The Broken Body As Spectacle Summary

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As the role of the media has expanded to encompass each and every avenue of our lives, this has led to an increase of the virality of the darker parts of human nature. This expansion of these darker sides in the media, has seemingly led to a rise in morbid curiosity. This advanced technology allows for close-ups and slow-motion replays and a continuous cycle of reviewing injury occurring events. In Dr. Julia Banwell’s essay The Broken Body as Spectacle: Looking at Death and Injury in Sport, she believes that “death and serious injury in sport destabilizes the notion of the excellence and toughness of the sporting body and exposes it as breakable and vulnerable” (142). Death and injury in sports is not a new phenomenon and thus injuries that become normalized in sports. We can watch first hand thanks to track cameras as athletes are either stretchered off the pitch or acquire first aid to the side. This perpetuates …show more content…

Banwell proposes that our view of injuries within sports depends on several factors, such as: its seriousness, the impact on the athletes’ future career, and the sporting context of the incident.

Why then would viewers wish to see such vulnerability on repeat? Vicki Goldberg in her discussion surrounding the repetition viewing of images containing scenes of death, argues “that any that is neutralized by the spectator’s control over how and when to view such images: “knowing when the violence and death will turn up allows a certain monitoring of one’s own emotions’” (147). To continue down this stream of thought, viewers may be rapidly viewing videos of athletes getting injured to apply control over uncontrollable events. This

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