Leslie Heywood, "Immanence, Transcendence, and Immersive Practices: Female Athletes in U.S. Neoliberalism"
(page 7 of 7)

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.[39] 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."[40] 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:

Fig. 4

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.[41] 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).[42] 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.[43]

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."[44] The Gen-Y athlete's "strategies for managing sexism"[45] 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."[46] 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.

Endnotes

1. David Andrews, Daniel S. Mason, and Michael L. Silk, "Encountering the Field: Sport Studies and Qualitative Research," Qualitative Methods in Sport Studies (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 9. [Return to text]

2. Nigel Thrift, "Still Life in the Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature," in Bodies of Nature, ed. Phil Macnaghten and John Urry (London: Sage, 2001). [Return to text]

3. David Andrews et al., Qualitative Methods, 12. [Return to text]

4. Stimpson takes this quote from the essay I co-authored with Jennifer Drake called "We Learn America Like a Script: Activism in the Third Wave; or, Enough Phantoms of Nothing," in Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, ed. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 46. Catharine R. Stimpson, "The Atalanta Syndrome: Women, Sports, and Cultural Values." [Return to text]

5. See Mary Jo Kane, "Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sport as a Continuum," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 19: 191-218. [Return to text]

6. David Held and Anthony McGrew, "The Great Globalization Debate," in The Global Transformations Reader, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), 28-9. [Return to text]

7. See David Andrews, ed., Michael Jordan, Inc: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). [Return to text]

8. See especially The Proving Grounds (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2005); Pretty Good for a Girl: A Sport Memoir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Bodybuilding (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). [Return to text]

9. Samantha King, "Methodological Contingencies in Sport Studies," in Qualitative Methods in Sport Studies, ed. David Andrews, Daniel S. Mason, and Michael L. Silk (Oxford: Berg, 2005). [Return to text]

10. Held and McGrew, "The Great Globalization Debate," 5. [Return to text]

11. Mary Mellor, "Ecofeminism and Environmental Ethics: A Materialist Perspective," in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. Michael E. Zimmerman, J. Baird Callicot, Karen J. Warren, Irene J. Klaver, and John Clark (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), 208-227. Mellor's argument is itself reminiscent of Susan Bordo's discussion, in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), of the liberal and radical feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s, which tended to be characterized by what Bordo terms the "Transcenders" and the "Red Bloomers": "On the one side are the "Transcenders - for whom the female body, undetermined by nature or history, can be recreated anew by feminism. On the other side are the "Red Bloomers" - for whom the female body is a source of pleasure, knowledge, and power, to be revalued rather than remade" (37). It should be noted that Mellor, like Bordo, sees her feminist position as residing between the two, "describing sex/gender relations as neither entirely socially constructed nor entirely 'natural.' Humans are both cultured and natured; human-human relations are embedded in and constructed from human-nature relations" (214). [Return to text]

12. For a description of the ways this opportunity was not always distributed equally between women, particularly on the basis of race, see many of the essays in this volume. [Return to text]

13. Mellor, "Ecofeminism," 214, 216 (emphasis mine). [Return to text]

14. Ibid., 214-15. [Return to text]

15. Held and McGrew, "The Great Globalization Debate," 3. [Return to text]

16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Globalization as Empire," in The Global Transformations Reader, 118. [Return to text]

17. Manuel Castells, "Global Informational Capitalism," in The Global Transformations Reader, 312. [Return to text]

18. Robert W. McChesney, "The New Global Media," in The Global Transformations Reader, 266. [Return to text]

19. David Andrews et al., Qualitative Methods, 26. [Return to text]

20. See especially Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (N.Y.: Routledge, 1993) and Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). [Return to text]

21. See Susan Bordo, "Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture," Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 10th anniv. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 245-275. [Return to text]

22. Mellor, "Ecofeminism," 215. [Return to text]

23. On linkages between women's sports and homophobia, see Pat Griffin, Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sport (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1998) and Mary Jo Festle, Playing Nice: Politics and Apologies in Women's Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). [Return to text]

24. See, for instance, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, "Sports Photographs and Sexual Difference: Images of Women and Men in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games," Sociology of Sport Journal 7, no. 1 (1990): 22-43. [Return to text]

25. Mellor, "Ecofeminism," 214. [Return to text]

26. Leslie Heywood, "For the Women's Cross Country Team, 1983," in The Proving Grounds: Poems (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press), 39. [Return to text]

27. Phil Macnaghten, "Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life Practices," The Sociological Review 51, no.1 (2003): 68. [Return to text]

28. Peter R. Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 2-3. [Return to text]

29. Macnaghten, "Embodying the Environment," 75. [Return to text]

30. Ceri Pritchard, Natalia Quacquarelli, and Christine Saunders, "Women in Surfing: Changing Equalities Over a Life Course," The University of Liverpool Research Report Series, no. 4 (2004), http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/undergraduate/
fieldclasses/santacruz/SCRS2004/index_page.htm. [Return to text]

31. Robin "Zeuf" Janiszeufski, "The Spirit of Rell," in Girl in the Curl: A Century of Women in Surfing, ed. Andrea Gabbard (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2000), 69. [Return to text]

32. See Drew Campion, Stoked: A History of Surf Culture (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003), 32-36. [Return to text]

33. Matt Warshaw, Encyclopedia of Surfing (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 552. [Return to text]

34. Douglas Booth, "Ambiguities in Pleasure and Discipline: The Development of Competitive Surfing," Journal of Sport History 22, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 194. [Return to text]

35. Ibid. [Return to text]

36. On the sport of powerlifting as providing a different model of competitive experience, see Leslie Heywood, "Bench Press, or Becoming a Girl Again," in Whatever It Takes: Women on Women's Sport, ed. Jolie Sandoz and Joby Winans (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999), 298-305. [Return to text]

37. Macnaghten, "Embodying the Environment," 82. [Return to text]

38. Don Sabo and Janie Victoria Ward, "Wherefore Art Thou Feminisms? Feminist Activism, Academic Feminisms, and Women's Sports Advocacy," Scholar and Feminist Online 4, no. 3 (Summer 2006). [Return to text]

39. 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). [Return to text]

40. Anita Harris, Future Girl, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 6. [Return to text]

41. 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. [Return to text]

42. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 24. [Return to text]

43. 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). [Return to text]

44. Krista Comer, "Wanting to be Lisa: Generational Rifts, Girl Power, and the Globalization of Surf Culture," American Youth Cultures (2004): 251. [Return to text]

45. Ibid., 241. [Return to text]

46. Ibid., 239. [Return to text]