The burdens of the flesh: star power and the queer dialectic in sports celebrity

Abstract

In this article I argue that when contemporary male sporting icons are used as promotional figures they are inevitably translated into the discourse of embodied sexualisation that dominates current branding strategies in celebrity culture. This presents them as sexualised objects, which is a discourse of representation that has been traditionally reserved exclusively for women and gay men in popular culture. Queer analytics direct our focus to the representational strategies through which dominant discursive categories of gender and sexuality are maintained and potentially disrupted. I suggest, therefore, that the current modes of representation celebrity culture render sports celebrity as a potentially queer cultural location because the ontological coherence of masculinity is destabilised through its interpellation as a sexual object. I argue that this construction of sporting masculinity is inevitable when it is drawn into celebrity branding culture. This inevitable queer destabilisation of traditional hetero-masculinity needs to be recuperated to maintain the commercial authenticity of sports masculinity. I argue that a queer dialectical momentum operates within strategies of representation to achieve this recuperation, whereby we are reminded that the desirable athletic and toned flesh on display is authentically and avowedly that of heterosexual icons. Sporting masculinity therefore retains its gendered authenticity through a dialectical relationship with the necessary requirements of celebrity culture.