The Swimsuit Issue and Sport - Hegemonic Masculinity in Sports Illustrated (Paperback, New)

Explores the cultural meanings of the swimsuit issue and shows how Sports Illustrated secures a large audience of men by creating a climate of hegemonic masculinity.

"The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is the cultural keystone of what is worst about male-dominated sport media. This book is the most systematic treatment of the SI swimsuit issue to date, and it reveals some of the ways that sexism, racism, heterosexism, and Western ethnocentrism have been woven into the cultural fabric of menis sports. But it is more than an analysis of SI. Davis unfurls cutting-edge critical analysis of media through this ostensible exercise in the study of a sport magazine issue. The book is a fine example of the explanatory power of feminist analysis that takes other multiple systems of domination into account; i.e., race, ethnicity, nationalism, and sexual orientation". -- Don Sabo, coauthor of Sex, Violence, and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity

This cultural study of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue shows how it encourages individual and institutional practices that create and maintain inequality. Laurel Davis illustrates how the interactions of media production, media texts, media consumption, and social context influence meaning, and how individual's reactions and interpretations are influenced by their views about gender and sexuality, views that have been shaped by their personal social experiences. Based on extensive interviews with Sports Illustrated consumers, producers, editors, and models, as well as the author's analysis of every swimsuit issue from the first in 1964 to those of the 1990s, it argues that Sports Illustrated uses the swimsuit issue to secure a large maleaudience by creating a climate of dominant masculinity that tramples women, gays and lesbians, people of color, and people from the postcolonialized world on the way to the bank.