Racialising the “great man”: A Critical Race study of idealised male athletic bodies in Men’s Health magazine

Abstract

While scholars working in the sociology of the gender, body, health, sport and media have begun to address the paucity of research into media representations of men and masculinities, the literature to date has failed consistently to address the racialised aspects of media dwelling male athletic bodies. The same critique can be applied to recent explorations of popular men’s magazine, Men’s Health. Current research has thus systematically underplayed the significance of “race” as a defining feature of idealised, mediated masculinities. During this paper then, I use Critical Race Theory to guide a semiotic analysis of a year’s worth of Men’s Health magazine. Firstly, I argue that white male athletic bodies are represented as idealised masculine types, possessing both the virtues of body and mind, while their black male counterparts, to varying degrees, are depicted as spectacular, violent and hyper-masculine. Secondly, I go on to argue further that this idealisation of the white male athletic body is a reaction to broader social and cultural transformations, indicative of late-modern societies. That is, I suggest Men’s Health’s mantra of self-regulation is better understood as a call to white men to exercise greater embodied control in order to reaffirm jurisdiction and supremacy, during an epoch of uncertainty. Thirdly, following this line of argument, the paper contends that future readings of Men’s Health, and men’s magazines more broadly, must seek to understand better how racialised discourses inform dominant media representations of masculinities.

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