Runner's World meets Runners' Worlds: Female Recreational Athletes, Ideal Bodies, and Fitness Advertising

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 remind them they may only occupy a certain place – namely, as objects whose bodies are public goods available for interested parties to judge. In this dissertation, I argue that this discourse is linked to a combination of neoliberal ideology and post-feminist sentiment that valorizes a form of aspirational femininity in which women are both subjects and objects. I combine the use of post-structuralist feminist theory and a hermeneutic methodology to investigate if and how advertisements in fitness magazines participate in sport culture’s “here is a place for you”/“know your place” discourse, and how female recreational athletes engage with such advertisements to construct an embodied sense of self. Focusing on the context of recreational endurance running, I accomplish these tasks across two interlinked studies: (1) a critical reading of fitness advertisements found in popular North American running magazines, including Runner’s World; and (2) semi-structured interviews with 26 female recreational runners. Through the critical reading, I argue that advertisements address 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,” or “body-becoming pedagogy,” that teaches consumers how a suitable body appears and functions. My interpretation of the semi-structured interviews shows that participants engage in a process I title “strategic ideological filtering” in order to negotiate advertising’s images of the ideal body. Through this process, the women assess advertising’s gendered neoliberal sentiment in order to take up aspects that suit them and discard or modify those that do not. For this reason, I argue that although fitness advertising is indeed a powerful force in consumer culture, female consumers exhibit a form of agency that counters a common narrative surrounding their victimization. These findings contribute to theory on gendered sporting embodiment, as well as advertising, and offer implications for marketing and advertising practitioners seeking to create advertisements that support, rather than marginalize, women in sport.

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