Skimpy Coverage explores Sports Illustrated’s treatment of female athletes since the iconic magazine’s founding in 1954. The first book-length study of its kind, this accessible account charts the ways in which Sports Illustrated—arguably the leading sports publication in postwar America—engaged with the social and cultural changes affecting women’s athletics and the conversations about gender and identity they spawned. Bonnie Hagerman examines the emergence of the magazine’s archetypal female athlete—good-looking, straight, and white—and argues that such qualities were the same ones the magazine prized in the women who appeared in its wildly successful Swimsuit Issue. As Hagerman shows, the female athlete and the swimsuit model, at least for the magazine, were essentially one and the same. Despite this conflation, and the challenges it poses, Hagerman also tracks the distance that sportswomen—including Wilma Rudolph, Billie Jean King, Serena Williams, and Megan Rapinoe—have traveled both within Sports Illustrated’s pages and without. Blending sports with gender history, Skimpy Coverage profiles numerous sportswomen who have used athletics and the platform sport offers to push for empowerment, freedom, equality, and acceptance in ways that have complemented and inspired broader feminist agendas.

Fans of Paul Carter will love this fast-paced and funny memoir featuring nudist neighbours, sex in croc-infested waters, frogs in the toilet and a resident snake in Kellie's kitchen that may or may not be lethal. These are the outrageous stories of a feisty girl who decided to go bush. SKIMPY (defn): A feisty barmaid who works in outback pubs in denim cut-offs and a bikini top Kellie Arrowsmith was a country girl whose idea of a hairdo was tying a ponytail whenever she wanted to go horse riding. But in her early twenties she left her sleepy hometown of Albury on the NSW/Victoria border for the bright lights of the Gold Coast, and soon found herself working in a succession of unexciting jobs just to keep up with her now-glamorous lifestyle. After spending two years as a frazzled receptionist for an adult entertainment agency, Kellie decided to stop booking the jobs and start taking them. So it was that she found herself travelling to Gove, a mining town in East Arnhem Land, where she had her first stint as a skimpy: a barmaid who wears not much clothing for big money. Skimpies can work in the NT, in WA, in the Hunter Valley of NSW - wherever there's a bunch of blokes with a fly-in fly-out lifestyle who enjoy a cold beer at the end of their shift. Kellie thought her new job would take her all round the country, but she hadn't planned on falling in love - not with Dave, a rough-and-tumble outback character with a big heart and the world's worst four-wheel-drive, and not with the Northern Territory way of life. But she did, and instead of diamonds and dust, Kellie got crocodiles and denim cut-offs - and a whole lot of stories to tell about a side of outback life that's a long way off the beaten track.