Here is a place for you/know your place: Critiquing “biopedagogy” embedded in images of the female body in fitness advertising

Abstract

The historically masculine realm of sport has not always been welcoming to women. Today, women have found a place in sport culture, but contemporary media position and address them as objects whose bodies are public goods available for interested parties to judge. In this critical reading of fitness advertisements targeting female recreational endurance runners, we combine poststructuralist feminist theory and a hermeneutic methodology to investigate if and how advertisements participate in this practice. Given the body’s salience at the intersection of sport, the marketplace, and media, we focus on how the body is depicted. We find that advertisements treat the body as a machine, prescribing and normalizing an obsession with athletics. They glorify the pursuit of the ideal running body through athletics and discount women’s potential in and contributions to sport. In this way, advertisements function as a “biopedagogy” that teaches consumers how a suitable body appears and functions.

Keywords

Fitness advertising gender the body neoliberalism postfeminism biopedagogy

Media depictions of female athletes’ bodies limit women’s participation and acceptance in sport culture (Messner, 1988). Indeed, women’s increased visibility and success illustrates that they may have found a place in sport culture (Kane, 2013), but media voices make quick work of clarifying that both recreational and elite female athletes may only occupy a certain place – namely, as objects whose bodies are public goods available for interested parties to judge.

Since female athletes tend to be considered faulty imitations of male athletes, this judgment also implies women’s subordination to men (Messner, 1988). For example, images in fitness magazines often trivialize women’s athletics and sexualize female athletes (Cranmer et al., 2014). Echoing Goffman’s (1976) analysis of American advertising, female models in fitness advertising – usually young, thin Caucasians – are shown in submissive positions to men, and posed unnaturally, often as body parts rather than a whole person (Wasylkiw et al., 2009).

Ironically, although sport culture has been deemed inherently masculine (Messner, 1988), female athletes can arouse gender suspicion by looking or performing “like a man.” In a now infamous case, Caster Semenya of South Africa, an elite middle-distance runner whose hyperandrogenism – a condition that means she has higher than typical testosterone levels for a woman – has endured newscasters’ speculation that her hormones give her an unfair advantage and that she may be biologically male or intersex (Cooky et al., 2012). By contrast, some female athletes take up an “athletic labour of femininity” that caters to social expectations of their “empowered” femininity and “hetero-sexiness” (Toffoletti and Thorpe, 2018). These two phenomena are nods to the fact that female athletes’ bodies face scrutiny that can affect their training habits and body image (Chase, 2008). Broadly, such scrutiny can be considered biopedagogy: a collection of information and directives about what constitutes the ideal body and how to attain it (Wright, 2009). These lessons take a variety of forms of communication, from health policy to the plotlines of television shows (Rail and Lafrance, 2009; Rice, 2014).

Advertising is acknowledged as a biopedagogical tool (Jutel, 2009), and fitness images and texts are said to teach athletes about bodily norms and values (Thomsen et al., 2004; Kane et al., 2013; Smith Maguire, 2008). However, consumer culture research does not address how advertising functions as biopedagogy, and whether fitness advertising, in particular, fits this characterization. As such, in this study, we ask if and how depictions of recreational and elite female athletes’ bodies in fitness advertising function as biopedagogy within sport culture. In so doing, we aim to determine if and how sport culture’s discourse of “here is a place for you”/“know your place” emerges in fitness advertising for women. To focus our inquiry, we examine advertisements in magazines distributed in Canada in 2017 targeting recreational endurance runners.

Theory and literature

Poststructuralist feminism offers an avenue for understanding the research topic. This perspective considers gender and related concepts to be socially constructed and subjective, but nonetheless embedded in society’s institutions and practices. It holds that as individuals use language to interpret their worlds, groups of interpretations form discourses, which are stories positioned as essential truths that reflect the interests of dominant groups (Weedon, 1987). The notion of subjectivity questions these essential truths by exploring the inner world of the individual, including her ways of understanding herself and her place in the world, which offers her power within less-than-ideal social structures (Elliott and Ritson, 1997; Weedon, 1987). This theoretical grounding can problematize dominant notions of what it means to be a female athlete.

Neoliberalism and postfeminism

We situate this study – and the aforementioned “here is a place for you”/“know your place” discourse – within a sociocultural context characterized by both neoliberal and postfeminist sentiment. Neoliberalism is a political and economic regime that promotes market-based solutions to a wide range of issues (Lave et al., 2010). It is also a series of normative conceptions of agency and responsibility rooted in this market-centric ideology and embodied in policies and institutions (Ward and England, 2007). Specific to the body, neoliberal ideology links fitness and health to attractiveness and moral worth, while to be unfit and unhealthy is considered the result of personal shortcomings (LeBesco, 2011). As a result, consumers are asked to take responsibility for their health and appearance (Wright, 2009).

While instruments like public health strategies once focused primarily on hygiene issues, today the behavior and appearance of individual bodies are a higher priority. This shift has generated increased messages surrounding such issues as the dangers of obesity (LeBesco, 2011). “Good” neoliberal consumers are considered rational, self interested, and able to act on their intentions (Lave et al., 2010). To this end, body-related messages targeting consumers define the normal body and self while using praise, shame, and expert knowledge to incite conformity among those who diverge from the norm (Leahy, 2009; Shankar et al., 2006).

Elsewhere, a postfeminist sensibility has permeated contemporary media and popular culture over the past decade (Gill, 2017). Postfeminism is often articulated as backlash toward the women’s movement and/or the simultaneous promotion and sacrificing of gender equality (Gill, 2007; Tasker and Negra, 2007). It holds that femininity is a bodily property by linking a woman’s worth to her appearance (Gill, 2007, 2009). The female body must be monitored and shaped to conform with societal standards, but those actions are framed as a choice made in pursuit of happiness (Gill, 2017; McRobbie, 2015). And making the wrong choice reflects poorly on the individual (Budgeon, 2015).

Some consider postfeminism as a watered-down form of feminism because the movement’s political epithets are often stripped of their meaning to preserve the status quo (Gill, 2007, 2009). A common characteristic of postfeminist cultural artifacts is how they depict women as subjects in addition to objects. That is, women can be portrayed in a traditional or objectified manner, but the portrayals deliver body-related prescriptions as benevolently as possible by taking up discourses of individualism and empowerment (Gill, 2007, 2009). These new forms of femininity may look free, but are in fact heavily mediated by sociocultural forces (McRobbie, 2007).

Where gender and the body are concerned, a conversation of postfeminism often includes a conversation of neoliberalism. Both perspectives conceal calls to conform in a discourse of free, rational choice. They value a fit and “healthy” appearance and encourage consumers to take steps to curate this appearance through self-surveillance, monitoring, and discipline. They also advocate for consumers’ physical well being, but only under strict conditions. For this reason, we argue that the “here is a place for you”/“know your place” discourse contains neoliberal and postfeminist sentiment. In the remainder of this study, we use the term gendered neoliberalism to characterize instances where both types of sentiment are active in a media text.

Advertising as biopedagogy

Rooted in Foucault’s (1980) notion of biopower, the term biopedagogy characterizes how governments aim to control individuals and populations not through overt force but through imparting values and knowledge that teach people how to assess, monitor, and manage their bodies in a manner that fits with state interests (Wright, 2009).

While advertising has been identified as a biopedagogical tool (Jutel, 2009), consumer culture research requires an understanding of if and how fitness advertising works as biopedagogy, and to what extent it shares the “here is a place for you”/“know your place” gendered neoliberal sentiment.

Extant research on advertising and gender indicates that an account of these processes is worthwhile. Advertisements communicate what it means to be a man or a woman, and what constitutes a desirable body (Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998). Their lessons promote gendered neoliberalism by locating women’s value in their bodies and praising those who chase conventional attractiveness (Winch, 2015). This is part of a process in which female consumers are taught to “do gender” by adhering to norms and values around appearance and comportment, which are socially constructed but powerful social organizers (West and Zimmerman, 1987). As such, advertising works alongside entities like government policies and physical environments to underpin women’s bodily experiences (Rice, 2007, 2015).

In this way, advertisements belong to a landscape of governmental technologies including exercise manuals, fitness magazines, and lifestyle media that mediate between individual anxieties about the body and broader political and economic goals (Smith Maguire, 2008). Their messages align with state interests, like reducing the health and economic effects of obesity, and ensuring a pool of individuals is fit for military service (Halse, 2009; Wright, 2009). In this environment, women may chase physical perfection because being slim is valuable across a variety of contexts (McRobbie, 2007, 2013).

While chasing physical perfection is, of course, framed in terms of free, rational choice, women’s body-related choices are limited because they are closely linked to patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty (Budgeon, 2015; Gill, 2017). Indeed, despite their benevolent appearance, by presenting body types and behaviors desirable for women, advertisements stigmatize and exclude those whose forms diverge from the ideal (Gurrieri et al., 2012). When practices like dieting and exercising are taken to extremes, they are logical manifestations of the bodily perfection women see portrayed in contemporary culture (Bordo, 1993, 1997). This raises a question: How much power can come from a fit appearance. Moreover, what does that appearance communicate to the self and others.

Research context and method

The evolution of endurance running makes it a worthy context in which to explore the topic of fitness advertising. Several high-profile events welcomed both elite and recreational female athletes into the sport despite its roots as a male domain. For example, in 1967, Kathrine Switzer illegally competed in the men’s-only Boston Marathon, which helped ignite the structural changes needed to include women in races (Chase, 2016). Later, in the 1970s, recreational endurance running emerged in part because it appealed to those seeking clean, upright living as a means to feeling and being seen as virtuous citizens (Gillick, 1984). The medical and scientific communities supported this trend, framing running as an exercise for the moral and intellectual (Bale, 2003). These, and related developments, left a legacy that continues today: in 2014, females accounted for 10.7 million race finishers in the United States alone and represented 57% of participants in event fields – up from 25% in 1990 (Running Journal, 2015).

Since the 1970s “running boom,” researchers have documented the physical and psychological aspects of the sport. Studies show that the promise of physical attractiveness is an incentive to run for both sexes, and running can boost women’s self esteem and psychological coping skills via perceived bodily improvements and physical competence (Bond and Batey, 2005; Ogles et al., 1995). This point is connected to our choice of running as a research context. Sports typically require specialty clothing, equipment, space, or companions/teammates. However, since running requires none of these things, barring issues around (dis)ability, running is a relatively barrier-free activity (Abbas, 2004).

Despite running’s simplicity, running media’s editorial content promotes a classed, raced, aged, and gendered ideal of running (Abbas, 2004). While runners typically represent a variety of shapes, sizes, and social locations, the popular depiction is of a young, white, upwardly mobile male. Yet, not every runner will possess an “ideal” running body – one that is tall, lean, and without discernable curves – and runners’ bodies face critique that can, for example, drive “fat” runners to run after dark to avoid judgment (Chase, 2008). Since depictions of a dominant body in running media shape participants’ expectations and pursuits (Abbas, 2004), we argue that it is important to interrogate the nature of a seemingly accessible sport that is not inherently gendered, raced, aged, or classed, but has become so in part through media communication.

Our focus on print advertisements in Runner’s World and magazines like it hinges on the role of print media in consumers’ lives. As running grew in popularity, the sport became an opportunity for commodification (Bale, 1993) – hence the emergence of advertisements targeting runners. The magazines in which they appear are distinct as a medium because they can incite action among readers and because they are often created by topic enthusiasts who would otherwise be readers (Abrahamson, 2007). Moreover, consumers trust print advertisements when making purchases more than advertisements appearing in any other media platform (Burstein, 2017). In our research context, Canada, consumers value magazine advertising, reading it almost as much as the editorial content itself (Magazines Canada, 2016). Advertisements in running magazines are therefore part of an intimate communication between publishers, advertisers, and consumers. Studying these advertisements offers an avenue for exploring firms’ preferred visual and textual cues. It shows us their DNA as it relates to an audience of female recreational endurance runners who engage with print media.

This inquiry, though focused on endurance running, can offer insights into consumption more generally. Running is no longer restricted to professional and high-performance athletes; it is also a consumer market embedded within a fitness industry wherein consumers eagerly pursue trends, practices, and the purchases that come with them (Settembre, 2017, 2018). Extant studies on advertising illustrate that women’s bodies are used to promote various consumer goods (e.g. Lazar, 2014; Winship, 2000). Owing to running’s aforementioned accessibility as a means of pursuing a “healthy” lifestyle (Abbas, 2004), these goods range from media to clothing to food to supplements. They target as many market segments as there are “types” of runners – anyone from teens on the track and field team to those who have been running for decades (Running USA, 2017). Advertising’s bodies, then, are an integral part of individuals’ involved consumption in this space.

Our investigation takes the form of a critical reading of fitness advertisements collected and interpreted using hermeneutics, a philosophy and practice of interpretation that involves engagement with a text to understand a given phenomenon (Moules et al., 2015). Rather than explaining the relationships between variables in advertisements across time, we instead aim to understand the “inner word” (Grondin, 1994) of advertisements. The choice of hermeneutics as a guiding philosophy and practice reflects our theoretical framework, which rests on the interpretivist assumption of multiple realities. While hermeneutics acknowledges the impossibility of achieving objective understanding of a topic, we can engage with these advertisements to describe a phenomenon.

Specifically, our sample consists of advertisements from the January/February 2017 issues of three running magazines targeting recreational endurance runners and focus their content on fitness pursuits: Runner’s World, Women’s Running, and Canadian Running. The former two magazines are published in the United States, while the latter is published in Canada. Researching this topic in the Canadian context, heavily shaped by the myriad American cultural materials available to us (Schultz, 2007), we chose these magazines to reflect the reading materials a Canadian consumer would most likely see at a bookstore or newsstand (as opposed to branded content created by consumer goods brands). The messages these publications share about the body have large audiences: Runner’s World, the sport’s leading magazine, boasts a readership nearing 700,000 athletes (Rodale Inc., 2016). Women’s Running, the sport’s-only women-focused publication, has a readership of 135,000 (Competitor Group, 2016). Canadian Running, Canada’s answer to Runner’s World, launched in 2008 to a readership of 30,000 (Masthead Online, 2008).

We selected advertisements depicting at least one female body, which resulted in a final sample that contains 59 total and 56 unique advertisements. Within the group of unique advertisements, we identified three images of elite athletes, while the remainder consisted of images of “real” recreational athletes (i.e. from race photos), and fitness models representing recreational athletes. The limited time frame and small sample aim to illustrate how one issue of each magazine can contain many instances of a specific phenomenon or ideology, not to locate changes across time (Eskes et al., 1998). This decision reflects a similar goal within hermeneutics to gather sufficient data to understand the topic at hand without straining the attention given to themes and ideas as they emerge (Moules et al., 2015).

Hermeneutics does not dictate a procedure for interpretation (Moules et al., 2015), so given hermeneutics’ purpose of generating understanding, the first author engaged in solitary “readings” of the advertisements. She kept notes in a research diary as she worked through interpretations of thematic groupings of advertisements, generating and re-working ideas through reviews of relevant literature and dialogue with the second author (Moules et al., 2015). Given the role of reflexivity in hermeneutic research (Moules et al., 2015), the authors used their recreational athletic experiences as signposts in their conversations. The resulting interpretations moved in an iterative manner from the specific to the general and back again so a comprehensive understanding of the text’s whole and parts could emerge (Arnold and Fischer, 1994). In this way, the researchers’ understanding moved toward the meaning of the text to the extent that it is possible given the limitations on finding its ultimate “truth.” In the following sections, we share our interpretation alongside a selection of advertisements (shown in Appendix 1) that exemplify the biopedagogy found across the dataset.

The sporting body as machine

Our interpretation indicates that the advertisements’ biopedagogy addresses consumers with the idea, typically found in medical and elite sport discourses (Bale, 2003), that the body is a machine that must be exercised regularly a high level of performance. In an advertisement from Perform, a company that sells pain relievers, a woman is shown from above and behind, running alone in morning light. The tagline reads, “I will run at first light, at first tilt, under the stars, under the weather, like I mean it, like the wind. I will not run away from pain.” Five products are shown beside text that reads, “Find relief fast so you never have to slow down.” Here, nothing is indicated about the focal subject aside from her relentless, unexplained need to run. Facing away from the camera, even her face is a mystery – her body is a vessel for performance that must meet a standard of consistency and speed, relying on a product to relieve pain so her regime is never interrupted.

Being sidelined from one’s training can involve a disruption of one’s sense of physical normality and identity (Allen, Collinson, and Hockey, 2007). Indeed, injury can be an emotional but inevitable experience within the sport of recreational endurance running and is often linked to overtraining (Bridel and Rail, 2007). Yet, the advertisement does not acknowledge the danger of running through injury, the necessity of rest in healing, or the related intuition and emotion required in tending to one’s body. Pushing an injured body can have physical and psychological consequences, such as further injury and burnout, which means the advertisement appeals to unhealthy behavior. Notably, “obligatory runners” run excessive miles per week and never take a day off, running despite injury or other personal costs to avoid the guilt, depression, and other withdrawal-like symptoms that emerge when not running (Ogles et al., 1995). For this reason, obligatory runners cannot let their bodily machines break down and will make sacrifices in the name of consistency and dedication.

In keeping tight-lipped about the negative aspects of injury, the mysterious runner in the Perform advertisement is a steward of gendered neoliberal sentiment. Gendered neoliberalism regulates emotion such that if women do show emotion, it should be positive (Allen and Bull, 2016). However, the advertisements in this dataset show that women must be stoic if they are to perform and present themselves like “serious” runners – unfeeling, as per life as a machine. Furthermore, in contrast to poststructuralist feminist theory that the body and mind are inextricably linked (Grosz, 1994), since the women’s heads in this dataset are often obscured or hidden from view, they are silenced because they are restricted from expressing identity, emotion, and intelligence through the face (Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998). Alternatively, when women are shown sharing positive emotions, they are participating in non-competitive “fun runs” or are running slowly.

Elsewhere, visual and textual cues position the body as an object to be curated with science. In an advertisement for chocolate milk, the text reads that Mirinda Carfrae, a world champion triathlete, has been “built with chocolate milk.” In an equally literal interpretation of the idea of the body as machine, an advertisement for Altra running shoes depicts the silhouette of a female runner. Instead of seeing her skin, clothing, or muscles, we can see that her body consists entirely out of the same material that would compose the sole of a running shoe.

Chocolate milk is positioned as the “triathlete’s triple threat,” containing the nutrients needed for refueling and the protein to build muscles. It is said to be “backed by science,” which invokes “an aura of truth, trustworthiness and transparency” (Halse, 2009: 47) even in the absence of information about how the science of the product functions. Conversely, while it might be possible to discern the general usefulness of refueling and muscles in the running context, Altra’s running shoes are powered by “dual-natured compound,” which is said to “provide a lively, responsive feel.” Despite sounding scientific, these words communicate little about how a shoe actually makes a body feel. Similarly, an advertisement for string cheese features a pair of hands peeling a piece of cheese, with the owner of the hands gazing upon a woman doing yoga in a park. The caption “real cheese people bend over backwards for protein” is a nod to her yoga pose. The imagery and caption relegate the woman to the realm of object as opposed to subject. Furthermore, there is no indication of how protein works in the body aside from keeping “you active things” (the target market) “fueled and satisfied.”

With its focus on rationality, neoliberalism advocates for understanding the world through science and math (Shankar et al., 2006). The “rhetoric of scientism” (Halse, 2009: 47) in these advertisements reads as an irrefutable, one-size-fits-all bodily project, where health comes from a dedication to the sport and the science that supports it, with little room for other ways of knowing and being within one’s body. Intuition and emotion are valued elsewhere as decision-making tools. For example, intuition has a place alongside scientific paradigms in nursing practice, where a nurse’s intuition is a part of the process of treating a patient (Holm and Severinsson, 2016). However, in sharing their recommendations, advertisers take a decidedly upbeat stance, as if they are simply “looking out for [their] brothers and sisters!” (LeBesco, 2011: 161).

The favoring of science and math over intuition and emotion in these advertisements is notable given the latter entities’ association with women (Annandale and Clark, 1996). Poststructuralist feminist theorists (e.g. Bray and Colebrook, 1998; Budgeon, 2003; Grosz, 1994; Rice, 2015) condemn the discursive mapping of social entities into dualities: male/female, body/mind, fat/thin, reason/emotion, to name a few (Annandale and Clark, 1996). Often, these entities are associated with another (masculine/feminine) so that men and women are, in turn, associated with specific qualities and characteristics. Since the mind and reason take a privileged position in discourse and the body and emotion take a subordinated one, men and women’s associations with these respective entities means men are seen as superior to women (Budgeon, 2003). For this reason, scientific discourse reinforces and reproduces sport culture’s masculinity (Budgeon, 2011), and these advertisements remind women that feminine ways of knowing and being are not conducive to a training regime worthy of a competitive machine.

The shape of speed

This dataset contains advertisements for a wide variety of products and services advertised to anyone from beginners to veterans. However, most of the female bodies in the advertisements are young, white, slim, and able. One of the few indications in this dataset that women may vary from this ideal comes from an advertisement for a Polar GPS watch. In it, a woman with white hair runs through an alleyway with a seemingly younger man. Although this woman has white hair that indicates she might be at least middle aged, her body and face depict the same youthful fitness seen in the rest of the dataset. The message is that the gendered, classed, and raced ideal of running also includes an imperative to stay young (and fit).

Because the women are usually depicted mid workout, consistent with the body-as-machine style of communication, visual and textual cues expand on that style by indicating that (1) running is the way to achieve a desirable shape and (2) speed requires slimness. An advertisement exemplifying this style of communication comes from Jaybird, a company that makes headphones. In it, a female runner strides barefoot up a set of rock steps. The lighting is dim, and her face is in shadow. She is clad entirely in spandex. Were her tights not covered in a floral pattern and she were not wearing her hair in a ponytail, it would be impossible to discern her sex. She has a flat chest and the angle at which she is positioned means the reader cannot sense any other curves aside from those of her chiseled triceps, which are softly lit by the setting sun.

She does not need shoes for the task, nor is she sweating, which implies that this task is effortless for her. Since her body type is peppered throughout the dataset, she is not only fast, she is the embodiment of speed, which implies that to be equally fast, one must look like her. Indeed, since women’s curves consist partly of fat stores, “running off” fat stores can indicate athletic prowess. While there is nothing wrong with this shape on its own, its repeated depiction within this media domain is worthy of interrogation – especially considering that when women are depicted running with a body that deviates from this ideal, they are typically depicted as unthreatening competitors. This pattern underscores the magazines’ editorial focus on performance.

Contrary to the visual and textual link between body shape and speed, as well as the aforementioned link between food and performance, additional advertisements advocate for calorie restriction. Despite the appearance of food in many advertisements in this dataset, there are no images of a woman consuming food. At best, women are shown adjacent to food. The depiction of thin, conventionally attractive women who do not engage with food is an implicit call for weight control. These women are perfectly proportioned and are pictured with individually wrapped pieces of string cheese, single-serving portions of chocolate milk, and petite containers of protein powder. The small sizes reference a diet restricted in calories for the athlete who has the self control required to execute such a regime.

That these advertisements ignore the importance of fuelling for runners is peculiar considering running burns many calories per hour as similarly popular exercises, such as walking, swimming, and biking (Shephard, 2011). To ensure the body is ready to complete or recover from a workout, it must be fed sufficient calories, but runners often underestimate their caloric needs (Ray and Fowler, 2004). In addition, with a powerful weight control tool at their disposal, female runners may desire an ideal body and use diet and exercise as punishment for their failure to conform to body standards (Krane et al., 2001). The resulting female athlete triad of disordered eating, abnormal absence of menstruation, and osteoporosis often goes unrecognized, but can cause setbacks in training or even death (Thorpe, 2016).

In simultaneously advocating for weight control and athletic performance, the advertisements in this dataset contribute to a broader sociocultural landscape in which health can be sacrificed for physical attractiveness through extreme exercise and diet programs (Eskes et al., 1998). In this dataset, an implication of this approach is, once again, that sport remains a masculine domain. The advertisements suggest that women can enjoy the freedom of running, but define this freedom with a set of constraints around how one must look and behave (Shankar et al., 2006). They discursively discount women as serious competitors by encouraging a preoccupation with weight that can undermine athletic performance.

An ideal running body may indicate success in the gendered neoliberal realm, but it also requires constant monitoring, surveillance, and consumer spending to meet standards of attractiveness (Gill, 2007). To this end, gendered neoliberalism sees the emergence of new beauty standards (Gill, 2017). In the fitness realm, phrases like “strong is the new sexy” (Washington and Economides, 2016) create a link between strength and physical appearance. This link tasks women with being agents of their own empowerment while also reinscribing their disciplined bodies as sexual objects for the heterosexual and narcissistic gaze (Washington and Economides, 2016). The salience of a strong and therefore sexy body in this dataset underscores the body as a site of female identity, undermining women’s dignity and casting judgment on their physical and intellectual habits (Borgerson and Schroeder, 2008).

Elsewhere, research shows that magazine staffers plan editorial content and advertising by casting readers in psychographic or demographic terms rather in terms of how they look (Smith Maguire, 2008). The Runner’s World media kit (Rodale Inc., 2016), for example, describes its readers using demographic information. This practice targets an accessible, interested segment, but also sells a magazine’s readership to advertisers (Smith Maguire, 2008). Furthermore, to secure this readership, fitness media’s editorial content wants readers to be able to “see themselves” in the magazine’s content (Smith Maguire, 2008). Readers’ body types are not explicitly defined, but it can be assumed that they may not conform with the ideal. Therefore, if a magazine wants readers to identify with its content, the ideal running body may not serve this goal.

[Don’t] go for the gold

The final style of communication in this dataset presents a contradiction that builds on and implicates the two styles outlined above. Namely, the advertisements appear to support women’s athletic success. However, they fail to advocate for or participate in any structural change in women’s favor and doubt what the female body can accomplish by (1) negating women’s athleticism in general but also in relation to that of men and (2) ensuring women are reminded of the traditional ways they should look and behave. While advertisements often highlight female athletes’ femininity as opposed to their athleticism as a way of excluding women from sport culture (Grow, 2008), advertisements in this dataset accomplish this same task in a different way: by adopting gendered neoliberal discourse that highlights autonomous and empowered women taking charge of their fitness pursuits.

An advertisement for Skechers’ multi-activity training shoe illustrates these points. In it, a woman training in a weight room looks bored. She takes an unstable pose, with her feet close together and one foot lifted at the heel, the toes barely touching the ground. This is not the kind of pose that could support any sort of strength training, but could rather be described as coquettish. Despite the tagline reading “train strong,” this woman does not communicate physical or mental strength.

Another advertisement comes from the Divas Half Marathon and 5K, a race series for women. In this advertisement, a woman is running wearing a pink tutu and tiara. The tagline reads, “You say I run like a diva like it’s a bad thing.” This advertisement appears feminist because the tagline and woman’s clothing queer the concept of athlete as masculine (she is both a diva and an athlete), and a women-only race could function as a place of mutual support for female runners. However, the purpose of the race and the princess attire are not provided, and the woman’s casual, bored demeanor hints that the race is not for “serious” athletes. In contrast to the powerful stride of the runner in the Jaybird advertisement, she appears disengaged, and her feet are barely lifting off the ground. The race seems more like a place to contain women than to support them. Elsewhere, this message is compounded by women’s placement behind men in photos, giving them the appearance of being unthreatening (i.e. physically smaller and/or slower than their companions).

Markers of femininity like hairstyles and clothing set women apart from men even when, as mentioned, their bodies otherwise look the same. The pink tutu and tiara are extreme examples of this practice, but additional advertisements see women dressed in pinks and florals, sporting long ponytails. This practice has also been observed in depictions of female participants in CrossFit, a sport that values markers of masculinity, like well-defined muscles (Washington and Economides, 2016). While this practice in CrossFit celebrates high-performing women in the sport, in this research context it indicates disempowerment and objectification – even when an advertisement takes a positive tone. The markers of femininity separate women from men, and the sociocultural significance of these markers as feminine and therefore “less than” masculine (Ehrnberger et al., 2012) negates the worth of the athlete who wears them.

In addition to marking women as feminine to articulate their difference from and subordination to men, the advertisements remind women of the responsibilities that await them post workout. The gendered neoliberal subject, after all, questions the “have it all” catchphrase that defined earlier eras of the women’s movement (Brace-Govan, 2010). In an advertisement for Brooks running shoes, a woman is climbing the lace of a giant running shoe, out of a chaotic scene at home where her children have made a mess. The copy reads, “Escape with the Adrenaline GTS 17.” She may be taking a break to go for a run, but perhaps she needs to return home to her responsibilities later. On the opposite page, a man is involved in a similar scene, but instead he is escaping a chaotic boardroom. Combined, these advertisements reference traditional gender roles, as well as the type of self-centered practices that can be framed as feminist but do not achieve any collective goals (Gill, 2007).

They communicate that free choice and autonomy equals empowerment, which, when considered in the gendered context of sport, ignores the constraints that influence its availability and regulation (Gill, 2007). Just as their standards constrain what can be considered an “ideal running body,” these advertisements regulate what a subject can achieve. The female runners appear empowered because they choose to exercise and step outside what is expected of women. However, a poststructuralist perspective would say that instead of having power, the women have been shaped by power – and that, in this context, freedom operates as a form of governance (Shankar et al., 2006). The hoped-for result is that consumers will attain desirable bodies, while traditional gender norms remain intact.

Discussion

In this study, we investigate how female bodies are depicted in advertisements in fitness media. Since advertising has been identified as a biopedagogical tool that tells consumers how they should look and live in a neoliberal setting (Jutel, 2009; Smith Maguire, 2008), we expand on this research by mapping the process through which fitness advertising operates as a biopedagogy that communicates gendered neoliberal sentiment. We argue that advertisements targeting female recreational endurance runners mirror broader trends within sport culture.

Specifically, advertisements permit women a place in sport, but remind them they may only occupy a certain place. This finding echoes Gill’s (2017) assertion that progress and misogyny can coexist within the same gendered neoliberal artifact or context. Here, contrasts abound: we see progress because a woman can be depicted as a serious athlete, but androcentric thinking characterizes the ideal athlete as masculine, advocates for unhealthy diet and exercise habits, and uses tools like visual markers of femininity to remind readers that women are separate from and subordinate to men. In so doing, the advertisements keep the focus on the ideal running body rather than on women’s potential athletic achievements.

This study offers insight into the under-researched context of running media. Extant literature argues that running media’s editorial content promotes a classed, aged, and gendered ideal of running (Abbas, 2004), but cannot account for the particularities of advertising in this space. In turn, we contrast depictions of women who are arguably competitors with those who may take the sport less seriously to show that, ultimately, both are relegated to object status despite the advertisements’ outward celebration of their fitness endeavors.

These findings align with research on female recreational endurance runners, who may use running to boost their self esteem via perceived bodily improvements and physical competence (Bond and Batey, 2005). Conversely, runners whose bodies do not conform to the parameters of the ideal running body can face discrimination in the sport that causes psychological discomfort (Chase, 2008). The present study contributes to this literature by explaining how the specific platform of fitness advertising works to contribute to the nature and valorization of the ideal running body. Advertising constructs an ideal type of female body – slim and strong, with lean muscles – to promote running-related goods. They illustrate that running involves consumer goods and practices that are connected to this ideal body.

Our findings extend to the context of fitness more generally. That is, these advertisements limit the potential for women’s athletic success, which problematizes the potentially gendered motivations and metrics of success involved in numerous activities. For example, women have different motivations for participating in running than men – they are more focused on self improvement rather than competition (Ogles et al., 1995). Yet, advertising still holds performance as a standard for success. The disconnect between advertising and reality means advertisements may be creating metrics for success that do not interest women.

We invite future research to refine and build on these findings. In particular, acknowledging the interconnectedness of the mind and body (Grosz, 1994), we are interested in how fitness advertisements are implicated in female recreational endurance runners’ relationships with their bodies and related identities. While we are curious how their reflections on these advertisements mirror or complement our findings, it is possible that the magazines’ readerships may enjoy the advertisements – or at least think that they do – as they come to experience themselves as subjects with creative power in engaging with media (Shankar et al., 2006). Relatedly, we are interested in how those who cannot attain the ideal running body challenge or resist their power (Gurrieri and Cherrier, 2013). Given the salience of advertising in public discourse surrounding gender and the body, following Gurrieri et al. (2016), we call for greater scrutiny of the process of generating images of women in fitness advertising.

In setting this agenda, we acknowledge the capacity of advertisements sharing information about the body to enact positive social change: it is entirely possible that advertisements advocating exercise can be helpful and informative to some extent, and to some readers (Gurrieri et al., 2012). Yet, this study highlights styles of visual and textual cues that (re)produce elements of sport culture that marginalize and limit female athletes. Since gender research contains an embedded critical nature that challenges essential sex differences and lays a political agenda for social and cultural change (Bettany et al., 2010), we ask what an alternative approach to advertising could look like in this media space and encourage future research to suggest how consumers’ positive experiences with fitness advertising can be translated into marketing practice. In envisioning a future where women are free to participate and succeed in sport on their terms, marketing must be part of the solution rather than part of the problem (Borgerson and Schroeder, 2008). Advertising to female athletes in “good faith” (Borgerson and Schroeder, 2008), then, means showing many ways of being and looking like a runner.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: the lead author received funding for this project in the form of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship.

ORCID iD

Carly Drake

Author Biographies

Carly Drake received her PhD in Management (Marketing) from the University of Calgary and is now an assistant professor of Marketing at North Central College. This article is based on her dissertation. A runner since she was 13 years old, Carly has raced everything from the 800m on the track to a 50km ultramarathon.

Scott K. Radford is an associate dean (Teaching & Learning) and associate professor of Marketing at the Haskayne School of Business. He received his PhD from the University of Missouri. He has published in the Journal of Consumer Culture, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Marketing Letters, and European Journal of Marketing. His current research is concerned with consumer responses to product design and popular culture.

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