Yesterday, in class we watched the documentary Murderball. Murderball offers an up-close look at the road to the 2004 Paralympic wheelchair rugby tournament of the US and Canadian wheerchair rugby teams, and the personal stories of the athletes who are passionate, driven, and determined to win. In the documentary wheelchair rugby is portrayed as a sport for ruthless, though guys. Combined with the use of heavy metal music the maker puts an – almost extreme in my opinion – emphasis on the masculinity of the sport and its athletes. The body plays an important role in the documentary. Immediately I asked myself the question: if there is so much emphasis on the body of these male athletes, is the media representation of female disabled athletes the same?
Blade Babe
In the world we live in, beauty and looks are very important. In ads, soap series, commercials and magazines we see a lot of ‘beauty’-full people. We live in a world where perfection of the body is valued highly. Is this idea of ‘perfection of the body’ also reproduced in disabiliy sport where the athletes body is not ‘perfect’ when the athlete has a physical handicap? Do we reproduce perfection among those who are not ‘perfect’? Therefore, I will take a look at the media representation of Marlou van Rhijn, aka Blade Babe.
Door Fanny Schertzer – Eigen werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Marlou van Rhijn is a Dutch female disabled athlete. Born without lower legs, van Rhijn has quickly become the world’s fastest female leg amputee and one of the biggest names in Paralympic sport. She won gold and silver at the London Paralympic Games and currently holds the world record on the 100 meters and 200 meters sprint in the T43/T44 class.
Despite her on-track success van Rhijn has still earned her nickname ‘Blade Babe’ based on her looks. However she is untroubled by her nickname. “I feel like it is a compliment,” she says. “I don’t really feel like it is something you shouldn’t like as a feminist.” (AFP, 2015)
Media representation
For this mini research on media representation I used the keyword ‘Marlou van Rhijn’ in Google. I selected the first 30 articles of national and regional newspapers, magazines, television and other non-company and non-personal websites in the search results. In each article I looked for references to 1. the nickname Blade Babe and 2. any other reference to beauty and looks.
Results show that in 20 articles the nickname Blade Babe was used either in the title or the body text and in 2 articles there was another reference to her looks in the body text (1 double reference in an article). In total, in 21 of 30 articles there was a reference regarding her looks (download pdf).
This is quite a lot although I see many copy cats; websites publishing the ‘same’ news article as seen on other websites. Anyhow, this reproduces the emphasis on the looks/the body on a large scale. Only websites regarding the sport athletics tend not to use the nickname Blade Babe opposed to more mainstream or popular media.
It seems that the first mention of the term Blade Babe (Babe op blades) was made during an interview with Folia TV in 2011, before van Rhijn became a well-known athlete.
Is this real science? No, of course not. But in my opinion the beauty of the body – even though seen as imperfect in our society – is also reflected on disability sports.
References
AFP (2015), Dutch runner shrugs off ‘Blade Babe’ tag, Bangkok Post, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/sports/738444/dutch-runner-shrugs-off-blade-babe-tag, visited 27 November 2015
Note: this blog was written for the course ‘Sport, Culture and Society‘ which I attended at the University of Amsterdam in autumn 2015.
Sport en Maatschappij 