilova] opens the door for Hingis to begin to be established in the mainstream of contemporary (American) sporting culture. With Evert operating as an archetype that works to define Hingis as an emergent celebrity, Hingis becomes linked to ideas of femininity, grace, and success. Most importantly, though, is that she becomes linked to Evert in terms of an affective representation of traditional American values (read: heteronormative).” Importantly, Giardini points out “the fact that she isn’t American is irrelevant” and that Hingis “actively positioned herself” within what he calls the “empowered postfeminist discourse” of “Girl Power”. He nominates Hingis’ “flexible citizenship and heteronormative exterior” as the hard currency of her cultural capital. Giardina’s work identifies a number of key factors influencing the representation women’s tennis: the recognised primacy of the United States as a market; the non-communal nature of celebrity; player agency and the constructed nature of identity; the crucial balance and narrative intertextuality between the past/tradition of community (here embodied by Evert) and the present trends in the wider culture (in this case, Girl Power).

Individuation is firstly harmful to the community because it legitimises by imposition the unacknowledged ranking system of aesthetics, setting community members in competition against each other in a much more personal way. Secondly it is harmful to the broader culture as the ascendency of the aesthetic in this potentially subversive subculture capitulates to wide culture gender structures that underpin patriarchal western democratic cultures. As Boyle (2008: 180) points out, individual opacity is not a feminist achievement: “If feminism is equated with women’s agency, choice and subjectivity, then questions about gender, about structural inequalities, discrimination, oppression and violence are allowed to slip from view”. In other words individual success is rarely an impetus for women (or any minority) to be taken seriously. So though Sharapova and Williams may appear on the Forbes rich lists most of that money comes from endorsement deals – primarily, for many years, for both of them from Nike. Early in 2009 Williams’ relationship with Nike was in doubt (Kaplan, 2009): “One of the reasons for the changes is the decline of tennis in America. The current economy is also a factor.” But Kaplan also posits another, more embodied, reason for Williams’ dilemma: “Nike has plowed substantial resources in tennis into Maria Sharapova, so where Williams fits into the mix is unclear.” I showed in the previous chapter that while Sharapova was Amercanised in the sequence screened preceding the match broadcast, Williams was ghettoised. Since Evert, the trend to promote the white, American or Americanisable, heteronormatisable, daughter-positioned accredited model over the easily-othered has continued. The muscled, Communist-bloc born lesbian Navratilova; the towering, ungainly and outspoken Davenport; the African American Williams – all sublimated to the “easier sale” of Evert, Hingis and Sharapova into the vast American market.

Overregulated Identities

 The decline of the popularity of tennis in the United States presents a multi-faceted problem for the WTA Tour. Firstly, of course, is the financial aspect. Although the player group is becoming less American the organisation is based in Florida with a largely American corporate infrastructure. Many player, organisational and tournament endorsements are focussed on the massive capitalist consumer economy of the United States although China (Kaplan, 2009) is emerging as an important market. Conventional advertising, cultural and corporate structures struggle to address such plurality, particularly when marketing to women (Grow, 2006; Schaffer, 1988). Perhaps nothing illustrates the dire financial situation for sportswomen in general than the index entry under “women” in the third edition of Strategic Sport Marketing (Shilbury, Westerbeek, Quick and Funk, 2009) which simply (and in my terminology inaccurately) reads: “see gender differences”. Broadcasters, logically, lose interest quickly on the heels of sponsors.

The decline of interest in tennis in the United States – whether temporary or not – is also important in the sense that there now exists an acknowledged global audience. Let’s consider this in the light of Horne’s thinking about sport and consumer culture (Horne, 2006: 99) that the combined rise of neo-liberalism and globalisation has seen a corresponding rise in esteem for the “enterprising self” and more involvement in cultural governance from national governments. Tennis is perhaps a prime example of this. Each country has its own national tennis organisation (which has within it state, regional and club-based organisations). These national bodies are overseen by the International Tennis Federation. Additionally the men and women’s games have their own infrastructures – the International Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association. Also, each tournament (particularly the Grand Slam events) has its own organisational structure. Each of these bodies has its own set of agendas, rules and expectations. Similarly laden are the players and the game by other stakeholders on top of these entities that govern the game: sporting apparel and equipment companies, audiences, broadcasters and other media outlets. Additionally, Rowe (1995a: 112) suggests that sports agents and agencies, by being involved across all these sectors “can exert undue pressure on their clients to appear in the many made-for-TV sporting events for which they are responsible”. Interwoven through the discourses and structures of all these organisations are sets of cultural demands, boundaries and disciplinary measures. An audience or entity not from the United States, for example, operates outside the impact of Title IX on that country’s sporting psyche where the girl-jock is a recognised if not wholly accepted phenomenon.  Different cultural encodings may mean that women are either more or less than a becoming reality in sports. Additionally, this number of stakeholders is bound to produce clashing agendas and requirements. Certainly, the WTA approaches endorsement regulation very cautiously in the Rulebook (Sony Ericsson WTA Tour, 2009: 100).  

Agency and the Constructed

 All of these trajectories of influence impacting on identity representation and reception, I argue, is another reason to avoid depending on the instability of a single, accredited model to represent the sport.  Diverse theorists (Amossy, 1984; Butler, 1990; Giddens, 1991; Peterson and Anand, 2004) to a greater and lesser degree agree on the instability and constantly decaying nature of identity. Articulating Butler’s legacy, Hey (2006: 439) concludes that “performativity conceptualises the paradox of identity as apparently fixed but inherently unstable, revealing (gender) norms requiring continual maintenance...These norms of behaviour (e.g. how girls [ought to] walk and talk) or how they (should) take up dress as a gendered aesthetic (e.g. looking like a ‘normal’ woman) operate ideologically to structure the fictive solidity of gender.” This fictivity underlines the necessity to remember that when reading signs their meaning is determined by how the signification resonates with one’s own fictitiousness. It also allows me to approach identity – in this case represented identity – as text and, more excitingly, as a work of fiction. Thus truth and reality are less important concepts than the ability to accurately assess the capacity of audience complicity. Commonly, when an audience ‘reads’ a projected or overt persona (a mediated representation for instance) as text, it responds to, Amossy (1984: 693) tells us, “all the constituents of the description which correspond to the pre-existing pattern . . . rubbing out . . . [a]ll nuances which are not immediately relevant”. Further, these rejected nuances, or “remnants” are most often written off as individuality or influences of the covert persona: as “a pure effect of reality”.   The pre-existing pattern is the stereotype (Amossy, 1984: 689) – a  cultural model that has the capacity “to repeat itself while being frozen … a prefabricated structure … It’s pre-constructed forms provide representation with foundations; they guarantee its possibility and legibility at the same time”.  

This suggests the importance of an apparently stable model to which all members of community or group can adhere. Having something in common differs from being the same. Commonalities can accommodate diversities because of the less stringent nature of similarity. I argue that there needs be an elasticity in the representation of sportswomen. That is, in just the same way that some players are better thinkers, faster, more accurate and stronger minded than others it should be accepted that players perform gender on a scale.  I argue that it would be healthier for the community if this performance scale be acknowledged and commented on rather than erased. Additionally, if the individual representations are of a broader scope, then the community identity is not anchored to one, proscriptively gendered model but rather potentially open and accommodating. The community, that is, can have its own distinctive character built around the sport that forms its core and the people who play it.

The Player Ranking System sees itself in flux quite often as injuries or form slumps and surges impact on a player’s success. I have mentioned elsewhere in this work that this is sometimes used as a sign of weakness in the women’s game (as opposed to the domination of Roger Federer on the men’s ITP tour, for example). Imposing this sort of “sense of order” on sport – which is concealed-outcome driven – seems counter-intuitive. Perhaps then, in any re-construction of the representation of women’s sport and sportswomen a discourse can be in-built based on an appreciation of the unpredictable both in the game and in the individual. I have elaborated elsewhere (Wical, 2006b) on the importance of a believable and sustainable identity narrative for the survival of a popular culture community.  This model does not rely on homogeneity but on the capacity to individualize and interweave progressive and traditional subcultural discourses in a balanced way. The audience then becomes invested as they are complicit in recognizing as the continuation of a tradition what is actually a constant adjustment to accommodate their changing desires.  The meaning of performers and performances are constructed both by and for the gaze of their audience.

Television offers the same window to many gazes. In this panoptical reversal many eyes are trained on a single point. The power rests with the agent of surveillance to render the meanings written. Thus, as Bagley (2001: 449) puts it in his work on television as text, “the text, whether printed word, film or television image, or even a cockfight, is anything but a monolithic determinant of meaning”. So, if the audience, on the one hand is a group of individuals with some things in common and on the other hand the text is not wholly prescriptive, there is flexibility and therefore space for the manipulation of meaning. What transformations take place in this space are likewise both text and audience driven. In this case, outside texts are employed – advertising, newspaper and magazine and television articles, websites and word of mouth all impact each other and the reader in an intertextual way. All these supporting texts associate players with things (cars, watches, electrical goods), people (family, friends, lovers) and places (residence, holiday destination, home town) outside the world of the tennis tournament. Just as positive audience feelings about the player may influence them to be attracted to products or not, so attraction to the player may be influenced by things, people and places associated with them.  Sitting watching broadcast sport is seldom all an audience member does – that is, they also interact with the world in other ways – and some of this knowledge will often be involved in the reading of players’ representations. As we have seen elsewhere, those players who excel in the manipulation of extraneous identity data such as Hingis can achieve a positive high profile that can often mitigate or render invisible unpalatable behaviours (see, for instance, Appendix 2 for Hingis’ part in the ‘outing’ of Amelie Mauresmo).

The Promise of Community?

 Television broadcast of “live” sports often purports to be in technological pursuit of the stadium experience – of “being there”. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. They chase, in part, what has been identified by performance scholars (Auslander, 1999: 2; Stoddard, 2009) as “the faulty promise of unity and the “community” that live performance is often said to create” in situations that are “predicated on separation and difference, on the very mediation of the gap between performer and spectator”.  I argue that the promise of community and other representations are manufactured in this gap and that the product forthcoming is what the audience accepts as knowing or rejects as “spin”. Mining Stoddard’s view (Stoddard, 2009) on witnessing the performance of pain more deeply we can begin more fully to understand the problems associated with mediating in the context of unease which, I argue, is the consistent factor in the broadcast of women’s sport. Here are some of the problematics of the performance of pain that Stoddard  highlights:

 Pain makes us uneasy.

Pain is a phenomological problem that exists on the margins of what can be represented.

The efficacy of pain’s performance is dependent upon the authentication of its existence by the spectator.

Pain is perceived as both live and mediatised, real and fake and this doubt triggers a longing to know for certain.

Representations of pain, whether live or mediatised, pose particularly problematic challenges to questions of authenticity.

Pain is not a fact or an image, but a historically and culturally situated experience.

  I suggest that, predicated on their similar arousal of cultural unease, the word “sportswomen” can be interchanged in the above list for “pain”. My argument then becomes this: Sportswomen make us uneasy because they exist on the margins of what can be represented by what we culturally and historically experience as woman. Representations of sportswomen pose particular challenges to questions of authenticity – a value that is spectator dependent. The model/player dichotomy sees sportswomen perceived as both real and fake and the subsequent doubt triggers a longing to know that is often either unresolved or resolved in a negatively impacting way. Sport is a resolution-based entertainment evoking a clarity about ranking that is arguably missing from the wider culture into which the diminution of success and the lack of clarity do not rest easily. In her conclusion, Stoddard (2009) suggests that “by touching the spectator where it hurts [one can] make space to speak to widespread apathy in the face of subtle violences that often remain unmarked: The commodification of identity, the disciplinary demands of patriarchy, and the challenge of ethically facing the other and her suffering”. For the remainder of this chapter I explore the possibilities that this work has made evident to me.

On the Margins of What May Be Represented

 In another project (Wical, 2006b) I have investigated the unease created when women move – of the signification by stillness of a controlled, passive notion of femininity. Elite professional tennis players are constantly on the move. Nomads, they follow the WTA circuit (money) from one country to the other starting in New Zealand in early January and ending with the Championships that finish in late October or early November. Some also compete in the Fed Cup, a nation-based teams event under the auspicious of the ITF, the final of which is held in November. In addition to this economic nomadism they are, of course, in motion for a great proportion of the time they spend before the eye of the camera. Much of this latter motion is conducted with power at speed. These young women are in every way free to move. Freedom, power, muscularity, movement, ease – all of these traits and tropes are culturally “masculined” regularly being exercised by young women, pushing them out onto the margins of what can be represented as woman.  Movement or “doing” is the catalyst of both success and failure. Anxiety and doubt live in the yawning chasm between these two outcomes. Movement can cause damage – muscles tear, ligaments snap, bones break. Aesthetic standards try to erase damage while athletic endeavour make it inevitable. As Stoddard (2009) suggests damage and the performance of pain arising out of that damage raises doubts in the spectator.

There is a mountain of authenticity work carried out to bring the representation of players in from the margins. In Chapter 2 I discussed the “Superhero” campaign, for instance. This authenticity work is much more concerned with the players being perceived as authentic (that is normatised according to wide culture practices) women rather than authentic athletes. Even the WTA players themselves when asked (SonyEricssonWTATour, 2009) who their favourite athletes and what their favourite sports are, most often nominate men and men’s sporting teams thus enforcing the lesser status of sportswomen and women’s sport. Women and women’s sports nominated by some are done so on a highly personalised basis – that is, they follow the careers of friends. So sportswomen are doubly marginalised as athletes and as women.  The alternative option to trying to constrain all players to a central aesthetic and behavioural model is to become a community that advocates diversity and at least appears to take pride in its marginality.  In this approach, the players with highly heternormatised exteriors by embracing their athleticism and openly exhibiting power, ease and ambition, become a model open to different kinds of meanings. As Grow’s extensive work (Grow, 2006, 2008; Grow and Wolburg, 2006) on the Nike women’s advertising campaign suggests: what unites all players is the play and this could potentially be the basis of the promise of community that is extended out to spectators and viewers. I argue that celebritised individuation and the use of the accredited model runs an obstructionist course with the promise of community. The community is dynamic – personal change and differing moments of success make it a community in constant flux. Any representation must embrace this or struggle with signification and definition until lack of clarity and purpose erases all interest. As Grow (2006: 198) concludes:

In the empowered community transformations occur. In the community of athletes, sport becomes a birthright. Individuals become teams, play becomes work, and fitness becomes athleticism. In a divided community empowerment and athleticism collide in oppositional messages. Product replaces image, humour usurps athleticism, and fear supplants empowerment.

What may power this community is an “energy” from the tension created by its constant changing and becoming. What I have previously referred to here as the promise of community, then, is not a faulty promise but an always-becoming one – more like hope, perhaps. Grow (2006) suggests that storytelling enables the transformations. Amongst the most powerful tools in popular culture and its mediation are narratives. Within a popular culture (in this case broadcast professional sports) narratives of identity representation can act as powerful counter-narratives: narratives that at least question and at best aim to depose hegemonic discourses. The positive themes from hegemonic sports discourses of war and journeying such as heroism, strength of will and endurance can be used repeatedly as a matter of course in the broadcast of women’s sport. Reiterability, as I implied in chapter 2 in relation to Peterson’s work, is often accepted by an audience as “authenticity”. This acceptance is necessary for audience complicity and the reaching of a consensus on what will be accepted as “truth”. Thus the marginalised can be moved to a central-seeming position. This accredited reality model of “the truth” creates an audience-dependent stability for the subculture. The question of community is resolved by this involvement (dependency) and the resultant stability of the relationship creates a market for advertisers thus rendering broadcast a viable economic choice. Profit then becomes the motivator for broadcast of women’s sport rather than some sort of externally imposed moral, ethical or legal paradigm of fairness. Television networks are profit driven businesses and will broadcast if there is an audience to amplify advertising into. Audiences are attracted to stable, sustainable narratives. As Grow (2006) suggests “weaving words and images into a cohesive series of signs that become culturally resonant” is crucial to the successful introduction of narratives into cultural practice.

Really?: “Reader” Sanctioned “Authenticity”

 I do not mean for a moment to suggest that the pathway I describe above is a simple one ; rather that it is possible. Possible, that is, to move a woman-centric product from the margins – take, for example, the success of Nike women’s advertising in the 1990s. Grow and Wolburg (2006) regard the keystone of that success to be that it claimed a contested reality. They open the article with a quote from the chief copywriter on the campaign: “It wasn’t advertising. It was truth.” What this meant was, Grow’s work revealed, that they produced a “truth” that matched the creative team’s reality or “their perception of other women’s realities”. That is, they presented what they understood reality to be as a universal truth. I am reminded of Australian singer songwriter Missy Higgins when asked how close her projected image was to her “self” replied “It’s close enough. You have to keep something for yourself.” Dolly Parton has sustained one of the longest ongoing and most consistent most successful identity narratives in popular culture. “I’m careful not to get caught up in the Dolly image,” Parton has said (Wilson, 1995: 113), “other than to develop and protect it”. This closing of the distance between “the truth” and “something like the truth” reflects the knowing way in which the performer/audience bond that links them into an imagined community is, as Grow (2006) puts it, “painstakingly constructed”. As Peterson (1997: 225) puts it “authenticity work” is part of a performer’s job that requires constant maintenance. It is also a part of their work that comes under close scrutiny and judgement. Foucault made it obvious that surveillance changes behaviour. Here, the disciplining audience gaze closes the relationship circuit. The reverse panoptic and superpanoptic surveillance is a clear indicator of the power that rests with the audience. That is, many eyes watch a singularity and technology provides storage and reviewing capacities. It also provides opportunities for comparison not just with what is happening in the moment but with past and future moments. Indeed, the main text analysed, recorded and burnt to DVD, underwent repetitive scrutiny in the process of this project.

Grow (2006) suggests that “symbolic references” emerge from the construction of community. She also implies that two communities (in Grow’s study professional sportswomen and the market base for women’s sportswear) can seem to be “married” by their proximity to a powerful source of signification (Nike). This implies that identity signification and the narratives that create and sustain them are far from static but may rather be thought of as dynamically stable. It also implies that power transference is a binding force in the construction of apparent community, unity, and identity. Thus Grow’s emphasis on the binding effects of storytelling become not just a matter of consistency, but also of encompassing and incorporating change. We only need to return to my central text to see how rigid narratives and erased associations can create a jarring dissonance. In this instance, accredited model Sharapova was also constructed as the “American success story”, a “princess”, and the likely deserving winner. Williams was the street fighter, the undeserving challenger. Although a common Nike fealty was visually cued in a powerful way by the presence of the “Swoosh” on the clothing and accessories of both players, this time it was seemingly overwritten by the overtly divergent identity narratives presented for them. This suggests to me that Nike is now harnessing narratives of dichotomy and discipline: narratives of nation, desire and women under patriarchal control that operate as such powerful cultural regulators that they could override discourses overtly constructed to attract attention such as advertising. This also would seem to be the model adopted by the WTA taking into account not just their “Superhero” campaign but also the rule changes allowing coaches to come onto the court between sets.

Conclusion

 Where Does It Hurt? : Towards Identifying and Utilising Porous Boundaries

 Earlier in this chapter I referred to Stoddard’s (2009) suggestion that “by touching the spectator where it hurts [one can] make space to speak to widespread apathy in the face of subtle violences that often remain unmarked: The commodification of identity, the disciplinary demands of patriarchy, and the challenge of ethically facing the other and her suffering”. I would suggest that moments of subcultural non-conformity and/or wider culture non-normativity are currently “where it hurts”. Here I would like to suggest that the identification and marking of non-normative moments may also signpost porous spots in the behavioural boundaries built to contain the identity representations of sportswomen. Exploiting these spots would most likely expand the acceptable spectrum of identity performance. In the main text utilised in this project, for instance, there came such a manipulable moment with Sharapova serving at 5-0 in the first set.

Figure 19: Sharapova raises her hand in apology – “live” view

In this incident, Sharapova struck an overhead smash at the body of Williams. Figure 19 shows the “live” view of the incident – a long shot from behind Williams that shows Sharapova lifting her hand in apology. This is followed by a close-up of Sharapova walking back to the baseline. The replay shows Sharapova striking the ball then shifts to Williams’ reaction (Figure 20). The spectators react to the displeased stare shown on the replay – a moment so fleeting it was lost in real time. Here the technology was utilised to heighten the drama of what was looking to be an annihilation of the favourite. The commentary team, however, does not pick up on it. Eventually, alerted to the incident, Roberts draws Pratt’s attention (and the viewers’) to the replay.

KP: And the play. (SR:Yeah! chuckles) Straight at the body. That’s one way to stop Serena.

SR: Ooh! The crowd’s seen that on the big screens and they know it’s far from over…The question’s going to be just how long can they keep up this power hitting? Poor old Yuri at the moment looks as though he’s gone through the wringer for two or three hours.

Figure 20: Williams glares down court at Sharapova – replay view

 Minutes later when Tracy Austin returns she tries to resurrect the incident:

TA: Wow! Sharapova will never let an opponent know that losing that first set in 26 minutes is going to bother her. I was gone for those two games Sandy. How about when Sharapova tried to tag Serena Williams (ROBERTS chuckles right through following)? If looks could kill after that. Really, Sharapova had the whole court.

Roberts again diverts the discussion:

SR: We said it was going to be a contest…But maybe that double fault tells us something about her feelings after that first set.

 In the first instance Pratt introduces the spectre of Sharapova being directly aggressive – even in a sense violent – towards her opponent. “Straight at the body!” she observes with good humoured approval. Then she emphasises it as a deliberate tactic: “That’s one way to stop Serena.” Roberts’ response is threefold in its erasure of the importance of the moment. Firstly, he interprets the crowd reaction as a realisation that the winner of the match is still in dispute. I would argue that most people who have seen Serena Williams play would have recognised that Sharapova had just sealed her fate. Secondly, Roberts evokes weakness (“how long can they keep up this power hitting?”). Thirdly, he invokes the controlling gaze of the father (“poor old Yuri”). Pratt doesn’t let it go though, returning the focus to Williams:  “Well he’s feeling it for his daughter out there because Serena, she’s been deadly. And the scary thing is she’s playing with such controlled aggression you feel like she could explode even more into this match.” Roberts does not counter the description of Williams as “deadly” and “scary” or analogous to a bomb which is consistent with the Williams identity narrative begun in the broadcast introduction. Similarly, unlike Pratt and Austin, he seems completely trapped in the “Sharapova as deserving winner” narrative. This is repeated in the passage where Austin returns to the commentary box and broaches the subject again. In these two passages we can see that the two former players (Pratt and Austin) recognize and approve of Sharapova’s aggressive strategy. Roberts (the journalist turned broadcast professional), adherent to the dominant broadcast narrative, quickly steers the discourse back to the factors Grow and Wolburg (2006) found were most often presented as the basis for women’s success – “emotion, family and luck”.

 Changing the set of cultural practices that marginalises women in the sporting arena is not a matter of changing or banning the use of single words or even phrases used when referring to that subculture. Entire narrative trajectories must be altered to impact long-standing discourses of diminution and disrespect. It would seem that Phillips’ suggestion of employing people who understand and like women’s sport to broadcast it may be the best place to start. They will likely have inherent in their vocabularies the building blocks of narratives of respect. The continued portrayal (Clarey, 2009) of women’s tennis as “a significantly less interesting complement to the men’s game” is an image the game must move away from. Far from mitigating this sort of approach to women’s sport, the overt portrayal of the community of players as entirely normative, hyper-feminised women amplifies this subordinate position in the broader culture. Infantilisation, the attempted erasure of difference, the erasure of work and the condemnatory approach to the expression of otherwise (i.e. male embodied) admired “masculine” traits by the female embodied are all narratives that need be addressed and eradicated. The erasure of difference within the subculture and the separateness of the players within it to the broader culture is perhaps the most damaging approach of all.

      Chapter 8: Conclusion and Recommendations

 For into dominant typifications and aesthetic structures are locked both atavistic and Utopian desires; archetypal and futuristic motifs; sensibility and reason; melodrama and realism. The productivity of popular culture lies in its capacity to bring these different dimensions into contact and contest; their negotiations contribute to its pleasures.  (Gledhill, 1988: 87)

 This thesis has sought to rigorously explore what Gledhill articulates here as a space for contestation and resiliency against contact and suggestss that it has found avenues of potentiality in not single words or phrases but in the narratives that make up sporting discourse. Desires, signs, motivations and realisations have come under scrutiny here as strands of a discursive agenda running as a cultural counter to the insertion of women into the world of broadcast professional sports. Part of this agenda is disciplining gender performance narratives. These narratives diminish, “other”, objectify, subjugate, homogenise, normatise and infantilise women operating in this sphere. My project has exposed this narrative violence.   Most investigations have concentrated on the male/female hierarchy in sport in the name of gender disparity. This thesis has departed from that body of work by approaching the constriction of female gender performances to an accredited model as the core detrimental effect of the hegemonic patriarchal sporting narrative. Comparing men and women’s sports is like comparing apples and oranges and this line of investigation often yields the same obvious answer: they’re different.

This work has taken the notion of difference and sought to find it within the mass mediated representations of the subculture of professional women’s tennis. Finding that difference was at best undervalued and at worst erased, I then moved toward scouting for sign of these valuations and erasures. These were easily uncovered from my positioning at the intersections of feminist and queer theories, and through what may seem to some an eclectic amalgam of theoretical approaches. This eclecticism has arisen out of my initial findings in the data – data that demanded a multi-faceted approach. Further investigation revealed contiguous differences being presented as points of contest and contact. This presentation, culturally echoing the very visible on-court contestation had a disintegrating effect on the representation of the community. This lack of cultural cohesion proved to be unable to sustain an on-going identity narrative for either players or the community with any consistency. This inconsistency was exacerbated by a trend toward non-agentic individuation of the players as celebrities and aesthetically normative promotional tools.  This individuation attempts to exert a hierarchical structure across several compared fields without acknowledging difference. It works in a contrasting way to individuality which holds within it the possibility of a new discourse separate to hegemonic patriarchy and therefore capable of presenting alternatives to it.

This project found particularly that though the embodied sex of players is a legislated commonality at many levels of the game’s governing structures, gender need not be a commonality at all. I have shown that the many threaded braid of players’ genders is currently overwritten by a “same-ing” accredited model – currently Maria Sharapova. Stakeholders such as event organisers and playing associations buy into this “same-ing” as promoted by major sporting goods manufacturers to highlight the normatively femininising signification of their product for consumption by the wider culture. (Arguably, Reebok’s “I am what I am” runs counter to this trend). This leads to an emphasis on narratives that mitigate and downplay non-normative feminine behaviours.  Players’ roles as daughters, fiancés, wives and mothers are emphasised and amplified.

I argue that the users of mediasport discourse need renovate the narratives they use to represent sportswomen and their work. In some cases this may mean changes of personnel.

Stories Told Well 1: Organisational Narratives

 It is important that the player community find something textured and interesting to celebrate – something that has narrative power. Find an icon to carry this power and to indicate to the members of the community (including their audience) what their communal and individual purpose and meaning is. These narratives should indicate by depth and diversity of population that this is a community that embraces and celebrates difference both within it and also its difference from the wider culture.  Tell stories of acceptance, stories that give individualistic traits a positive value. Make the brand one that sporting companies want to be near to siphon its power. Also I would advise that the selection of the CEO be made more astutely in the future. Backgrounding in and a loyalty to the men’s tour may, for example, with all the best intention in the world, prove not to be an asset. UNESCO reports (2009) that “the feminization of ruling bodies proves to be a main element for a policy leading to stronger diversity within the sport movement.”

Brand identities are beliefs invented about a product to make it more desirable, to sell it, and to make a profit. Organisational identities emerge from members’ collective values and experience, and help to provide the organisation and its members with a deeper, broader reason for being. (Harquail, 2007: 136)

This demonstrates the strength of a cohesive, sustained narrative.  Harquil (2007: 135) also states that she found that the use of a brand icon by an organisation provides “cues from which members constructed their beliefs about the identity of the organisation itself”. Studying these assertions closely, it becomes apparent how organisations exert strict control of their identity. That is, firstly, they construct a set of beliefs to attach to a product to elicit a desire in the consumer base that will lead to profit. Secondly, they create a sign (an icon) that represents the product. Thirdly, this sign is used by members as a cue to the construction of the identity of the organisation. Lastly, when “organisational identities emerge from members’ collective values”, it is an organisationally guided set of values that the identity is constructed of. That is, organisations construct their identity out of their own members’ guided responses to the organisation’s signified representation of itself.  This closed circuit narrative ensures that the power lies with the organisation (rather than its component parts). It also infuses signifiers of the organisation (brand icons) with power. The diminished positioning of the WTA icon on the players’ apparel, in my case study for instance, in deference to the Nike Swoosh reflects the dominance of the sporting brands over player organisations in the instance under scrutiny here.

Similarly, the WTA Tour by acceding to sponsorship contribution pressure and being referred to as the Sony Ericcson WTA Tour, suggests a brand hierarchy unflattering to the WTA. The necessity to assert a dominant and sustained narrative of its own seems to me obvious. Although academically it is a debated point, the story goes that the seeds of the WTA were sown by Billie Jean King and a few of her colleagues in 1972. The imminent 40th anniversary of this event would seem an opportunity to tell and retell this narrative and to make those players a core iconic group. This group has several attractive qualities for performing this function. Firstly, they are community elders who have constructed its history and meaning outside of postfeminist enculturation, high level celebratisation, and such intense levels of sponsorship interference. Secondly, as older women, they are less impacted by the violence of the public woman aesthetic and more likely to have stories to tell. Thirdly, they are seen to have achieved something new and special as a group and particularly as a group of women. If this opportunity is ignored by the WTA it will be telling. It is difficult to escape the subordinating narratives of hegemonic patriarchy but almost impossible to escape self woven narrative constraints. By ignoring its diverse and rebellious past and accepting narratives of diminution as a means of survival in some form into the future the WTA will condemn its present to stand as a weak singularity. There will be no continuous, cohesive narrative to invigorate mass mediation even should there arise a will to do so. Advocating diversity is a narrative that lends itself to the positive spin. Difference gathered around a commonality can signify an accepting community, one that could easily be seen to hold the capacity to accept the viewer.  

Stories Told Well 2: Player Identity Narratives

 It is clear that the structures supporting and guiding players should be less restrictive of representations of player behaviour and personal style. For example: allow them less rote answers to post-match press questions and familiarise them more with positive self-representation. Make a field where a player’s image seems less important than what they have done – good or bad, on court or off. The viewers and spectators must feel they determine what their attachment to a player will be – whether an object of desire or someone they want to emulate. To do this they must have enough data – stories, narratives – to feel they can make a decision. Stakeholders should make use of translators in press conferences so that players can communicate in their own language, allowing sharper responses from the athlete in quicker time.  

The exploration of player identity narratives undertaken exposes tendencies to diminish, to erase difference and to culturally misplace. This sort of narrative action arises out of the cultural anxiety aroused still by women active in the public sphere. Players are, of course, also problematically muscular, ambitious and assertive. They yell and grunt with frustration and effort. They sweat. They are global nomads. They are marked by their freedom and ease of movement. Under intense scrutiny, they operate in a confined space within which the unpredictable can happen. Like a firecracker in a tin, the potential of the situation is powerful and redolent with the possibility of the constant production of (wide culture) gender queer moments. That is, each women’s sporting event is an opportunity to show people living the normative culture, something they are not exposed to every day and therefore things that they do not expect. Thus these events are already sites of concentrations of the non-normative; the players themselves sites of gender performance contestation.

The narrative energy put into erasing and diminishing non-normativity and contestation should be instead applied to the celebration of all of the variations and differences and unpredictabilities within the community. By acknowledging each player rather than promoting one or two aesthetically normative players as the accredited model to which all aspire, the public is alerted to a depth of field not normally exposed. My reading of Tuhkanen’s recent article (2009) on the relationships between performativity and becoming (particularly as articulated by Butler and Braidotti respectively) suggests that, at least in theory,  representation of players in the act of becoming may add an extra dimension and progressive impetus to the community in question here. To me, Tuhkanen’s suggestion that it is folly to try to theorise something new without adding something new to the theoretical mix has a direct application here in the sense of representation. To represent something new (women as self-controlling, powerful, agentic individuals) using unchanged narratives has lead narratives of sportswoman to their current state of confusion and diminishment. Changing the representational narratives of players – whether they are radically adapted from the arena of men’s sport or emerge new born from genuinely invested new broadcasters – is a way forward.

Stories Told Well 3: (Hardly) Sporting Narratives

 Because the media’s role is vital, there is also a necessity to accentuate the positive aspects using supportive (or supportive-for-pay) on air and behind camera principals to do so. Use entirely separate teams for men’s and women’s matches indicating a difference for the viewer by personnel change.

Repeated cheating and subordinating discourses; framing wins as luck or the product of the father’s (whether the coach as defacto father or the player’s actual father as coach) labour; amplifying loss and playing down the triumphal: all of these are destructive narratives to the individuals they surround and define. Even the sporting narratives available by broadcast limit the television audience’s view. WTA tournaments rarely receive any coverage except for the championship game. Seeing the last scene of many different plays tells only one un-nuanced story: something has concluded. Additionally, the compelling “last man standing” narrative is withdrawn by not having access to the entire tournament. Thirdly, only rarely is the championship match the sporting or dramatic highlight of the tournament. As with the case studied, it can often be a lop-sided event. The western democratic countries are used to the overpowering discourse of the reverse superpanopticon.  That is – after Mike Poster’s superpanopticon (Poster, 1995) – storage technologies that allow replays and statistical comparisons or multiplatform information provision that allow many people to see every available piece of information about a single event or individual. (It also means that a player is not only compared and contrasted to and constructed from their opponents’ abilities and image but also to those of a younger self.) A single line of vision is no longer sufficient and a non-cohesive narrative is no longer (if it ever was) attractive. I suggest that television audiences no longer tolerate such an interrupted view. Analogous perhaps to the dominant computer operating systems discourse, fans are used to opening another window if the information they seek is not before them.

Embracing the women’s game as different (from the men’s) but refusing to accept that subordination is therefore moot could be one discursive structure to explore. Challenging the privileging of the perceived certainties of men’s tennis and promoting uncertainty as higher drama would be a potentially productive narrative thread to follow. The encouragement of fictive accounts of sportswomen from the major stakeholders could be helpful in shifting the narrative tangent. Positive fictitious renderings of sportswomen are not common. In the Women’s Sport Foundation’s list (2009) of 33 films that “feature girls and women as active participants in sports and physical activity as either athletes or as professionals” only two feature tennis players. One is a film based on the Billie-Jean King (who is the foundation’s founder) match against Bobby Riggs released in 2001 and the other is the Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy romance Pat and Mike (1952) set well before the Open era.  This is another way forward for the creation and promotion amongst the wider culture of a new tennis narrative.

What Does It Matter?

 Whether or not the WTA Tour survives as a broadcast sport matters in as much as it signals that there is a place in the world for women who are active, healthy, strong-bodied and strong-minded. Governments and NGOs (UNESCO Social and Human Services, 2009) seem to agree that women are mentally, physically and socially healthier if they play sport and that they will play a sport more readily if they are aware of role models who play it professionally. Whether or not women in the public eye continue to be represented through the patriarchal paradigm by broadcast journalists does matter. Essentially, of course, this thesis is not “just” about sport. Future projects for investigation in this research arc include national women’s team competitions and a taxonomy of women’s sporting narratives in Australian literature.

What this thesis has illuminated is the presence of a vast cultural storehouse of intertwined subjugating narratives. This cultural back-catalogue is not only a tool of a patriarchal culture but also an affect also of whiteness and other discursive structures of dominance. The stories we tell and retell can all too quickly become “real”. “Once upon a time” can become “the way it is” with an alarming rapidity. These stories do not disappear because we wish or legislate them away. They are in the very bones of the way individuals and communities identify themselves. Changing vocabularies does not necessarily alter the narrative tangent and certainly rarely unsettles dominant agendas.

I argue that the time to refuse to repeat these stories, the time to construct new stories, has come. Fluidity brings with it opportunity for change. In the popular culture environment where the present is only as viable as its connection with the past and its future potential, the plausible stands for the authentic and any sense of truth and reality. It follows then, that plausible constructs pointing forward with an identifiable pedigree have a place in that environment. Once the discursive structure of women’s sport is solid, then the issue of quantity of exposure can be addressed should it still need to be.

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