Space Invaders at Wimbledon: Televised Sport and Deterritorialization

Abstract

This analysis of the televising of the 2005 Wimbledon Tennis Championships in the United Kingdom and United States explores how the space of Wimbledon is communicated to different national cultures. The theoretical framing draws on the concepts of deterritorialization developed in Tomlinson’s (1999) work and space invaders as understood by Puwar (2004). A discourse analysis of newspaper reports and television broadcasts demonstrates ways in which the mediation of Wimbledon can be understood as subject to deterritorialization, which opens up the space of Wimbledon to bodies simultaneously marked as insiders and outsiders, revealing tensions around the visibility and invisibility of bodies. We conclude by pointing to the potential of these tensions for disrupting the power dynamics of sport.