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.