d) Femininity versus Feminism and Beyond

“Femininity and Feminism in the WNBA,” by Sarah Banet-Weiser (pp. 111-118, in Professional Sports: Examining Pop Culture)

“American public’s fascination with female athletes has almost always centered on individual athletes” (111).

“… tennis players, professional golfers, figure skaters, and gymnasts… demonstrate the agility and elegance ‘natural’ to women” (111).

“… individual stars are known, culturally at least, for their ‘feminine’ attributes: self-sacrifice, glamour, grace” (111).

“Public recognition of individual female athletes attends much more to their feminine beauty and objectified status as particular kinds of commodities than to their athletic skill” (112).

“Masculinist assumptions of team sports challenge the individualistic and moralist ideology that constructs sports such as figure skating and gymnastics… WNBA have had to manage a contradictory set of cultural images” (112).

“The traditional trappings of femininity --- fashion, motherhood, beauty, and morality – characterize the players of the WNBA” (112).

“… on the official Website of the WNBA, alongside features that list game schedules, highlights from previous games, and new sponsorship partners, there is a section called ‘WNBA Unveils Uniform.’…. Clearly, this particular section of the website contributes to a dominant ideology that women are overly concerned with clothing and fashion” (113).

“The fact that some f the WNBA players also model is something that is emphasized by reporters” (113).

“WNBA players’ commitment to being feminine”… contradicts the “history of female athletes, who were so often criticized for their unfeminine qualities, such as muscularity and athletic skill” (114).

“… pressure on athletes to demonstrate their femininity and heterosexuality” (114). [Note: article on sports covers]

“… sport that most resemble masculinized athletics (for example, softball or hockey)... are culturally defined as masculine, and because there is an easy cultural slippage between ‘masculine women’ and lesbian identity, strategies are needed by the players to redefine and recast the sport as feminine or womanly” (114).

“A successful strategy to reassure fans of the players’ heterosexuality has been to focus on maternity. When WNBA star Sheryl Swoops of the Houston Comets became pregnant… it proved to be a great advantage to her as a player, as well as a golden marketing opportunity for the league” (115).

“When Swoopes plays, the camera continually returns to shots of the sideline, where the baby and the father watch the game” (114).

“… [WNBA] stories about maternity in general, balancing baby with basketball, and generous sacrifice of Swoope’s husband, Eric Jackson, to stay home with the baby” (114).

“The long-held dominant ideology that women are ‘morally superior’ to men finds its way to the WNBA… women are seen as less corrupted, whether by power or money, than NBA athletes” (115).

“Media portrayals of the defiant, ‘bad’ behavior of the professional male basketball players situates the WNBA as a positive alternative, a sport that emphasizes a kind of feminine behavior and attitude that contains the unruliness of the NBA” (116).

“The discourse of the family and maternity play into this dual construction, where the family-oriented players of the WNBA offer wholesome good fun and healthy competition to their fans, as opposed to the lone mavericks of the NBA, seemingly out only for themselves and their personal glory” (116). [female family and maternity > male selfishness]

“Before the WNBA... (was) established, the only place where women could play professional basketball was oversees. The players of the WNBA were grateful to have a professional organization in the United States, and they consistently demonstrate this gratitude to their fans. Traditionally, gratitude, like self-sacrifice, has been a characteristic of femininity” (117).

“The major sponsors of the WNBA, Nike and Reebok, have adopted explicit liberal feminist rhetoric in their advertisements, and although this language is a lucrative avenue for selling products, it nonetheless shapes the dominant construction of women athletes” (118).

“The sheer physicality of the [WNBA] --- a physicality that is so visually different from the way women’s bodies are traditionally imaged and imagined – makes it a place where one can conceptualize new conditions of possibility for definitions of the feminine” (218).