Spectacles and Spectators

Abstract

This chapter develops the debates set up in earlier chapters about the measures and mechanisms of operations of power in sport that are underpinned by sex gender relations that are manifest in representation and symbolic systems. Thus it focuses on the nature of the media spectacle and the mega-event, in the case of the Games the rituals, insignia and opening and closing ceremonies in particular (Home, 2007, Houlihan, 2008, Miller and et al., 2001, Scambler, 2005, Sugden and Tomlinson, 2011). More emphasis has been given to media coverage (Markula, 2009) and the visibility of women at different sporting sites, for example, in feminist work on the representational systems of sport (Daddario, 1998, Giardina, 2005, Hargreaves, 1994 Markula, 2009). Sex gender, or more specifically gender, has played a key part in the analyses of the coverage of such sporting spectacles (Daddario, 1998, Markula, 2009), especially in relation to the vast media coverage which the Olympics receive (Sugden and Tomlinson, 2011), although feminist work has stressed the empirical presence, or more likely absence, of women (Markula, 2009). This chapter offers a critique of the spectacle and its visibility in promoting possibilities of inclusion and includes sex gender as the conceptual basis for understanding the operation of power in making the spectacle and develops the argument already introduced about the merging of representation and the virtual with the material, enfleshed actualities of sport.