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ESPNs Body Issue was launched in 2009 with the purported aim of celebrating the athletic form by photographing prominent athletes nude. This paper analyzes the way the Body Issue sexualizes and objectifies athletes while articulating a discourse of empowerment. This study utilizes a multimodal analysis to conduct a comprehensive examination of all of ESPNs the Body Issues from 2009-2019, looking at every image of individual athletes (N = 778) as well as any accompanying text, captions, or interview excerpts. This study furthers a robust body of literature about the objectification of athletes but extends the theoretical importance of previous works by combining analysis of both images and texts to highlight the way hegemonic beauty standards and body types are prioritized in the Body Issue.
Keywords: Body Issue, ESPN, objectification, empowerment, athletes
For 11 years, ESPN published the Body Issue in celebration of the athletic form, depicting athletes in nude and partially nude photographs (Christie, 2019). The Body Issue has featured hundreds of athletes from dozens of sports and has been both celebrated for its appreciation of the human form and criticized for its objectification of athletes. It was a huge financial success for ESPN and was able to help temporarily revitalize a struggling ESPN The Magazine, before it eventually stopped print publication in 2019. Initially created to compete with Sports Illustrated s Swimsuit Issue, the Body Issue capitalizes on the sexual curiosity of viewers while using a rhetorical framework of pseudoscientific art appreciation. Despite the purported aims of the two magazines, they share more similarities than differences. Each years issue attempted to replace concerns of sexual objectification with a discourse of empowerment, reaching its apotheosis in the final 2019 issue. In the era of #MeToo and woke culture, this study examined how the concept of empowerment is refigured in a discursive formation that is utilized for the selling of sexual fantasy and has the potential to obscure issues of social progress.
This study utilizes a multimodal analysis to examine the images and included text (captions, pull quotes, interviews, etc.) in the online digital compendium of ESPN's Body Issue. More specifically, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of all the ESPN Body Issues from 2009 to 2019, looking at all the photos of individual athletes included...