Naked Function, Athletic Form: Acceptable Sexuality and the Myth of Empowerment in ESPN's Body Issue

ESPN's Body Issue was launched in 2009 with the purported aim of celebrating the athletic form by photographing prominent athletes nude. This paper analyzes the way the Body Issue sexualizes and objectifies athletes while articulating a discourse of empowerment. This study utilizes a multimodal analysis to conduct a comprehensive examination of all of ESPN's the Body Issues from 2009–2019, looking at every image of individual athletes (N = 778) as well as any accompanying text, captions, or interview excerpts. This study furthers a robust body of literature about the objectification of athletes but extends the theoretical importance of previous works by combining analysis of both images and texts to highlight the way hegemonic beauty standards and body types are prioritized in the Body Issue.