From Masculine Myths to Girl Power Realities: The Athletic Female Body and the Legend of Title IX

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 female bodies are, despite their “objective” appearance, historically contingent. Drawing from this 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 conjunctural analysis, I illustrate how 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. 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. 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.