Abstract
Women are now the majority of frequent participants of fitness activities in the United States. Despite the visibility of sporting women today, little existing work addresses the interaction between consumers and commercial discourses about female athletic participation, an important task given the contradictory construction of the female athlete in popular media. This essay situates a textual analysis of the marketing discourses of the US-based mail order sportswear company Title Nine (T9) alongside analysis of customer posts to the company's on-line community, “Time Out With Title Nine,” to illuminate some of the ways that consumers construct a self in relation to company content and imagery. The essay argues that while at the same time the catalog's representation of the female athlete is understood by consumers as liberating and empowering, and enables consumers to understand themselves as activists improving the lives of other women, other aspects of T9 discourse are adopted by consumers in their framing of sports as a means to save a naturally pathological self.
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