Cheryl Cooky's Essay

In Cheryl Cooky’s essay titled, Strong Enough to be a Man, but Made a Woman, she analyzes the discourse surrounding the phrase “Girl Power” and how women are portrayed in conversations surrounding sports. Cheryl Cooky is a professor at Purdue University, her main research focuses on sports and media, and feminism. In her essay, she chooses to highlight a popular sports magazine, Sports Illustrated for Women, as it was one of the first magazines to represent girls/women in sports. Through Sports Illustrated for Women, the traditional discourses surrounding femininity around sports were challenged and changed. SI for women challenged the idea that “real women” are women that participate in sports, yet participating in sports threatens their femininity.

Cooky argues that participating in sports does not take away a woman’s femininity, despite many societal stereotypes, a woman does not have to choose between being feminine and engaging in a sport. Rather, sports require even more maintenance that surpasses the one needed to maintain a woman’s femininity. When covering women in sports, many sports reporters choose to focus on the “‘heterosexiness’ of the athletes more than their performances” (Cooky 98). Women who choose to participate in vigorous physical activities and resist engaging in activities to produce their feminine bodies are seen as masculine. This negative discourse around women in sports provided another example of how SI for women serves as an outlet for women to participate in physical activity. “SI for Women encouraged a well-balanced diet defined by proper nutrition (vitamins, protein, and complex carbohydrates), adequate water intake, and plenty of calories to support athletic participation” (Cooky

C. Duncan, titled The politics of women’s body images and practices: Foucault, the panopticon, and Shape magazine, also focused on a magazine catered to women, but chose to highlight general women issues instead of the ones surrounding sports. M. C. Duncan is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, her focus is in kinesiology, her publications include subtopics of cultural identities and politics in sports as well as the ideal bodies represented in social media. In Duncan’s essay, she explores how exposing women to women’s magazines may make them want to perfect their bodies into an ideal type. Which is a contrast to Cooky’s writing, where she suggests that women’s magazines help to uplift women, showing that sports do not undermine their femininity. Duncan focused on two panoptic mechanisms, the first being “the efficacy of initiative” suggesting that “readers will naturally want to reshape their bodies much like the models on the pages of women’s magazines” and “feeling good means looking good” emphasizing the importance of health but linking feeling good to looking good so that real health issues are subordinated beauty issues (Duncan