Visual Culture
and the World of Sport

This article contains a slideshow including the images that appear alongside the text, along with additional materials. To start the slideshow, click on any image in this article, or click here.

The last time a woman athlete was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine (Vol.103 Issue 2) she was not in uniform, but wore a mini skirt and a tank top. The woman, carrying a wiffle ball and bat, was Jennie Finch, pitcher for the 2004 Olympic Gold Medal softball team and NCAA title holder for the most consecutive winning games (60 while playing at the University of Arizona). Seeing the magazine in a newsstand, the image of a competitive and physically proficient woman, a world-class athlete, does not suggest itself. If that cover is representative of the post-Title IX female athlete in the visual culture of sports, what has happened since 1972?

Sports Illustrated magazine is iconic. The images on its pages, particularly the cover, have come to represent the world of sport. It is, at its simplest, sports – illustrated. The magazine’s paid circulation is over three million, and its readership is reported to be up to 21 million people. The average SI reader, overwhelmingly male, lives in the eastern central states (Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, etc.), is between the ages of 25 and 49, earns between 50 and 60 thousand dollars a year, most likely does not have children (less than 50% of readers), and is very likely white (about 75%).¹ If Sports Illustrated is primarily a business, as mainstream magazines are, the images included in the magazine, and their inherent assumptions about race and gender, correspond to what is most marketable to the magazine’s constituency. While it is impossible to decipher if SI merely disseminates what their constituency desires or rather constructs those desires, the images in the magazine represent the current state of gender in sport.

Sports Illustrated has featured powerful pictures of powerful female athletes: Brandi Chastain and Serena Williams dominate the covers that showed them muscular and triumphant. They are, however, exceptions which confirm the dismal fact that the premiere magazine of sport has featured fewer women athletes (as athletes) the more women play. The athletes who never make the cover, and how those on the cover are represented, provides a telling history of women in sport since 1954, the year of Sports Illustrated‘s inception. The highest number of women appearing on the cover in one single calendar year occurred in 1955, the second year of the magazine’s publication. Twelve covers out of fifty-two featured women. Since 1965, when the number of women pictured began to fall, an average of three women have appeared on the cover each year, a figure that includes models and wives of athletes, in addition to female athletes. In Olympic years women have fared significantly better, though even that number has been suffering. In every Olympic year since 1996 one female athlete has appeared on the cover, most recently track star Marion Jones in 2002 and figure skater Sarah Hughes in 2004 (snowboarders Hannah Teter, Gretchen Bleiler, and Lindsey Jacobellis shared the cover with their medal-winning male teammates in 2006). There have been two years in Sports Illustrated‘s fifty-one year history when the swimsuit issue was the only issue featuring a woman on the cover. Only models in swimsuits were on the cover in 1975, three years after the passage of Title IX, two years after Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the one of the most watched tennis matches ever, and only one year after the Women’s Sports Foundation was established. The second year was 1981, when the NCAA first added women’s championships to their domain.²

The covers of Sports Illustrated exemplify the contradictions facing women who are athletes. Certainly, in the past quarter-century, we have continued to see astonishing progress in terms of women’s sports. At the professional level, women tennis players have successfully advocated for equal pay at many major tournaments; there is now a professional women’s basketball league, along with increased interest in women’s professional golf. Some women have even qualified to play in events on the men’s tour. But we have also seen blocks to women’s progress, sometimes in surprising places: despite the widespread excitement, almost obsession, with the women’s national soccer team, the professional women’s soccer league was forced to fold; at the Olympics the number of men’s and women’s sports remains uneven and women are barred from major events like Winter Olympic ski jumping; at the college level Title IX is under attack and gains made for women’s sports are particularly targeted.³ Given the overall trend toward progress, however, why has there been little or no progress – and actually losses – in the representation of women athletes? And, we must also ask: do these failures in representation contribute to the continuing blocks to moving forward in some areas of women’s athletics?

These questions are particularly pressing given the amazing improvements in the scope and power of the photographic illustration of sport. The increased capabilities of photographic technologies have been part of a revolution in visual culture that has ushered in the age of video cell phones, HDTV, and continuous access to media through the Internet. In our increasingly media saturated culture, one would expect more and more outlets to allow the accomplishments of female athletes to enter public view, but that is yet to be seen. The images that do appear assume more importance as they become progressively more available to more people, especially in a world where visual recognition can be more important than accomplishment or success. In a world organized in and through the media, the importance of image over achievement plays itself out in politics and in business. And, it is certainly true that in the world of sport, visual recognition is crucial to the most lucrative form of success: not the winning of championships, but the securing of contracts for product endorsements.

So, if illustration is so important, why are the numbers of female athletes represented on SI‘s cover dropping, and why is the content of the illustration shifting? In viewing cover images from 1954 to the present there has been a marked shift away from athleticism and toward sexuality, more specifically toward a sexuality that seems unrelated to women’s athletic abilities, that seems to empty out the import of their athletic achievement. We could argue that this change is simply part of the greater sexualization of U.S. public culture since the 1950s, and perhaps that is one factor, but, of course, then we have to ask why male athletes have not experienced a similar sexualization. And, when men are presented in poses that are body-baring, attractive and even sexual, why is that sexuality always tied to their athleticism? On an unquestionably homoerotic cover from 2001 (Vol. 94 Issue 10), Nomar Garciaparra, a here shirtless player for the Boston Red Sox, holds a baseball bat tight against his upper thigh, implying the size of his anatomy, apart from his muscular arms. The headline reads: “A Cut Above: How Boston’s Nomar Garciaparra Made Himself the Toughest Out in Baseball.” Here the suggestion of sexuality (is the reference to coming out incidental?) is tempered by his athletic accomplishments. While the cover undoubtedly signals sex, we are intended to see his sexuality as coupled with his athletic prowess, as part of his physical domination. My critique is not of sexualization, per se, but the way that, when it comes to women, illustrating sex substitutes for illustrating sport.

Here it is helpful to think about the relation between the status of women in sport and the declining status of the representation of women in sport. Since women’s athletic opportunities and achievements have expanded, while their representation has contracted, we cannot assume that SI is merely reporting Ñ illustrating Ñ what is happening in the world of sport. Rather, at least as far as the cover is concerned, SI is telling some other kind of story, one that tells us something about the role of sport in the production of cultural values (see Catharine Stimpson’s essay in this issue). The poor representation of women athletes may contribute to the obstacles to equitable treatment that they continue to face. Further, this problem of representation may have wide implications in terms of the way that sport – and its representation – contributes to the production of gender relations, and the values ascribed to masculinity and femininity.

For example, in an interview with a former football player, sociologist Michael Messner demonstrates one of the ways in which American men construct their understanding of gender relations, through identification with athletes in the media. Most men could never match the athletic accomplishments of those with whom they identify, but nonetheless, these figures epitomize masculinity, not just as an ideal, but for average men. As the former player stated, men and women were not the same, or even equal, because “[a] woman can do the same job as I can do – maybe even be my boss. But I’ll be damned if she can go out there on the field and take a hit from Ronnie Lott” (then a dominating defensive back for the San Francisco 49ers).⁴ Even if he once could “take a hit” (although perhaps not from Ronnie Lott) the man who made this statement could no longer do so; yet this athletic act still made for a gender difference that told him who he was – his athletic ability or lack thereof aside. Moreover, the question of who could or could not “take a hit” somehow spoke to the question of gender equality.

1. Circulation information for the past three years can be found in Sports Illustrated‘s online Sales and Marketing Information Center: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/adinfo/si/. [↩]
2. All references to statistics and individual Sports Illustrated covers come from research conducted at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. For a complete searchable archive of Sports Illustrated cover photos, go to http://dynamic.si.cnn.com/covers/search. [↩]
3. See the Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Donna Lopiano article in this issue for a discussion of recent threats to Title IX. [↩]
4. Messner, Michael A. Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). [↩]