Builtto Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon

Querying Youth on Female Alphas,Betas, and Balphas

We asked a total of ten questions and were mainly interestedin the meaning youth derived when reading images of athletic women.As noted in the introduction and throughout this book, femaleathletes are increasingly ubiquitous in the public eye. We arefacing a post-civil rights, post-second wave feminism, postindustrialconsumer culture that provides a unique historical context inwhich to consider some of the cultural work images perform, particularlywhen considering the power of consumption and the fractured natureof identity. Consistent with Krueger's guide for categories ofquestions, we used a combination of opening, introductory, transitional,key, and ending questions. We began by asking students introductoryquestions such as age, race, and gender, and moved to requestthat they describe the sport and fitness activities they do now,have done in the past, and might consider for the future. To transitioninto the key questions, we asked students questions about recognitionof female athletes (covered earlier in this chapter). We thenshowed the groups six recent images of female athletes from sportand fitness magazines (see the appendix for a full discussionof the method). We strategically chose Brandi Chastain, Women'sProfessional Billiards Association champion Jeanette Lee, a femalehockey player in a Nike ad, a female bodybuilder, a muscular blondefitness icon, and Olympic track star Marion Jones, so as to ensurethat we did not reproduce discussions of a monolithic female athlete.We also chose these six to ensure coverage of different kindsof sports (team versus individual), and to elicit a wide arrayof discussions surrounding multiple signifiers of race, class,gender, and sexuality.

Elegance, Grace, and Race:Moral Marion Jones in Post-Civil Rights
Postfeminist America?

Marion Jones, draped in a black evening gown, hands on hips,peering away from the viewer, is posed staring into the horizon,standing tall in beach sand, chin up, with muscular arms and shouldersrevealed. The text that accompanies the image says, "Sherepresents the total package. She can talk easily with NelsonMandela, then ten seconds later chat with a little girl abouta doll." Combining ideologies of race, gender, nation, beauty,and athleticism, the image relies upon a strategic juxtapositionof image and text to produce the meaning of the "total package."

Indeed, images of black female athletes cannot simply be cheeredfor their "equal opportunity" appeal to beauty and athleticism.The ways in which images of people of color have been packagedin America have long aided white consumers in thinking that theyare embracing diversity without the "messy problems of actuallydistributing resources," "living the affects of affirmativeaction," or helping girls and women get access to education,health care, and sport. The appearance of black bodies has tendedto be erroneously conflated with a lack of morality, a signalof threat and chaos, and as blameworthy, particularly under theReagan and both Bush administrations, for the "deterioration"of American society through proliferating images of welfare mothers,crime, drugs, "promiscuity," and "immorality."As such, perhaps the public more easily embraces people of colorwho are constituted within media as having "morality,"distinguishing them from those who are poor or are seen as havingless "appropriate" backgrounds. At the same time, raceintersects with gender in unique ways in American culture, andAfrican-American women have long been constructed as standingoutside of the norms of white, middle-class ideals. Instead, blackwomen's physical fortitude and strength has been linked not toelegance or beauty, but to a "different" womanhood frequentlypresented as a desexualized Mammy image, a welfare queen, a matriarchresponsible for pushing away black men, a strong woman doing arduouslabor or as somehow more athletically inclined. Inherent in thisparticular image of black womanhood, then, lie a number of tensionsaround assimilation, difference, eroticization, athleticism, independence,morality, winning, femininity, and race.

Upon viewing the image of Jones, nearly half of students embracedthe image as "elegant," "beautiful," "strongand pretty," "glamorous," and "powerful."Several girls touted the famous Helen Reddy line, "I am woman,hear me roar," while some reminded the class that "blackis beautiful," linking it to the significance of 1960s civilrights marches that challenged conflations of whiteness with beauty.At the same time, however, just as many students referred to Joneswith powerfully negative sentiments that were infused with intersectionsof gender and race in American society, with language such as"ugly," "frightening," "big feet,""too tall," "doesn't look right in a dress,""having a bad hair day," or "doesn't look goodin a dress because of her big muscles." Although wholly consistentwith past research that highlights how easily women in sport canbe seen as undesirable and how othering can occur when viewingimages of women and/or African-Americans, it was shocking to hearhow many students centered on critiques of Jones's powerful body.No students challenged these comments with mention that heightand feet might provide a function when attempting to produce Olympicgold medals in track.

Again indicative of the fact that gender and race intersectin American culture, many students offered that Marion Jones was"too serious," was "threatening," "scary,""shadowy" "angry," "mafia," "frightening,""had attitude," or "needed to lighten up."Further moral judgments about Black America were powerfully reinforced,for instance, one ten-year-old girl offered that "she lookedrespectful of America," while another stated that "sheholds her head high and is a good role model for her family,"and a third noted that "she is a good influence on others."No other athlete was given these designations, again indicatingthat Jones was seen as linked--even if through her "superior"morals--to immorality, threat, and chaos. Seen as a "goodrole model," she represents achievement in a land of supposedequal opportunity, standing in as an icon for the classic liberalstory that obscures how sport is by no means an equal playingfield, and that society offers widely different levels of accessto health care, work, wages, sport, and more. Silently juxtapositionedagainst other black women, who will be judged to see if they arethe "moral sisters" of whites, she not only representspowerful athleticism but also is lauded for her feminine effortsto carry out the tasks of world peace, chat about dolls, and standbeautifully posed in an elegant dress under a cloud-filled sky.Indeed, the need to reinforce her femininity was critically readinto the image, even by fifth-graders. For instance, a few studentsdiscussed how they "felt badly" for Marion Jones, statingthat "maybe boys made fun of her for not being more feminine,and so she is trying to show a more feminine side." AmongHispanic girls, there were a sprinkling of themes that revealedthat Jones represented "pride" and "equality tomen," although it was rare for students to vote for the imageof Marion Jones as their favorite image, as the most attractiveimage, or as making them most want to do sport. Those who didwere typically girls who stated, "The picture is so powerful.It brings a lot of strength and passion out. She's beautiful andin her power as a woman! I like!" or boys, who commentedthat Jones was "independent and glamorous," has "gonewhere no other woman has gone" or "should feel proudto be a woman." Perhaps the dual nature of the responsesabout Jones reflect wider public structural realities and sentimentsabout how things have never been so good--and so bad--at the sametime within "black America." At the time this book wentto press, it was not coverage of Marion Jones but print-mediadiscourse on tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams that captivatedthe public. Print media was dominated by concerns with winningrecords, but also credit-card debt, hair beads, fashion, beauty,and the effect of sibling rivalry on play. As representationsand discourse surrounding high-profile African-American femaleathletes continue to flourish, researchers can and should continueto consider critically what it means to champion athletes of coloras inspirational representatives for women's sport. This is particularlythe case given the broader track record that media has concerningrepresentations of African-American women more generally, andthe burden that women of color in sport carry given the contentiousnessof cumulative, sociopolitical, racialized, and gendered powerrelations.

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