Queering Whiteness: The Peculiar Case of the Women's National Basketball Association

Abstract

This article offers an investigation of the Women's National Basketball Association's marketing discourses and provides historical and contemporary contexts to illuminate the complex articulations of race and sexuality imagined via representations of the league and its players. Proposing to “queer whiteness” by deploying particular inflections of the word queer, this article makes visible the ways in which discourses related to heterosexuality and whiteness assist marketers in advertising the league as a “mainstream” and therefore salable event. Marketers thus participate in and advance a representational politics that elevates the importance of maternity and morality as emblematic of the WNBA's idealized image of the “good girl,” especially the “good white girl.” This constant emphasis on the players' moral attributes and family values helps to distance the league from projections of alleged deviance imagined to be embodied by “fatal women”—that is, bodies marked as black and lesbian—the alleged obverse of the “good white girl.”