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The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport
Explores the cultural significance of the metrosexual in sports.
How do you explain Dennis Rodman’s dyed hair, tattoos, and pierced body parts? Why are there so many athletes stripping for men’s underwear ads? Besides sport, what do Pat Riley, Alex Rodriguez, and Ian Thorpe have in common? And why has David Beckham been compared to Louis XIV?
In this fascinating exploration of past and present celebrity athletes, David Coad shows how gender roles for men are undergoing a revolutionary change. Once famous for their lack of style off the field, professional players are now fashion-conscious trendsetters. Looking at certain stellar sports figures of the past, such as Joe Namath and Jim Palmer, who were at the vanguard of reinterpreting gender roles, Coad goes on to examine their primped out and “pimped out” contemporary successors—those athletic peacocks in their furs, silks, and diamonds who embody metrosexuality, widen its focus, and demonstrate the range of experiences open to today’s male.
“…Coad’s comprehensive overview of the term and the phenomenon, their roots and evolution, accounting, for example, for how metrosexuality differs from earlier similar phenomena and how it appears in men’s lifestyle magazines, comes as a welcome and timely reminder of the importance of continued analysis of embodied and sexually defined masculinities in popular culture.” — Men and Masculinities
“…recommend[ed] … for anyone who has a Gender, Women’s Studies, or Men’s Studies program, or anyone who is a marketing or management major. There is something for all of them, as well as the general public, to see how we are being manipulated in our view of sex, sexuality, and image in advertising.” — Southwest Journal of Cultures
“…an important commentary on the range of experiences available to US and European men, extending beyond the narrow confines of traditional masculinity.” — CHOICE
“At last someone rescues the metrosexual from the mendacious marketers and gives him what he craved all along but hardly ever serious attention.” — Mark Simpson, author of Male Men Performing Masculinity
How do you explain Dennis Rodman’s dyed hair, tattoos, and pierced body parts? Why are there so many athletes stripping for men’s underwear ads? Besides sport, what do Pat Riley, Alex Rodriguez, and Ian Thorpe have in common? And why has David Beckham been compared to Louis XIV?
In this fascinating exploration of past and present celebrity athletes, David Coad shows how gender roles for men are undergoing a revolutionary change. Once famous for their lack of style off the field, professional players are now fashion-conscious trendsetters. Looking at certain stellar sports figures of the past, such as Joe Namath and Jim Palmer, who were at the vanguard of reinterpreting gender roles, Coad goes on to examine their primped out and “pimped out” contemporary successors—those athletic peacocks in their furs, silks, and diamonds who embody metrosexuality, widen its focus, and demonstrate the range of experiences open to today’s male.
“…Coad’s comprehensive overview of the term and the phenomenon, their roots and evolution, accounting, for example, for how metrosexuality differs from earlier similar phenomena and how it appears in men’s lifestyle magazines, comes as a welcome and timely reminder of the importance of continued analysis of embodied and sexually defined masculinities in popular culture.” — Men and Masculinities
“…recommend[ed] … for anyone who has a Gender, Women’s Studies, or Men’s Studies program, or anyone who is a marketing or management major. There is something for all of them, as well as the general public, to see how we are being manipulated in our view of sex, sexuality, and image in advertising.” — Southwest Journal of Cultures
“…an important commentary on the range of experiences available to US and European men, extending beyond the narrow confines of traditional masculinity.” — CHOICE
“At last someone rescues the metrosexual from the mendacious marketers and gives him what he craved all along but hardly ever serious attention.” — Mark Simpson, author of Male Men Performing Masculinity
- GenresFashion
222 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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July 24, 2011
One of the great ironies of modern masculinity is that sport – the last bastion of the bloke – has become associated with its most widely seen queering, the metrosexual; at least this is David Coad’s fairly convincing case. Metrosexuals are an unusual ‘breed’ they are widely seen as clearly heterosexual, but take considerable (un-bloke-like) interest in their appearance, clothes, style and so forth.
Coad’s case is intriguing here: he shows that the heterosexuality of the metrosexual can be traced to a series of market research reports in the US and UK (by the same consultancy) in 2003, but the terms itself goes back to the cultural analyst Mark Simpson for whom one’s preferred sexual partner was not relevant to metrosexuality. It is this change to become heterosexual, Coad argues, that makes athletes so important to metrosexuality, because after all athlete’s are ‘real men’ occupying a dominant place in approved and endorsed, valued forms of masculinity so undermine any metrosexual association with non-normative sexualities. This means that the absence of gay men from sporting metrosexulaity is not an absence from metro- but and absence from/submergence in sport, at the same time as athletes are sexualised (sporno stars, he calls them) and subjected to a desiring gaze of both men and women (there is a useful but no dominating deployment of concepts derived from feminist psychoanalysis here) – yet these are primarily white men and black bodies sit very uncomfortably in metrosexuality. Coad elegantly traces the growth in relations between athletes and high fashion industries (think Pat Riley’s Armani suits) but also places image conscious sports figures such as Riley and Joe Namath in a pre-metrosexual world: his detailed individual case studies (other than in a long discussion of men’s underwear) are Namath as pre-metro and Ian Thorpe and David Beckham as the encapsulation of contemporary sporting metrosexuality.
I’m not entirely convinced by his case, but it a compelling argument, well made, accessibly written, and drawing on a range of (primarily English language) sites, suggesting that the metrosexual is a localised phenomenon (but pointing to parallels in Japan and Korea, for instance). What is compelling though is his case that the rise of the metrosexual suggests a political moment to challenge dominant and validated forms of masculinity. Incisive, accessible savvy cultural analysis that doesn’t treat sport as an isolated form but places it stars and celebrities in broader cultural and political context: highly recommended.
Coad’s case is intriguing here: he shows that the heterosexuality of the metrosexual can be traced to a series of market research reports in the US and UK (by the same consultancy) in 2003, but the terms itself goes back to the cultural analyst Mark Simpson for whom one’s preferred sexual partner was not relevant to metrosexuality. It is this change to become heterosexual, Coad argues, that makes athletes so important to metrosexuality, because after all athlete’s are ‘real men’ occupying a dominant place in approved and endorsed, valued forms of masculinity so undermine any metrosexual association with non-normative sexualities. This means that the absence of gay men from sporting metrosexulaity is not an absence from metro- but and absence from/submergence in sport, at the same time as athletes are sexualised (sporno stars, he calls them) and subjected to a desiring gaze of both men and women (there is a useful but no dominating deployment of concepts derived from feminist psychoanalysis here) – yet these are primarily white men and black bodies sit very uncomfortably in metrosexuality. Coad elegantly traces the growth in relations between athletes and high fashion industries (think Pat Riley’s Armani suits) but also places image conscious sports figures such as Riley and Joe Namath in a pre-metrosexual world: his detailed individual case studies (other than in a long discussion of men’s underwear) are Namath as pre-metro and Ian Thorpe and David Beckham as the encapsulation of contemporary sporting metrosexuality.
I’m not entirely convinced by his case, but it a compelling argument, well made, accessibly written, and drawing on a range of (primarily English language) sites, suggesting that the metrosexual is a localised phenomenon (but pointing to parallels in Japan and Korea, for instance). What is compelling though is his case that the rise of the metrosexual suggests a political moment to challenge dominant and validated forms of masculinity. Incisive, accessible savvy cultural analysis that doesn’t treat sport as an isolated form but places it stars and celebrities in broader cultural and political context: highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review