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159 6 Emancipatory Potential, Social Justice, and the Consumption Imperative In 1993, William Solomon and Michael Messner published a journal article in the Sociology of Sport Journal titled “Outside the Frame: Newspaper Coverage of the Sugar Ray Leonard Wife Abuse Story.” In this analysis, the authors split the types of newspaper coverage of this famous abuse case into two categories. Themes that dominated print media coverage of the case were said to be “inside the frame” (in this instance, stories of drug abuse and alcohol use, and individualized stories of sin and redemption from starting/stopping drugs and alcohol), while other themes remained wholly “outside” of the print media framings of the event (analysis about wife abuse) (Messner and Solomon 1993). When we originally began working on this book together, we were discussing the conceptual work in this analysis, and during the course of our conversation, we linked Messner and Solomon’s concept of “outside the media frame” with a term known as the “realm of the unfathomable.” The phrase the “realm of the unfathomable” was coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to highlight how particular configurations of power and knowledge intersect to produce a preponderance of certain types of knowledge claims while others are wholly unthinkable, or left out (e.g., outside the frame). In Messner and Solomon’s analysis, the “wholly unthinkable” themes stood on the side of social justice frames. Here, the authors recognized the paradoxes associated with limiting the print media coverage about a domestic violence case between a (famous male athlete) husband and wife to themes of drug and alcohol abuse (and themes of individual morality/ sin/redemption associated with drugs/alcohol), without discussing masculinity , sport, violence, or gender inequality. Not all scholars would agree with this interpretation, of course. For example, in Darnell Hunt’s book, 160 Emancipatory Potential, Social Justice, and the Consumption Imperative OJ Simpson Fact and Fiction: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality (1999), that examined print media coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, he underscored how race should be central to any analysis of what is or is not inside of media frames. Some researchers would therefore argue that negative media attention is in fact disproportionately cast upon sports stars, particularly African-American athletes. Given the ways in which media focuses attention on the “bad behavior” of such celebrities, it frames their guilt as predetermined due to racialized and racist notions of crime in U.S. society, foreclosing discussions of possible innocence. Nonetheless, similar conceptual work on what is included or excluded from analytical framings of events was offered by Karin Lutzen, in her 1995 published work titled “La mise en discours and silences in research on the history of sexuality.” In this work, she highlights how certain deviant sexual acts were not marked as such during the 1800s. Individuals who carried out what many would clearly call sexually deviant acts in contemporary culture were not arrested for sexual deviance at that time, but rather, were arrested for “pathological obsessions”1 Her chapter highlights that it is analytically important to examine not only what history says about sexuality—but also what it does not say. She notes that “with silence as a track, one must reconstruct the attitude causing the refusal to talk” (p. 23). Throughout Lutzen’s work, silences and omissions are indirectly linked to social justice, as her central concerns are linked to the ways in which history is often unable to constitute the discursive logic associated with recognition of the sensual, erotic, or sexual. By “studying up” on dominant health and fitness ideals and by extension examining the politics of inclusion and omission in our own relational coverage of women’s and men’s health and fitness magazines in Body Panic, we took a similar analytical approach. We carried out an analysis of what is included inside the frame of health and fitness media texts concerning gender and bodies—and also examined what remains external to or outside of imagery and text. Despite the common analyses of the past within an academic sociology of sport, fitness, and media that often report men as subjects and women as objects,2 our own analysis did not solely uncover a simple, traditional female object/male subject dichotomy. Rather, for the most privileged bodies, the convergence of experiences by gender makes objecthood for both men and women a sign of status and part of the experience of idealized subjecthood in consumer culture. In this work, we combined...

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