Final Web Page
by Kat Daniel

This web site looks at women in sports advertisements. It looks at famous women athletes and advertisements that portray the idea of woman and models posing as athletes. It ties in these advertisements with authors who have written on similar subjects. I have been an athlete for the past 18 years, but have only recently noticed how some advertisements aimed towards women athletes are extremely degrading and sexualizing. So why are these womenhyper-sexualized in advertisements? Perhaps, because athletics are historically a male dominated field, and strength is considered to be masculine. Many women in sports feel the need to be overly feminine to combat the masculine ties of strength. Women athletes that feel the need to "compensate for their perceived masculine comportment as athletes by enhancing elements of their feminine appearance" are called feminine apologetics (Lowe 121). Lowe's article focuses on female bodybuilders and the regulations that inspire femininity. The only body enhancement women are allowed to have in bodybuilding is breast implants, Lowe argues, in order to make the women appear more feminine (Lowe 130). Lowe argues that the more masculine the sport, the more feminine women participants try to be. For example, bodybuilders often have long blonde hair, get spray tans, and wear an absorbent amount of make-up. On the contrary, volleyball players don't have to try as hard to be feminine because their sport is traditionally a women's sport. What makes Brandi Chastain any different from male soccer players who take off their shirts? (See top of next page) Why is it a big deal for a woman to remove clothing in celebration but a common site among men? Through this webpage I hope to explore some of those questions as I focus on the question: How do advertisers use this sexual woman athlete to sell their products to women? I use intertextually to see what the advertisements say as a group. Intertextuality is "the way the meaning of any one discursive image or text depends not on that one text or image but also the meanings carried by other images or texts" (Rose 142).

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Works Cited
Lowe, Maria. "Profitable Physiques, precarious Hegemonies: Maintenance of the Feminine Apologetic" Beauty, Strength and Grace: a Sociological Analysis of Female Bodybuilding. 1993.
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: an Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: SAGE Publications, 2007.

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This Webpage was produced in COM 784: Visual Communication,

a class taught by Bob Bednar in the Communication Studies Department at Southwestern University