Can the humanities practice sport? The odds of such a match are quite low. Sport is governed by iron discipline, quite foreign to today’s academies. Cultural studies, however, are used to entering forbidden lands, far beyond the safe havens of academic contemplation. Let us then try to play some tennis by using the most crucial notions of critical cultural studies.

One of the most famous Nike tennis commercials starts with a scene in which Maria Sharapova looks at her own reflection in the mirror. The match is about to start. The tennis player examines her appearance closely and then leave the hotel room. We follow her journey through the eyes of onlookers who look at their idol and sing successive verses of I Feel Pretty, the West Side Story smash hit. ‘I feel pretty and witty and bright’, hum the chambermaids, ‘...and I pity any girl who isn’t me tonight’, responds the elderly gentleman from behind his broadsheet. Sharapova remains indifferent to the awe surrounding her. She enters the court poker-faced, passing the singing umpires by. The game starts when the whole stadium is signing and it seems that nothing will be able to stop the elation. Suddenly, Sharapova lets out a wild scream and violently ends the point. The confused audience fall silent, stupefied. Only after a while does the muted applause begin.

 

The aporia of the body

There are two models of representation which characterise the sporting body. Let us call them the imagined model and the material model. The first one is grounded in a narcissistic order of performance, which places the sportsperson in the position of the object of our desires. It is established by the mirror-like stage, which reveals the look that is a precondition for every identification of the self. At first, Maria Sharapova looks at herself in the mirror, but in a moment or two it is her who will become a mirror in which her fans will look for their own reflection, holding on to the hope of at least a partial identification with the ideal. Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, referred to the mirror metaphor to describe the process of false identification with a presumed image that comes from the outside. The body of the tennis player is transformed into a space of such false recognition, onto which we project our ideas, dreams and complexes. This is the source of the transferred narcissism, which, in the Nike commercial, is not ascribed directly to Sharapova but rather to the spectators. And this is why even Sharapova’s short trip to the court is raised to the rank of a performance, in which the sportswoman turns into a celebrity and the game into aesthetics.

When Sharapova begins the match with her spectacular winner, the mirror of the imagined order is broken. The confused audience need some time to adjust to the new model of representation, the material model. The body with its physicality, movements and rigid discipline becomes the gist of the sports performance. The materiality, however, is not located on the opposite pole of the imagination. It maps out a different context for the representation and contemplation of the sporting body. Remarkably enough, Sharapova in a way needs to remind the audience that she is a sportswoman, or maybe even a sportsman. The brutal physicality of sport does not fit well with femininity, which is the very dispute that fuels most of contemporary discussions on women’s tennis.

 

Sport in theory

The material reality of sports is also one of the main reasons of their rather unimpressive career in cultural studies. According to John Hughson, David Inglis and Marcus Free, authors of The Uses of Sport: A Critical Study, the emphasis placed on textuality and structural analysis, characteristic of early critical theory, marginalised the importance of sport in the eyes of scholars[1]. Although textual analysis of the body could possibly inspire literary scholars, it stood no chance when it came to facing the true, dynamic reality of sport. Yet another reason why the humanities were inclined to sideline the importance of sport lay in the fact that it was politically useless. Scholars within the field of cultural studies turned their attention to popular culture to search for local areas of resistance to the dominant social order. They discovered that the snobbish disregard towards popular culture was in fact motivated by class interests and the underappreciated pop had in fact an enormous critical potential. However, it may only be interesting to the extent in which it can be applied in the wider political project pursued by cultural studies. So how should we treat sport with its inherent inability to be used in this subversive context? The sporting body subject to the training regime and imprisoned in the rigid corset of rules and principles offers an image that seems to be taken directly from Michel Foucault’s visions. This French philosopher analysed institutions such as psychiatric hospitals or prisons as social devices used to tame the body. The sociology of sport, inspired by Foucault, produced some analyses of fitness classes going in this very direction. In any case, many a culture scholar associates PE classes rather with oppression than subversion, so it is no wonder that the humanities were not inclined to consider sport as their ally.

Despite its marginal position, sport remained a source of inspiration for the greatest minds of the 20^th century critical humanities. Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist and an unfulfilled tennis player, studied the ways in which sport is used to reinforce class differences. What makes some disciplines more aristocratic while other are associated with the masses?, asked Bourdieu. Tennis, a bourgeois sport par excellence, held the central position in his theoretical reflection. He was not, however, interested in professional competitions but rather in everyday social practice, which used tennis as a means to preserve one’s own social status. This mechanism was based for the most part on the special way of managing the body, since, according to Bourdieu, social difference forms a part of the material physicality of sport. Disciplines that demonstrate the naked body, such as boxing, wrestling or soccer, become mass entertainment, while those with a more restrained attitude towards emphasising the body, like golf or tennis, gain the prestige of aristocratic sports. Too much muscle, nakedness, lack of distance between players, loud cries, in other words: an excessive expression of the physical, disturb the aesthetic canon and therefore are banished to the realm of popular culture. Tennis further reinforces its elite position through the exclusivity of courts as such, through individualism, elaborate etiquette, emphasis on fair play and technical aspects of the game. It is no accident that in popular opinion Wimbledon is the most important among the four grand slam tournaments, although in the tennis community their prestige is in fact equal. The British Slam is the only tournament that carefully reproduces all elite attributes of tennis. The easily recognisable, all-white dress code is the most characteristic element of this elite distance.

 

Beyond distinction

However the fact that I am interested in women’s tennis not only as a fan but also as a culture theorist means that Bourdieu’s analysis fails to do justice to this sport discipline. Maybe the key to my fascination is the double role that I assume in this area of study (or maybe even triple: a fan, a cultural theorist and an umpire), which eliminates the cognitive distance characteristic of traditional humanities. The elite distance described by Borudieu as a fundamental aspect of a tennis match is, in part, a reiteration of the theorist’s own distance towards this sport discipline, as the author decided not to engage in the physical pleasure inherent to the object of his studies. Today, the exclusion of pleasure from the analysis of pop culture is seen not only as anachronistic but also lays bare a deep misunderstanding of its dynamics. If we decide to take a risk and adopt the perspective of a fan, we may gain the opportunity to examine how the mechanisms of distinction described by Bourdieu actually function, and this is not the only advantage of the pleasure-oriented approach. By questioning the elite and disciplining model of representation, we can reveal their exaggerated, perverse core and thus weaken their normative character.

Let us then come back to the Nike commercial to see what the final twist in the plot is really all about. The crowd is stupefied by Sharapova’s end shot because it disturbs the distinctive proportions of women’s tennis. If we were to agree with Bourdieu that the cultural representations of this discipline are based on technical finesse, elegance and subtlety and not physical effort, force or muscle, we would have to conclude that women’s tennis today is at a crossroads. Ever since mid 1990s, it has become clear that the elitist attributes ascribed to this discipline are simply untenable. The Big Babe Tennis generations, with players such as the Williams sisters, Lindsay Davenport, Mary Pierce or Maria Sharapova, changed the way people thought about women’s tennis, disturbing former cultural models of representation of tennis bodies. Sportswomen became impressively muscular and preferred using sheer force than engaging in technical finesse. Their athletic bodies, varied in terms of race, could no longer be hidden under the smart skirts. Power tennis was promptly disparaged as an insult towards the defining finesse of this discipline, and disputes between aggressive and defensive players (ball-bashers and pushers) are still a major topic among connoisseurs. The conservative resentment towards power tennis is especially strong in Poland because of Agnieszka Radwanska’s rather defensive style. Her duels with power tennis players from behind the eastern border are often interpreted from a nationalistic perspective, whereas the defensive – aggressive dichotomy acquires a political dimension. Therefore, what is at stake whenever she plays is not only whether she will go on to the next round but also, more importantly, whether she will protect our national honour against the invader from the east.

 

Excess and control

The debate that emerged with the birth of power tennis continues to this very day. It can be traced in all representations of women’s tennis. Muscles, physical effort, brutality, sweat and noise not only go against the traditional character of this discipline but also against the usual positioning of a female tennis player within the landscape of representation. This incoherence is perfectly depicted in the Nike commercial. What actually drowns I Feel Pretty out is not so much Sharapova’s shot but rather her loud cry. The noises made by female tennis players when hitting the ball have become the infamous characteristic sign of women’s tennis and a topic of never-tiring discussions among its fans. The first woman to break the decorum was Monica Seles, followed by almost all representatives of power tennis. The loudmouths were actually warned that their exhalations are unpleasant to hear and may be perceived as a deliberate attempt to scare the opponent. The excessive expression of one’s own body has come to be viewed as not so much an representational offense but also a violation of the rules of the game. At the same time, many commentators and commercials treat such sounds as sexual. Pornography offers a model of representation that relocates the woman’s offensive body back into the safe, well-known context.

In his famous analysis of wrestling, John Fiske argued that the excessive, grotesque corporality of male players transforms the sport performance into a carnival parody of the discipline, where all rules exist only to be broken and anarchy defeats all order. Wrestling, however, is closer to Jerry Springer-style freak shows than to a classic sport discipline, so it may as well be governed by the logic of excess. The Women’s Tennis Association is well aware of the fact that bodily excess in tennis needs to be justified by a more soothing representation. The latest advertising campaign for women’s tennis, Strong is Beautiful, seems to confirm that WTA has still not found a way to cope with the conflicts occasioned by the athletic, female body. Strong can also be beautiful, the authors of the commercial try to convince us. In other words, the body in its material excess can still be reduced to a purely aesthetic dimension. The commercials show tennis players performing their signature shots. In slow motion, we watch Ana Ivanovic’s forehand, Kim Clijsters’s split, Serena Williams’s backhand. At the same time, the players are fully made-up, dressed in sophisticated, sport outfits and their bodies are sprinkled with glitter. Slow motion, a typical way of representing some events in sport which usually hyperbolises the musculature of players, only underlines the alienating effect. The players, yanked out of their natural context and filmed in unnatural, artificial surroundings, seem to be reduced to the role of mere ornaments.

 

Guilty pleasure

However, slow motion also enables a certain pleasure-based identification, which neutralises the representational tension. The tennis players become monumental, surreal, and the glamour effect seems a bit kamp. Bodies are filmed in slow motion not only in sport broadcasts but also in queer art, for instance by Karol Radziszewski. It helps us experience pleasure that would otherwise be inaccessible. This exaggerated, all-too-vigilant way of looking is characteristic of the fans of this discipline. The dilemmas concerning the representation of women’s tennis do not disappear if we adopt their perspective; they actually become more pronounced. Tennis’s unclear standing in oppositions such as refined – force-driven, elite – popular, athletic – sexual makes it not only more interesting but also inspires discussions that are otherwise marginalised in sport. The largest fan community, TennisForum.com, illustrates such tensions perfecly. The fans’ creations include not only internet memes but also fan fiction, pop remixes, collages and mash-ups connected with all of the issues discussed above. If it had not been for the whole-hearted support of the fan community, Sarah Gronert, a German tennis player who was born a hermaphrodite and had to face years of discrimination, would probably have given up her career.

Women’s tennis today can no longer be reduced to the model of distinction proposed by Pierre Bourdieu. Sporting bodies fall outside any given order of representation or rigid pattern. Nevertheless, in order to sell itself, sport has to undergo constant image negotiations. Many commentators now say that the glamour aesthetics will turn out to be simply inefficient when it comes to women’s tennis. At the same time, excessive aestheticisation provides, albeit unintentionally, one more interpretation option. Let us come back once again to the Nike commercial. The lyrics of I Feel Pretty were slightly modified, a trick that the fan community promptly picked up on. The spot says ‘I feel pretty, and witty, and bright’, while in the film, Maria actually sang ‘I feel pretty, and witty, and... gay’. Once again, the fans’ insight discovers the mischievous potential of identification, which actually is no surprise, as homosexuals form a large part of this particular fandom. Strong, independent, aggressive women are a perfect epitome of the gay icon, and the ‘Strong is beautiful’ slogan reveals its whole subversive potential. At the same time, the last binary opposition underlying the image of sport in popular culture is dismantled: there no longer is a dichotomy between passive watching and active performance. The pleasure of watching is an activity, a semiotic guerrilla war pursued with an aggression and finesse worthy of tennis’s biggest stars.