Mediated and commodified bodies

The body has always been central to sport, but it is also constantly being reconfigured and repurposed through a range of interconnected processes. This chapter is concerned with two of those processes – mediation and commodification – that relentlessly work on and, to a significant degree, problematize the sporting body. The term ‘mediation’ is used here to describe how the diverse elements of the social world become meaningful through various media and their symbolic representations. This is not a neutral process of translation, but one that is produced out of the power relations that enable some ways of interpreting the world to dominate others – that is, those that are ‘hegemonic’ (Rowe, 2004a). Furthermore, the body can be regarded not just as mediated (symbolically represented in certain ways as, for example, gendered, sexualized and racialized) but, in fact, mediatized (Frandsen, 2014). The latter is a process by which the constituents of society and culture – in this case, bodies and the processes that encircle them – are transformed ‘into forms or formats suitable for media representation’ (Couldry, 2008: 376). This chapter will focus on the wider process of mediation, although it is recognized that there is also considerable evidence of mediatization.