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The Body Athletic

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aq.2023.a905858

1080-6490

Joseph Darda, Amira Rose Davis,

Sports, Gender, and Society

The Body Athletic Joseph Darda (bio) and Amira Rose Davis (bio) In the twilight of the print magazine, ESPN took one last shot at winning the newsstand. On October 1, 2009, a year into the financial crisis that all but killed analog media, it announced the arrival of ESPN The Magazine's first annual Body Issue. A press release described it as "a celebration and exploration of the athletic form" and, in a dig at Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue, a tribute to "athletes of diverse shapes, sizes, genders and races." Showcasing the muscled naked bodies of figure skaters, golfers, rock climbers, and surfers—their genitals carefully obscured by an arm, a leg, a basketball—the Body Issue invited readers to take in athletes' bare torsos and limbs as embodied art. The six alternative covers broadcast the issue's inclusive bent: three Black athletes, three white, three women, three men, household names and lesser-known stars, a Paralympic triathlete crossing a prosthetic leg. The Serena Williams cover, with the tennis champion seated with one leg folded underneath the other and an arm over her chest, sold the best and now fetches hundreds of dollars as a collector's item. The issue offered a testament, the network's press team said, to athletes' "most important asset—their bodies."1 Advertisers and readers ate it up. The Body Issue generated more ad buys and sold more copies than any previous October issue of the magazine, and media critics, echoing ESPN's own marketing strategy, commended it for every new gesture of inclusion.2 In 2014, the Washington Post, noting the appearance of "chubby-cheeked" first baseman Prince Fielder, declared the issue a "democratic" force with "the power to subvert ideas about the ways we envision and define" athleticism.3 In 2016, the New York Times praised the eighth Body Issue for featuring a transgender athlete, the triathlete Chris Mosier, for the first time.4 In 2018, the Post welcomed another "first": a queer couple, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, on the cover.5 Until the day ESPN The Magazine ceased publication in October 2019, the Body Issue remained one of the print world's last big sellers and, more important for its parent network, a branding coup. It let readers feel good about doing the very thing that had made ESPN, according to Forbes, the most valuable media property in the world.6 It gave us permission to look.7 [End Page 443] The magazine's editors presented the Body Issue as an education in the right kind of bodily appraisal—functional, inspiring, appreciative of difference. "We sing the body athletic," it opened.8 In this, our own Body Issue, we take a closer look at that education, because, while we don't share the magazine's rosy vision of commercial sports or Walt Whitman's physical brand of patriotism, we can't ignore the truth it reveals about athletics: in no other domain do Americans feel so free to compare, contrast, sort, and judge bodies. How do we—living in a sports-saturated world, members of a broad sporting public, whether we like it or not—come to know our bodies and the bodies of others through athletic performance? What do we talk about when we talk about sports? The political Left has long expressed a not-unfounded wariness of sports culture. Leon Trotsky blamed boxing and football for diverting the revolutionary fervor of the British proletariat into "artificial channels."9 Theodor Adorno thought sports functioned as a covert way of training people to carry out and even enjoy the "behavioral techniques" required of them as workers. What lies below our obsession with fitness? he wondered.10 Many contemporary scholars have implicated sports in the maintenance of empire, with some even identifying the imperatives of Western expansion as the foundation of modern athletic competition.11 And we can guess what Michel Foucault would have said: that athletics operate as part of a diffuse "political technology of the body," a field of unstable, contested "micro-powers" through which we name and know ourselves.12 We, in part, agree. But another, more liberatory thread runs through the Left's engagement with athletics. C...