ABSTRACT
This chapter explores sporting spectacle and Eros are linked through money, in ways that suit the politicized interdisciplinary focus of physical cultural studies. Elias' disciples in sports studies focus, inter alia, on the spectacular body, focusing on discipline, mirroring, dominance, and communication. Erotic experience is the height of jouissance and the peril of exchange are mutually heightened in a spiral of bodily connection. The uncomfortable sense of the male body straining while almost naked can lead to some interesting practices of compensation in the media. As part of the desire to address media spectators and capture their attention for advertisers, the sporting body has become an object of lyrical rhapsody and gendered money. In 1995, UK female spectators for Wimbledon on television outnumbered male, and the numbers were nearly equal for boxing. The chapter also considers the most powerful yet derided form of female sports spectatorship: wives and girlfriends (WAGs).
