Embodying the "New" Sporting Woman

The body is dangerous. The deliberately muscular woman disturbs dominant notions of sex, gender, and sexuality, and any discursive field that includes her risks opening up a site of contest and conflict, anxiety and ambiguity. . . The most pervasive tendency, however, seems to be a recuperative strategy, an attempt to pull her back from a position outside dominant limits to a more acceptable space.(1) With the advent of consumer capitalism and postmodern culture, the human body has become an important locus of personal needs and desires via dress, looks, nutrition and physical fitness.(2) Consequently, women have gained access to a broader range of physical activities. For example, increasing numbers of women are "working out," competing in events like powerlifting, bodybuilding and the martial arts, and playing contact sports like rugby and ice hockey. But as the above comment by Laurie Schulze indicates, the entry of women into the traditionally masculine preserve of sport has had complex and contradictory outcomes. On the one hand, sport has been a site of sexual contestation and a vehicle of empowerment for some women. The mere presence of strong and active women athletes has challenged the common sense idea that sporting prowess is "naturally" masculine. On the other hand, threats to masculine hegemony in sport have precipitated the usual attempts by men to reassert their material and symbolic control over women's bodies.(3) In this paper, I argue that current representations of the "new" sporting woman in the Australia media are implicated in what Schulze terms a "recuperative strategy" of containing women within permissible spaces. My analysis relies on the work of Schulze and other scholars who have applied a feminist/cultural studies perspective to sport.(4) These critics have made two particular contributions that are relevant to my investigation. First, they have revealed how the media naturalise hegemonic definitions of "real men" and "real women" in sport. Second, they have argued that women's oppression in sport is not the result of any "natural" corporeal limitations, but socially constructed by heterosexist ideologies.(5) I will be using semiotic techniques associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism to illustrate this feminist/cultural studies perspective. For instance, although I will be presenting my own decodings, it is imperative to note that media texts always have multiple interpretations because audiences read them actively: "Meaning is always negotiated in the semiotic process, never simply imposed inexorably from above by an omnipotent author through an absolute code."(6) However, it should be noted that I reject the extreme relativism associated with some postmodernist/poststructuralist approaches to both feminism and cultural studies. If meanings were not relatively anchored by an array of cultural and social technologies, they would be nonsensical to audiences.(7) As Anthony Giddens succinctly reminds us, "every relation of meaning is also a relation of power--a matter of what makes 'accounts' count."(8) My examples of representations of new sporting women have been taken from recent advertisements and articles published in mass-circulation magazines and newspapers such as the Bulletin, Time, the Australian Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend Magazine, Woman's Day, the Australian Woman's Weekly, the Australian, and the Courier-Mail. Maternal Bodies Although Australia women have recorded many remarkable sporting achievements, the media frequently devote more attention to their maternal traits than their athletic prowess. For example, sports journalists commonly identify women athletes as "swimming mums," "running mums" and "rowing mums." The apotheosis of the sporting "supermum" is swimmer Lisa Curry-Kenny: multiple Commonwealth Games gold medallist, three-time Olympian, author of books on women's fitness, entrepreneur, sports commentator, wife of former iron man champion Grant Kenny and mother of two. …