Representations of women’s active embodiment and men’s ritualized visibility in sport

Abstract

The embodied woman is central to much marketing communication imagery and, in contemporary discourses the physically active body is portrayed as the healthy role model in much social marketing. From a periodization of women’s access to physical activities, three significant shifts in perception and representation are proposed: the Restricted body, the Malleable body and the Viewed body. Women activists and advertisers connected the freedom to engage in physical activity with social freedoms. A closer examination of second wave feminism reveals the inadequacies of sex role theory, and the limitations of liberal feminist dualisms. In contemporary culture, the interconnected nature of media representations, marketing communications and postfeminism becomes evident. The mobilization of bias through ritualized visibility is introduced to explain the unabated valorization of hegemonic masculinity through images of men’s active embodiment. Further, it is asserted that the inequalities of the neo-liberal identity project are obscured by ‘new traditionalism’. The paper concludes that marketing’s theorization of women would benefit from further consumer research into both the portrayal of physically active women and their experience of active embodiment.