Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2017 Sporting Bodies: The Rhetorics of Professional Female Athletes Lindsey Banister Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Banister, Lindsey, "Sporting Bodies: The Rhetorics of Professional Female Athletes" (2017). Dissertations - ALL. 742. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/742 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract In my dissertation, “Sporting Bodies: The Rhetorics of Female Athletes,” I interrogate how female athletes are represented in the media, trace the dominant cultural images and discourses associated with these representations, illustrate how female athletes use venues such as ESPN The Magazine as a vehicle to represent themselves even as they are represented by ESPN in ways that are not entirely within their control, and examine how female athletes’ self- presentation in the Body Issues can be interpreted as strategic, rhetorical acts. This project begins by investigating how historical discourses have influenced women’s athletics and female athletes. Rhetorically examining historical discourses about female athletes and women’s bodies demonstrate how patterns of marginalization have developed and continue to function in contemporary sports and American culture. I then build out these discourses in our contemporary setting, specifically focusing on arguments made my feminist sports scholars and women’s sports advocates, which call for the media to solely focus on the athleticism of female athletes. I also I offer the critique that an important limitation of these arguments is the lack of discussion about the economic pressures that greatly influence professional athletes. Additionally, a main focus of this dissertation is my rhetorical analysis of the visual and textual representations of female athletes in ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issues. I argue that we should resist interpretations of the representations of female athletes that position their sexual, racial, and feminine appearances as something to be ignored and devalued or as something that should be the focus of attention in themselves. The central goal in this project is to demonstrate how female athletes engage in rhetorical acts, via the representations of their bodies, that are complicated and often contradictory. A rhetorical analysis of the female athletes in the Body Issues is especially provocative because it offers a way to look at the representations of these athletes’, to look at their multiple subjectivities, and consider how they use their bodily appearances, pose types, and interviews in order to maintain the structures of the sporting world, or to survive and/or to gain visibility, economic security, public recognition, and the power to speak. Ultimately, I argue that their collective rhetorical activity demonstrates how athletes use the Body Issues as a vehicle to work within and against the male-dominated sporting world and propel themselves, their sport, and the larger organization of women’s athletics into positions of power. Sporting Bodies: The Rhetorics of Professional Female Athletes by Lindsey Banister B.A., Pepperdine University, 2009 M.A., San Diego State University, 2012 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric. Syracuse University May 2017 Copyright © Lindsey Banister 2017 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements I’d like to start by thanking the people who have advised and supported me through this process. I wouldn’t be here to defend my dissertation today without the vast efforts of my dissertation chair, Lois Agnew. Lois, you have tirelessly listened to my numerous stressed out ramblings and guided me through this rocky and challenging thing of writing a dissertation. Thank you for continually highlighting where and how I can be a more thoughtful researcher and writer. It’s a testament to your mentorship that I produced a project that I’m proud of. Thank you to Eileen Schell for your constructive feedback and for pushing me to complicate my ideas. You always had resource recommendations at the ready for me and I’m grateful for how you have helped enhance my research. Thank you to Collin Brooke, who has always been a calm, steady, insightful force in my life since the moment I join this program. Collin, thank you for teaching me how to actually write a dissertation and for giving me strategies to negotiate the complicated sections of this project. Thank you to Krista Kennedy for your continued support throughout my time at SU and for generously allowing me to write about crafting the body in your course. Your mentorship and advice helped me to arrive at this project. And finally, thank you to the powerful scholarship of Barry Brummett whose research on rhetoric and sports undergirds this dissertation. During my first semester here at SU, I took a class with Minnie Bruce Pratt on Feminist Narratives: Theory and Practice, and Minnie Bruce pushed me to clarify to myself why I’m interested in women’s bodies and representations and performances of gender and sexuality. Through numerous narrative writing prompts where our class was asked to write our stories and the histories that shaped us, and I came to realize the profound significance sports, specifically water polo and swimming, have had on my life in terms of shaping my identity and how I v perceive and engage the world around me. Ultimately, Minnie Bruce’s class and the crystalizing of this tension between female athletes and representations and perceptions of their bodies led me to this project. Therefore, I owe a big debt of gratitude to Minnie Bruce for pushing me to realize the importance of researching female athletes and women’s sports. Additionally, I want to honor my coaches who helped shape and mold me into an athlete and the woman I am today. Specifically, I want to acknowledge Andrea Castro for offering me the opportunity to get in the pool and play with her team and for being one of the best English teachers I’ve ever had. You helped me discover my love for waterpolo and my love for writing. To that end, I’d also like to thank my swim coach, Peter Tragitt who taught me how to find joy in competition and practice as well as the true meaning of hard work and dedication to one’s passion. Thank you both for always showing up for 5am practice, for your mentorship, for you weird jokes, and for always, always supporting me as an athlete, a student, and a person. Waterpolo gave me a way to make sense of myself, my mind, my identity, and my body, which had always seemed too much in one way or another. This connection with sports is one I have often heard repeated by my fellow teammates, girls I have coached, and most recently, by the women who came before me, whose histories and experiences are detailed in this dissertation. Thus, I want to acknowledge these amazing girls and women who have sweated alongside me, competed against me, or who paved the way so that young girls and women like myself will always have abundant opportunities to play sports. I’d also like to say thank you to my friends and family. Erika, you continually teach me how to be a lady boss and own my awesomeness. You have been with me and loved me through every major and minor up and down during graduate school, and I do not have enough words to tell you how grateful I am to have you in my life. Thank you for the late night calls, ridiculous vi texts, cross-country trips, numerous beer/wine dates, and for putting a spa mask on my face after my first semester in my Phd program. You are my sister and bestie in every way. I love you. I have also been blessed with amazing community here in Syracuse. Matt and Tara Waldby and Stephen and Becca Rusinko, thank you for “kidnapping” me four years ago and opening your homes and hearts to a stranger and becoming my second family. I’m truly touched to be a part of your lives and honored to call you friends. Thank you to Simeon, Josh, Jeremy, Suzie, Laura, and Abbey and Jon Mahoney for celebrating every single obstacle I’ve overcome, no matter how small or insignificant, for always reminding me to laugh and not take life too seriously, and for your continued prayers and encouragement. Most of all, thank you to my partner and best friend, Ryan. You have stood by me even when I spilled wings down the front of your shirt and pants after my comp exams; you took care of details such as feeding me during the entire month of February so that I didn’t have to take time and energy to grocery shop and so that I could finish my dissertation and graduate on time; you never complained when I showed up late because I lost track of time while working; and you always express how much faith you have in me and my ability to do this research and finish this project. Thank you for your prayers, you delight in my weirdness, your support, your encouragement, and your love. And lastly, I would not be who I am or where I am today without my family. Thank you to my brother Josh for always playing games and sports with me, for never making me feel less because I am girl, and for making sure I was living on more than peanut butter and wheat thins during my Masters.