Post by Jennifer Lynn Jones, Indiana University

Every year I look forward to ESPN Magazine’s “Body Issue,” an interesting if somewhat uneven antidote to Sports Illustrated’s “Swimsuit Issue.” Out now, the issue ostensibly serves as a reframing of the body according to the demands of a specific sport, celebrating bodies “for what they can do, rather than how closely they adhere to prevailing beauty standards.” It typically features female and male athletes posing naked in the midst of activity, discussing their relationship to their body and their sport. Past editions have included sections contrasting the average size and shape of athletes in different sports, charting not only the range but also the value of bodily variation in athletes.

This year’s edition appeared just a few weeks ago, and this is the image that got me excited to see it.

Amanda Bingson is a record-holding hammer thrower from Nevada. She competed at the 2012 Olympics and is a professional athlete with USA Track and Field. And just look at her here! Big! Strong! Tough! Some might say thick but Bingson also calls her body “dense.” The skin rolls on the cover photo don’t seem inhibit her abilities, nor does the cellulite on her hip in the interior spread.

But this is the only cover I found on the newsstand.

Natalie Coughlin is one of the most successful swimmers in the world, has medaled in every major competition in her field, and even holds the record for the most medals received at one Olympics in her 2008 appearance. There’s no question of her abilities; the question here is who ESPN Magazine chooses to feature how and where. For special issues with multiple covers, my experience is that newsstand availability reveals what image the magazine believes will sell best, with those predicted to be less popular going out to subscription holders. Newsstand issues therefore wind up being the most normative image, and the logic holds here: a slim, white, blonde female athlete barely engaged in the actual activity of her sport. In contrast to Bingson, Coughlin doesn’t even have to appear “in action” to prove her worthiness for a cover; her looks are enough. The problematic influence of this particular image of Coughlin was enough for a Swimmer’s World contributor to address.

Coming to the fore here is the conflict between appearance and achievement in sport. Athletic achievement is valued more than appearance: what you do is supposed to matter more than what you look like. This equation best suits predominantly male spheres, although phrases like “fat guy touchdown” reveal how appearance still factors there. Sport is often seen to be beneficial for women because the emphasis on achievement is expected to overcome the focus on appearance, but more often than not, women face a double bind: damned if you conform to conventional female appearance, damned if you don’t. The pressure from this conflict affects all female athletes, but considering that sport goes beyond its fields of play into other arenas–from sponsorships and product endorsements to fashion spreads–appearance often wins out and disproportionately affects those with non-normative bodies: not small, not white, not cisgender, those read “in excess” of expectations.

The release of the 2015 “Body Issue” coincided with debates around the bodies of two other high-achieving female athletes, Serena Williams and Caitlyn Jenner. Williams, the top-selling cover from the first “Body Issue” in 2009 (at top), was near to earning her sixth Wimbledon title when a New York Times article sparked controversy for its discussion of her body. Explicitly about size and gender but implicitly about race, the Times story is just one in a series of attacks on Williams’ body, ruminating on her larger, more muscular body primarily from the perspective of other female tennis players with smaller, white bodies. As Zeba Blay notes, the problem with the Times piece “isn’t about the fact that Williams isn’t tall, slim and a size two. It’s about the fact that she isn’t white.” Race is certainly central here, but size still matters: readings of Williams’ size and race compound and co-construct each other. Relatedly, when Corinne Gaston argues that this “type of body-shaming … comes gift-wrapped in a triad from hell: misogyny, racism and transphobia,” I would add sizeism to the list as well. Furthermore, drawing on Julia Robins’ critique, we shouldn’t allow discourse about Williams’ appearance to obscure her achievements, but neither can we easily separate her achievements from her body. The labors of her body–the acts of shaping and using it so successfully–are also part of her achievements, ones that have clearly given her a competitive advantage over the more conventionally sized/raced/gendered competitors quoted in the Times piece. This disruption of tennis’ identity hierarchies is a further victory, but one that shouldn’t continue to come at Williams’ expense.

Just four days after Williams’ Wimbledon win, Caitlyn Jenner made her first public appearance to receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at ESPN’s ESPY ceremony, and comparable controversies followed. As Jon Stewart noted when photos of her Vanity Fair debut first appeared, as a man we could discuss Jenner’s “athleticism, business acumen,” but now that “you’re a woman… your looks are really the only thing we care about.” Achieving femininity involves attaining an approved appearance, legitimated through cover stories like the Vanity Fair spread, but attaining that appearance often obscures other achievements. Many questioned how Jenner could merit the award simply by “putting on a dress,” showing ambivalence in the reception of her presentation: being taken seriously as a woman requires “getting work done,” arranging and engaging in the labor to approximate conventional femininity, but the challenge of that work–physical, emotional–isn’t seen as equal to Jenner’s past athletic achievements as a man. Jenner and Williams were also pitted against each other: comedian D.L. Hughley echoed others’ comments by contrasting Williams’ feminine beauty to Jenner’s and questioning why Williams would be critiqued for appearing “too masculine” while Jenner is celebrated for becoming more feminine. While this double standard should be examined, such assertions also overlook how these oppressions stem from the same problematic system. Recognizing the intersection of these oppressions strengthens their challenge to that system, and hopefully improves the opportunities for more participation and representations of non-normative women within it.

I’m not talking about the underestimation of the rally numbers, though one can forget the estimates of 215,000 people in attendance; those estimates fall far short. What I’m talking about is our seeming inability to make meaning of those hundreds of thousands of bodies and our inability to assess their significance—either at the level of democracy (to be grandiose) or at the level of those simply in attendance (to be realistic). The coverage has focused on Jon Stewart’s “sincerity” speech at the end of the rally and what it meant–an identifiable text that reporters know how to read and discern meaning from. But as Stewart notes in his speech, the speech itself means nothing without the people who showed up (or as he put it, “If you want to know why I’m here and what I want from you, I can only assure you this: You have already given it to me. Your presence was what I wanted”).

So what do so many bodies mean? When journalists do turn their attention to the people, they again turn to more texts—the posters and signs these bodies carried. Reporters have used such signs to once again marginalize the rally and Stewart, as they had done repeatedly for the weeks leading up to the rally (the subject of a forthcoming Antenna post). But again, for journalists, these are the texts that speak for the body, over and above what the bodies themselves are saying by their presence.

I don’t think journalists or citizens or politicians in the 1930s had a difficult time understanding political bodies and their meaning for citizenship. Political reality was actually comprised of bodies—at train stop rallies in the North or surrounding politicians stumping from the backs of wagons and trucks in the Deep South; people assembled around radios or teemed from bars during political events; thousands upon thousands of marching Nazis; mobs lynching black men. For those of us who didn’t live in those times, these are the bodies represented in documentaries like Triumph of the Will and Why We Fight, and films like Meet John Doe and All the Kings Men. In this world, bodies comprised political reality. They were meaningful by their sheer presence.

But today, in our postmodern political reality, they seem inconsequential, despite the improvements in communication technologies to capture and represent such bodies in action. Indeed, the paradox is that hyperreality seemingly makes them meaningless or, if that is an overstatement, the hyperreality that stands for reality doesn’t know how to deal with them. Bodies are exhibited on screen, but then can be ignored, not taken into account, not used as the starting point for understanding just what an event like Saturday meant to the citizens in attendance.

For those in attendance, smashed together, standing shoulder to shoulder, unable to move in any direction yet politely and jokingly making space for the families having to leave to take Missy and Junior to the potty or carry out the poopy diaper, we literally embodied the message coming from the stage. And it was a message whose only meaning resides with and is given meaning by us. From the journalistic accounts I have seen, that is the text that reporters seemingly have no idea how to read. The “24-hour politico-pundit-perpetual-conflictinator” indeed.