“We Always Have to be the Nice Ones, be the Ladies”: A Postfeminist Analysis of how Sports Marketing Reflects Female Athletes’ Lived Experiences

Sammanfattning: Current debates about representations of female athletes in the media consist mainly of textual analyses research produced by scholars who observe the topic from different theoretical frameworks. To better comprehend the relation between women athletes and media’s representation of them, in particularly advertising, this thesis aims to converse with up-and-coming professional and collegiate sportswomen as a way to examine what kind of correlation, if any, there is between sports commercials’ portrayals of female athletes and their actual reality. As there has been a shift in sports marketing approaches towards women through ‘femvertising’ (which challenges traditional gender stereotypes), a common belief is that gender equality in sport has been achieved. Taken as my case study, I use Nike’s commercials I Feel Pretty (2006) and Dream Crazier (2019) as auxiliary ‘props’ to get the discussion about advertisements’ representations of female athletes off ground in my conversations with several women athletes. Nike stands as one of the most prominent sporting brands in the world, and since the early 90s, the brand has been leading in “female athlete empowerment” advertising. Thus, by conducting a focus group interview in addition to in-depth semi-structured interviews with women athletes from the United States and Europe, the analysis draws on a postfeminist critique as a way to better understand the relation between the representations of sportswomen in sport advertisements versus their real-life experiences. Ultimately, the results of this research work imply that even though sport brands make a good case for the visibility of sportswomen, it does not match the experiences of the female athletes without celebrity status. Finally, this thesis is a contribution to the field of media and communication studies as it privileges the voices of up-and-coming professional and collegiate female athletes. It serves in hope of inspiring other scholars to further investigate sport in relation to gender and media through the lived experiences of the sportswomen about which they theorize.