Celebrating imperfection: sport, disability and celebrity culture

Abstract

In recent years, discourses of celebrity surrounding sports stars have provided fruitful ground for critiquing the role of sport in late-capitalist culture. Seldom, however, has this critical gaze been directed at the Paralympic movement. Drawing on a critical anthropology of Paralympic sport, this paper argues that celebrity status is situated at the heart of an individualised and ideologically grounded late-capitalist culture in which visual media is central to the production of social identities. It is against this backdrop that the paper seeks to unpack what lies behind the achievements of the United Kingdom's most celebrated Paralympian, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson. We argue that Grey-Thompson's celebrity appeal as a role model, political figure, voice of Paralympism (in the UK) and, to some degree, marketable commodity, are devoid of an understanding of the habitus of the Paralympic community, the nature of Paralympic competition, and specifically the complex and detailed classification systems within which all disabled athletes perform. It is argued that a greater awareness of these matters at a public level may well challenge the tenability of Grey-Thompson's celebrity position.

Keywords:

• celebrity
• sport
• disability
• Paralympic Games
• habitus

Notes

1. This federation is suspended from the IPC and its athletes banned from participation in the next Paralympic games because of irregularities in the construction and application of its classification system.

2. This is a federation that was launched in September 2004 at the Athens Paralympic Games and which merged two federations that had been part of the Paralympic movement since its inception: International Stoke Mandeville Wheelchair Sports Federation (ISMWSF) and International Sport Organisation for the Disabled (ISOD).

3. See www.paralympic.org

4. We use the term ‘stars’ here to denote sports performers who have become well known (and recognised) publicly as celebrity figures. For further discussion on the star/celebrity relationship, see Andrews and Jackson 2001, Cashmore and Parker 2003, Dyer 1998. For more detailed insight into sporting celebrity and notoriety, see Cashmore 2005. For more on the legalities of sporting celebrity, see Haynes 2005 and Parker 2009.

5. Academic offerings on the broader concept of celebrity are nothing new. For more on this subject, see Debord 1968, Gamson 1994, Marshall 1997, Boyle and Haynes 1999, Evans and Wilson 1999, Giles 2000, Turner et al. 2000, and Cashmore 2006. For specific discussion on taxonomies of celebrity see Monaco 1978, Rojek 2001 and Turner 2004.

6. To equate Grey-Thompson's sporting achievements and (subsequent) celebrity status with notions of labour and productivity presents something of a contradiction to Oliver's (1990) existing thesis on the way in which disability has historically been rendered dependent and ‘non-productive’ within the context of capitalism.

7. According to Smith and Thomas (2005) the recent success of the Paralympic Games has (in the UK at least) brought a more widespread and more positive media reportage of disability sport.