Runner's World meets Runners' Worlds: Female Recreational Athletes, Ideal Bodies, and Fitness Advertising
Bibliographic record
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 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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".