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The Athletic Female Body and the Legend of Title Ix View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository FROM MASCULINE MYTHS TO GIRL POWER REALITIES: THE ATHLETIC FEMALE BODY AND THE LEGEND OF TITLE IX BY DORIE A. GEISSLER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Kinesiology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor C.L. Cole, Chair Professor Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko Associate Professor Melissa Orlie Associate Professor Synthia Sydnor Professor Emerita Paula Treichler ABSTRACT The last 40 years have brought dramatic changes to America’s female sporting landscape. During this time, the athletic female body, once feared and considered deviant, has emerged as a nationally celebrated and highly commodified popular icon. According to popular narratives, this change in cultural perceptions can easily be explained as the “natural” outgrowth of the second-wave feminist movement, the fitness boom, and more specifically, America’s commitment to gender equality via Title IX. However, as Foucauldian-informed feminist studies of the body have repeatedly shown, popular modes of representing bodies (like the female athlete) are, despite their “objective” appearance, historically contingent. Drawing from this theoretical and methodological assumption, my study is shaped by a desire to “write against” popular narratives, particularly the now legendary status of Title IX within the national archive, by drawing attention to the historical specificity of modern representations of athletic female body. Through the methods of conjunctural analysis I illustrate how, through a series of discursive negotiations, popular cultural fears about the physical and psychological dangers of female sport participation, have given way to “common knowledge” of female physicality as a healthy and empowering practice. Consequently, this study explores how these commonsense definitions of the athletic female body have functioned to delimit the acceptable boundaries of female athleticism, define women’s sport history, frame debates about Title IX, and shape particular categories and problems related to female subjectivity. Specifically, this study begins in the 1970s a period popularly recognized “revolutionary” period in women’s sports, fueled largely by the passage of Title IX and subsequent dramatic increases in female sport participation. I explore how, during this ii period, sport science research on the athletic female body gained cultural authority and relevance through its articulation with popular debates about the changing role of U.S. women in sport and in turn, helped to dispel popular myths (i.e., women and girls become masculine and/or homosexual through sport participation, they lack physical stamina, aggressiveness, and competitive instinct) about female sport participation. Moving to the 1980s, this study then examines the disparity between cultural notions of the female athletic body as a new standard of beauty, backlash sentiments against female sport participation, and critiques of early sport science research on the female/sport relationship. Through this analysis, I suggest that despite their apparent divergence, celebratory, backlash, and critical discourses concerning the athletic female body are articulated to postfeminist, neoliberal, and psychotherapeutic discourses in ways that serve to maintain suspicions about the athletic female body. Next, this study considers how during the 1990s and early 2000s the now popular understanding of sport as a major determinant in women’s and girls’ physical well-being and the enhancement of self-esteem inform and extend the image of the celebrity female athlete, the athletic little girl, and girl power/Ophelia discourses. Through this analysis, I contend that despite its progressive appearance, the current advocacy of sport for girls, particularly as a means of addressing social problems, also functions in oppressive ways by facilitating a politics of blame associated with lifestyle politics and self-betterment strategies. Finally, this study concludes by considering how commonsense definitions of the athletic female body as feminine, healthy, and empowered, yet biologically handicapped, continue to shape popular discourses concerning female sport participation. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was born quite accidentally from a need to fulfill a graduate course requirement. It is through my enrollment in a course titled Kinesiology 249: Sport in Modern Society that I was first introduced to critical sport studies. It is here that I met an inspiring teacher and scholar, Dr. C.L. Cole, who encouraged me to rethink commonsense assumptions about the body and power in sport. Through her support and guidance I decided to give critical sport studies a try. Dr. Cole’s widely respected body of work has set the academic standard to which I aspire and has profoundly shaped the form this project has taken. I am particularly grateful for her ability to gently challenge students while simultaneously imbuing them with confidence. Without her advice, patience, enthusiasm, and faith in this project (over more years than I care to count), this project would not have materialized. Through the course of my graduate study I have had the extreme good fortune of benefiting from the guidance, insight, wit, and wisdom of a committee of exceptional and accomplished scholars: Wojtek Jan Chodzko-Zajko, Melissa Orlie, Synthia Sydnor, and Paula Treichler. I am grateful to the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Department of Cell and Structural Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana for their financial support through my many years of study. Lastly, I am indebted to Ms. Tina Candler, Secretary of Graduate Studies. Thank you for helping me to navigate through the many administrative issues associated my particular project, your kindness, and always engaging personality. I thank my parents, Richard and Yvonne Stec, and my in-laws, Burkhard and Judy Geissler for always believing in me. To my husband and best friend, Karl, thank you for iv your loving affection, much needed laughter, for standing by me through this lengthy process and encouraging me to “get the paper done”. My deep personal gratitude and admiration goes to my two best teachers, my children: Alex and Jake Geissler. Thank you for helping me to stay grounded: it’s hard to take myself too seriously when there are Lego kits to be built, Wii levels to solve, and Nerf wars to be won. Lastly, above all, I am eternally indebted to my God. Thank you for Your unending faithfulness, unmerited grace, and rich blessings. May I continue to grow in partnership with You. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: RE-THINKING THE ATHLETIC FEMALE BODY IN LATE MODERN AMERICA: MY THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK ............................................................................ 1 CHAPTER TWO: FROM SEX ROLES TO SELF-ESTEEM: SPORT SCIENCE AND POPULAR DEBATES OVER THE ATHLETIC FEMALE BODY IN THE EARLY DAYS OF TITLE IX............................................... 44 CHAPTER THREE: “A CRITIQUE OF CRITIQUES”: FEMINIST SPORT STUDIES, TITLE IX BACKLASH, AND THE NEW ATHLETIC IDEAL OF BEAUTY .................................................................................................................. 107 CHAPTER FOUR: “IF YOU LET ME PLAY SPORTS”: EMPOWERMENT, RISK, AND THE ATHLETIC GIRL-CHILD IN 1990s AMERICA ............................ 173 CHAPTER FIVE: “IT’S A SKILLS THING”: BIOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM, AND THE MARGINALIZED FEMALE ATHLETE IN THE POST-TITLE IX ERA ...................................................................................... 232 REFERENCES................................................................................................................ 248 vi CHAPTER ONE Re-thinking the Athletic Female Body in Late Modern America: My Theoretical and Methodological Framework On June 3rd, 2002, in a moment marked by constant news reports of terrorist threats, suicide bombings, child kidnappings, and corporate debacles, Newsweek offered the nation a temporary respite from chaos in an optimistic cover story about America’s girls. Pictured on the cover is a young white girl about fifteen, her wide smile, open relaxed posture and hand gesture suggest a carefree demeanor tempered with confidence. Drawing on popular crisis narratives about the dangerous effects of the prepubescent female psyche, the visual message is secured by the copy which reads: “In Defense of Teen Girls, They’re Not All ‘Mean Girls’ and ‘Ophelias’, How to Raise a ‘Gamma Girl’” (Meadows, 2002). Specifically, the cover story addresses cultural panics over two best- selling books, Wiseman’s (2002) chronicle of adolescent girls’ harmful preoccupations with popularity, titled Queen Bees and Wannabes and Simmons’ (2002) ominous account of an “epidemic” of bullying among teenage girls titled Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. In an attempt quell fears the piece suggests that popular representations of girls as either shallow, cutthroat, and obsessed with popularity, or insecure and longing to be accepted, overlook well-adjusted girls who may not be concerned with the trappings of popularity. This presumably scarce breed of confident girls also known as “Gammas”, we are told, are not in short supply
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