‘I dream of Genie’: Eugenie Bouchard’s ‘body’ of work on Facebook

Abstract

ABSTRACT New visual regimes of fame and femininity continue to challenge the traditional realms of sport stardom and media representation. Through new media, individual athletes potentially have more agential control over their imagery, content and forms of self-presentation. This article offers an exploratory case study of French-Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard’s self-presentational on Facebook. Through her construction of an online Genie persona, Bouchard offers an idealised, desirable and commodified ‘body’ of work on Facebook. Collectively, Genie’s playful embodied projections and performances merge athletic endeavours and self-depreciating tennis posts with an array of provocative, hetero-sexy displays. Poignantly, such self-presentations are notable for the frequency of bikini-clad and ‘Genie hot body’ imagery, coupled with the reduced emphasis on tennis performances. As such, Bouchard’s visual regime seemingly illuminates, confronts and challenges traditional sporting and feminine identity constructions. By enacting and performing the online Genie persona, Bouchard largely eschews the expected sport stardom parameters of merit and achievement, while foregrounding a postfeminist body politics around desirability and agency through her self-sexualising and self-objectifying practices.