Bodies of Discourse

Sports stars are omnipresent icons of popular culture. In the global age of celebrity, few public personae enjoy greater popularity and recognition than professional athletes. Yet, beyond their sporting achievements, athletes – from stars with near-global appeal such as Muhammad Ali or Tiger Woods to local and national sporting heroes – embody and reflect key political, social, and cultural discourses of our time. This anthology investigates sports stardom in its global context across the spectrum of spectator sport: from the quest of Japanese star athletes to exorcise the cultural demons of postwar Japan, to the Mexican pitcher celebrating victory in the first major league baseball game played on Mexican soil; from the naturalization of a Croatian footballer in Israel, to the marginalization of Scottish women curlers at the Winter Olympics. Reflecting this focus, Bodies of Discourse conceptualizes the discourses surrounding sports stars as part of an increasingly transnational and fragmented public sphere and thus traces the economic, social, and cultural roles of these discourses, ranging from nationalism and racism to foreign affairs and sexual politics.

Cornel Sandvoss is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. He has published widely on media sport and fan audiences, including A Game of Two Halves: Football, Television and Globalisation (2003), Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (2005), and Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2007). He is also coeditor of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture. Michael Real is Professor of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His books include Exploring Media Culture (1996), Super Media (1989), and Mass-Mediated Culture (1977). He has written scores of scholarly and general publications, directed local and international research projects, and hosted television and radio programs. The focus of his work is media, culture, and social responsibility. Alina Bernstein is Senior Lecturer at the School of media studies, College of management academic studies (COMAS), Israel. Her main area of research, in which she has published several articles, is media and sport, including the coedited book (with Neil Blain) Sport, Media, Culture: Global and Local Dimensions (2002). She also wrote the «Representation, Identity and the Media» section in The Media Book (2002). She heads the Media and Sport section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

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