Third-wave feminism and representation

Abstract

Third-wave feminism gained hold in the 1990s as a way to help explain and account for new developments in media representation. For women’s sports, this meant developing a framework that could account for a multiplicity of body images, identities and ideals, and that could help address an emphasis in feminist critical studies on the contradiction between beauty and power in female athletes. Instead of an opposition between athleticism and femininity, new codes emerged that began to combine them in complicated ways. In this chapter, a third-wave analytic looks at the relationship between athleticism and femininity, and it is used to analyze the cases of ESPN The Magazine’s ‘Bodies We Want’ feature in 2016, and the incidences of body shaming that occurred around Serena Williams.