Immanence, Transcendence, and Immersive Practices: Female Athletes in U.S. Neoliberalism

It should be noted, however, that the positive rhetoric and potentialities around women and sports have also been appropriated in ways that work to serve a neoliberal agenda, as I have argued elsewhere.¹ On the level of representation, for instance, the ideal image of female athletes perfectly incorporates the neoliberal ideal of the can-do, do-it-yourself, take responsibility-for-yourself identity that is mapped particularly on girls in order to demonstrate neoliberalism’s supposed extension of opportunity to all. As sociologist Anita Harris writes, “today [girls] are supposed to become unique, successful individuals making their own choices and plans to accomplish autonomy . . . To be girl-powered is to make good choices and to be empowered as an individual.”² In addition to appealing to young women as an important consumer market, girl-power advertising images that make use of female athletes cultivate ideals of uniqueness, strength, and autonomy, as in this ad from the Roxy sportswear website:

This image of the healthy athletic female body is meant – and perhaps is interpreted by viewers (if the advertising works successfully) – as a synecdoche for the successful life. Just having bodies like these signifies success on the cultural level. While it is clear that all audiences do not read images the same way, and that images are often read counter to their message and reappropriated for oppositional ends, this does not mean that they do not simultaneously communicate messages that normalize – in this case, the idea that the athletic female body is representative of the success the athlete will have in her life.³ The way the image is coded directs viewers to read it in a certain way. For instance, Susan Bordo notes that muscles and athleticism, once coded male and working class, “today frequently symbolize qualities of character rather than class, race, or gender status” (emphasis mine).⁴ The “character” these girls demonstrate with their bodies is that of the powerful, self-determining consumer subject, the image of a health and happiness that come through successful participation in the neoliberal ideology of the DIY, self-determining lifestyle, which assumes equal opportunity when, in fact, opportunity, like wealth, is distributed highly unevenly.⁵

In addition to raising these structural questions, it is also possible to read the young, “Generation Y” female athlete today as having a different relationship to gender than did my “Generation X” cohort. In her work on women’s surfing, Krista Comer writes that Gen-X athletes, the first generation post-Title IX, concentrate more on becoming hard-core competitors in the masculine model, “turning themselves from ‘just girls’ into athletes,” proving they can do anything a man can do and succeed in sports in those terms. According to Comer, Generation Y, however, faces a different struggle: “Their questions are about how girls can be agents in the scripting of their own embodied lives in the midst of consumer culture into which, since the mid-1970s, young people have been born.”⁶ The Gen-Y athlete’s “strategies for managing sexism”⁷ are characterized more by the logic of “girl-power,” the idea that “her mental health is stable and secure, guaranteed by sports activities. She is backed by her girlfriends when the going gets tough, and they bring her back to sisterly sanity when she gets too boy-distracted . . . she does not denounce her ‘girl-ness’ and, in effect, insists that girl-ness be valued, taken seriously.”⁸ It is possible that young female athletes, today’s Atalantas, have taken the “girl-power” messages promulgated by consumer culture in the 1990s and turned these into a strategy that allows them to value immanence (their “girl-ness”) and experience sport not in only its competitive, transcendent modality but in its potentiality as an immersive practice as well.

As I hope to have shown, sport is an immensely complex cultural site that contains many contradictory messages, possibilities, and meanings. As sport grows in importance as a cultural institution, it will be in the best interest of feminists of all kinds to take it seriously as a subject of critical inquiry, and as a crucial site for activism and public policy interventions. I have given a large part of my life to undertaking this inquiry, and an even larger part to experiencing the benefits of body, spirit, and mind that sport in all its various forms has to offer. The female athlete occupies an ambivalent space within the larger context of U.S. neoliberalism. She is at once the symbol of the free market’s supposed opportunity and transcendence of limitation, and, when examined with an emphasis on immanence and immersive practices, an agent of its potential transformation.

1. Leslie Heywood, “The Girls of Summer: Social Contexts for the ‘Year of the Woman’ at the 1996 Olympics,” in The Olympics at the Millennium, ed. Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaeffer (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 114. See also Leslie Heywood and Shari Dworkin, Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), especially chapter 2, “Sport as the Stealth Feminism of the Third Wave,” 25-54. “Producing Girls: Empire, Sport, and the Neoliberal Body,” in Physical Culture, Power, and the Body, ed. Patricia Vertinsky and Jennifer Hargreaves (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). [↩]
2. Anita Harris, Future Girl, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. [↩]
3. On the ways consumers read images against the grain of their dominant messages, see John Fiske, “Introduction,” in Media Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1-19. [↩]
4. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 24. [↩]
5. See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “Patterns of Global Inequality: United Nations Development Report 1999,” where it is reported that “OECD countries, with 19 percent of the global population, have 71 percent of global trade in goods and services, 58 percent of foreign direct investment and 91 percent of all internet users . . . The assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP (Gross National Product) of all least developed countries and their 600 million people . . . The fifth of he world’s people living in the highest income countries had 86 percent of world GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the bottom fifth just 1 percent” (The Global Transformations Reader, 425). [↩]
6. Krista Comer, “Wanting to be Lisa: Generational Rifts, Girl Power, and the Globalization of Surf Culture,” American Youth Cultures (2004): 251. [↩]
7. Ibid., 241. [↩]
8. Ibid., 239. [↩]